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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kbrakke" data-source="post: 6576738" data-attributes="member: 6781797">It used to be that I prepared for my homebrew a lot. Because I was both writing world things and working on new story things. These were my bad times as a gm, it was my first real attempt to dm a full campaign and I made so many classic newbie mistakes. I have learned a lot in the last 2 years and I have started to experience different styles of dming.I find that dming in a fully homebrew takes the most time for me. Making maps, thinking of how the world works and coming up with names in addition to making encounters. I did myself no favors by dming 4e without ever reading a core book. I only had the rules booklet and the online tools. It was still fun, but I was unsatisfied with how I was as a dm and felt too overwhelmed. I tried again with the Next playtest, but didn't get much beyond an initial city and bits of history.Once I decided to set a campaign in an already written campaign setting everything changed. I spent about a week just reading the setting book (Eberron in this case) about an hour each day on my commute. After that I have done very little prepwork every week. Mostly just adjusting plot points to account for players impact on the world, filling in details where I had none, or making stat blocks for villains they might fight. Having a book that gives me NPC's with names and motivations already has helped a lot in letting me feel like I can safely improv without changing the feel of the world too much. Actually the most prep after the initial readings have been when I incorporated modules in to the plot.My experience with prewritten adventures has varied, but on average I do more prep for those than for my home games, but less than a full homebrew. I usually just read the adventure when I have spare reading time. For Adventurer's league running HotDQ it was similar to my home game. Lots of initial prep, but not much upkeep. For expeditions and pathfinder adventure paths I do a reasonable amount of prep before each session, definitely more than my home game. Pathfinder is more work for me because I'm still not a master of the system. Anything with spells completely throws me for a loop.Overall I find a similar experience where pre-written adventures don't necessarily result in less prep, but if used as a setting they result in much less prep over time for me. Something like rise will be high initial prep for me but less prep as the game goes on.</blockquote>

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