GMs: What is your prep to play ratio?

[zakael19]

I’m going to discount “setting up the..setting” prep. As far as focused time thinking and sketching ideas : play, at least 1 : 6. Eg, for the current situation in my Tuesday game I spent probably 2 hours off and on wrestling down some formatting i wanted to use and then vomiting out ideas. We had 12 hours of play out of that so far and likely to go on to 15 (5 sessions).

I’ve been aided by focusing down more and more on situation based prep with goal oriented play so I don’t really have to do much during prep and play to let things flow.

 

[zakael19]

I really dont understand these critiques of modern adventures. I have never viewed them as scripts, but as kits. The supplemental material is a great bonus reading pleasure for me and a springboard for my own ideas to bring it all to life. I dont need to pay somebody for a map and list of bullet points. Anybody should be able to whip that up on their own.

The criticism is generally “I thought I was paying for something I could open and run” and it rarely is that in most mainline products (notable exceptions in my experience are dungeon focused play out of some of the OSR/NSR space).

If I need to spend hours reworking something or using it as a springboard of ideas, why did I pay $50?

 

[payn]

The criticism is generally “I thought I was paying for something I could open and run” and it rarely is that in most mainline products (notable exceptions in my experience are dungeon focused play out of some of the OSR/NSR space).

If I need to spend hours reworking something or using it as a springboard of ideas, why did I pay $50?

That really sounds like dammed if you do situation. Folks complain that the adventure is a railroad if they can run it like a script, give them a kit and its not straightforward and requires too much work.

 

[zakael19]

That really sounds like dammed if you do situation. Folks complain that the adventure is a railroad if they can run it like a script, give them a kit and its not straightforward and requires too much work.

I mean I’m thinking of adventures that not only need prep due to bad organization and missing bits, but are also a railroad as written and thus a lot of the work winds up being fixing that. And so why bother, right?

The one thing that I acknowledge I just don’t do as well as professional authors is high-agency / interactivity dungeons a la Necrotic Gnome products etc. My brain and competence just isn’t in that play style.

A situation tailored to my player’s characters and session 0 forward priorities telling interesting themes and lots of possibilities for them to explore? I