GMs: What is your prep to play ratio?

[hawkeyefan]

It makes some sense in the "OSR style" in that it is supposed to be a battle of wits between the player and GM, and in that context the GM winging it is sort of cheating. But adventuring or storytelling? You don't need heavy prep for that.

Absolutely. But even in a classic dungeon delve type adventure, you don’t need to go to the lengths of prep that a module does. You can just use bullet points for room descriptions… you don’t need full descriptions and separate boxed text and all that.

 

[LordEntrails]

I am also learning that VTT play tends to be much more front loaded than I'm used to. It takes a lot to get things set up but it sustains play longer with minimal effort at upkeep. I'm liking it a lot so far.

Agreed. I found that after running 5E on FG for years I have so much prep material that it makes running games really simple. What I found most useful was things like prepped flexible encounters, i.e. various CR rated groups like bandits, mercenaries, orcs, etc that I could pull out in second and put on a map and use them for a dozen different uses (town guards, assassination squad, random encounter, etc). That and then having ready maps to pull from when I need something on the spur of the moment.

Since (general) you are here, what does your prep actually look like (some of you have answered this already)?

So above is a lot for D&D 5E. Though I have to add I often would go to bed thinking about how the various factions should react to the current situation and then over the next few days taking notes on that.

But, for FrontierSpace my prep looks like;
A lot of setting building. It's pretty open and without a lot of detail or lore so I've been creating a lot of that. Giving it to the players though Message of the Days stories when they log in. Some are told like news casts, I've got a running series I call Five on the Frontier that are five topics of a paragraph each on current event (ship crashes on planet x, riots on planet y) and others might be stories heard at a lounge or tavern (the pirate ship Odelion, etc).

Maps, I spend a lot of time creating custom maps. Not a fan of most maps I find online, though I do spend time looking at various Patreons and sources. 90% of the maps I use I create myself via Campaign Cartographer.

I've also spent time creating factions and fleshing out those that are mentioned in the rulebooks. Such as the Asimaar Prelacy has mention of historical purges of psychics centuries ago so how does that manifest today (i.e. riots and persecution and limited trade with required permits for ships being able to enter restricted space, etc.

And part of that is creating flexible things like a set of building guards so if they try to break in to something I have a ready set group of NPCs. Even some detailed locations so when they step into a bar on some planet I have a list of NPCs I can put in with descriptions and names.

And I've been writing background on locations for the parties adventures. I don't count most of this towards prep, because I may spend 4 hours of prep for outlining enough for the players adventure on a newly discovered planet, but then 40 hours fleshing that out to actually have enough detail to publish it.

 

[stonehead]

I'd say probably an average of 1:1 time prepping vs playing. Probably a bit more, because I also frontload a lot of prep at the beginning of the campaign.

One thing I've noticed, is that the amount of time I spend prepping is inversely proportional to the amount of campaigns I'm in. I don't intentionally budget out my time or anything, but it seems like I have a set amount that I spend on prep, and I split it among all my campaigns. If I'm only in one, I'll put in the extra effort to draw character portraits, and npcs and stuff, but if I'm in three or four, I'll run out of time and improvise npcs and their names.

As for how I spend that time, usually about half of it is on mechanics. So, stats for monsters, maps for battlefields, puzzles, etc. A lot of people complain about combat being "My turn? I attack with my weapon" 4 or 5 times and then it's done. You can make it much more interesting if you design enemy stats and battlefields that lead to more varied gameplay. It's harder to improvise well designed encounters like this than it is to improvise simple ones, so I try to prepare ahead of time.

The other half is spent on the scenarios. I try not to prepare a plot or anything, but even sandbox games are more fun when the world is in a more interesting state. If you show up to a town, and there's nothing going on, it's a bit boring. If you show up, and the townspeople are all starving, it's a bit more interesting. It starts to get fun when the townspeople are all starving because their fishers have all gotten lost at sea, and they've gotten lost because... and so on. It's more fun if there are npcs with a web of different relationships. I'm not great at improvising things like this, so I usually write down a few things happening in the world beforehand.

If I have time left, I draw maps, and portraits for npcs or monsters.

 

[bsss]

Assuming we're not counting things like thinking about the plot (which just happens ad hoc whenever I have idle cycles in the ol' gray matter), I would say I probably get 2~3 hours out of 30 minutes of prep (again not baking in the time spent deciding on next steps).

I primarily run the Cypher System, and my prep will consist of me jotting down the major NPCs and motivations, and where I think the next couple "hops" in the story are and what's going on there. This probably takes 10 minutes, after thinking ahead. The rest of the time will be spent getting some stat blocks ready for the situations that seem to warrant combat, doing some supporting research (e.g. coming up with ritual components for a hook later in my fantasy game, or finding some scientific astronomy concepts for my scifi game, etc.), coming up with task difficulties for the points where that seems particularly relevant, that kind of thing.

In general, my "blocker" tends to be how much time I've had to think about the plot, more than doing the prep itself. If I've had a busy two weeks, I find myself going "crap, what were we doing again?" and then I feel the prep pressure. If I've had time to think about the game, I can wing it pretty easily, Cypher System can essentially be a no-prep game when you need it to be. I tend to riff off of the players at the table more, anyway, so I take a light touch on prepared material and mostly just take the flow of the game off in further directions, so a lot of preplanning is a waste of my time.

Edit addendum: I forgot to mention that I have the fortune of not using a VTT for battlemaps or anything like that, because I also find that tick-tackery to be a huge waste of my time. All my games currently are theater of the mind.

 

[aramis erak]

Since (general) you are here, what does your prep actually look like (some of you have answered this already)?

Varies widely.
My VTT group, it's just maps and critters in the VTT.
Pendragon, I do 4-12 page 5.5x8.5" booklets for each "year" - mostly cut and paste from the GPC campaign book PDF, then outline and stat blocks for the adventures. If I have PC landholders, I make their event rolls, too, and put them in. If there are illos of the major NPCs, I put them on the front cover, and the calendar for the year on the back.

Traveller is mostly maps, ships, and some NPCs. I use a web page generator (locally hosted, since it's no longer available online, mostly JS) to make NPCs in seconds.

Starships & spacemen, it's mostly pre-game sector creation. Which I've now semi-automated. It's a go-to for me as a quick play.

KAMB: 5 minutes to sketch a map. 15 minutes to stock it. 10 minutes of PC generation. Start play. (Can you tell its role in my collection is as a fill-in?)

 

[pemerton]

Maybe this is my own biases showing, but I feel like there's a correlation between "using modules" and "greater prep time". I think there's a tendency that if you're not using modules, you're not instead spending tons of hours making your own homebrewed adventure, you're simply more willing to ad-lib and improvise with less prep.

I don't know what the general state of affairs is - but for me, this isn't true. When I was GMing 4e, I found it quicker to use modules - which come with maps - than to draw my own maps. And GMing Torchbearer, the time to write up my own "mini-module" or convert something like the Moathouse is about the same. It's fairly quick to draw up my own TB2e maps, because they don't need to be scaled (unlike D&D), but writing up the inhabitants, treasures, notes on twists, etc, isn't quicker when I do it myself rather than convert from a D&D write-up.

Maybe your conjecture is more applicable when "prep" is not just creating a classic map-and-key (TB2e) or a map + statblocks (4e D&D), but is also about writing up a plot? I don't really do that, and so couldn't comment on how long it takes.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Since (general) you are here, what does your prep actually look like (some of you have answered this already)?

I tend to fill a single empty page in my campaign notebook with sketched out ideas based on what is happening next (I am running a sandbox game and I make sure to let the PCs decide what they are doing, but ask them to tell me so I can prep at least a little). After that, or just before the session, I find maps and set up encounters that are likely to be needed (I run of Fantasy grounds, so this only takes a few minutes). If something unexpected happens, I tell everyone to take 5 and then throw together the required encounter and map during the session. This rarely takes more than a couple minutes because context led to the need in the first place.

When I am running a con game -- which are usually 3 or 4 slot episodic, ongoing games -- I build "the world" and the first "adventure" before play, then use the time between slots to riff off what happened and build the next. I usually have an arc in mind and a thought about what the climax is, but more often than not player decisions change that. I explicitly only run games at cons I am familiar enough with to improv and quick prep. I learned this lesson...

It really does vary.

I found when running PF1 on VTT (Roll20) that prep took much longer than for face to face games. Doing up maps and NPCs on VTT could be very time intensive. Although it did have the advantage of making the play very quick. I should say that I couyld have easily done my NPCs by hand and just rolled real dice. But I was trying to get the benefit of VTT, e.g. linking character sheets to map icons, health bars, one click attacks, and such forth was a thing I was trying for. In the end, although it looks pretty, for me the amount of work is not worth it.

The only game I'm currently (for a given value of "current") running is HERO system. I do minimal prep. I write up an opening monologue for each adventure. (Done in the voice of a local radio DJ and always weirdly tied to the events of the adventure.) I'll do the quick and dirty version of stats for any NPCs I need, or just use generic ones. I do an outline of the Whats' Whos, Wheres, and Whens of the actual adventure. The most time consuming parts of this are the monolgue (and choosing the right 80's song to go with it) and coming up with names for pubs, kebab shops, etc.

 

[payn]

One reason I love modules is that while I love using maps, monsters, and NPCs im not fond of actually making them. Things like the NPC Codex that Paizo made for PF1 are my bread and butter. So, the more of the mechanics that are done and ready for me to grab and go like a tool kit the better. Foundry VTT has made this even more of a breeze. I didnt think id enjoy online play as much as I have. Im a lot more efficient and a lot more game gets done during sessions with FVTT.

The real prep I engage in is thinking about NPC personalities, their situation, how they are gonna react, etc.. I think of one step after the next as a chain reaction and want a good response to the PCs every step of the way. No, I dont plan for every eventuality, as we all know the PCs are always gonna find an unpredictable path no matter what. Though, I want an interesting and organic experience to unfold during every session.

Tailoring the experience to my players is part of that prep too. I greatly dislike random encounters and loot drops and try instead to have things of interest in place. So, sometimes that means digging into my GM tool kit ahead of time instead of during valuable session time. Whatever mechanics I can offload will open up my cognitive space to focus on moving forward at a good pace.

Some folks can do all that improv, ive seen it once or twice. I've also been in dozens of improv games that were not fun. The GM thinks they are good at it, but they are not. I know im not particularly good at it and im a better prepared GM.

When I think about it, its likely due to my desire for long campaigns. Dont get me wrong, I love a good one shot, but I live for a long form story. More serial in nature as opposed to episodic. Whatever fits in between, isnt for me. So, west marches isnt going to hold my interests. Give me a good players campaign guide, interesting setting filled with factions, and endless political intrigue.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I love the PF1 NPC Codex. Also the Monster Codex.

Takes a lot of the pain out of NPCs with class levels.

 

[Distracted DM]

In-person, my prep was like... 15 minutes of picking out minis, 5-10 minutes of writing down names and places, and 15 minutes of driving to the game and thinking about what could happen.

Online I need to make it all nice to satisfy my own standards, that's like... 2+ hours per session.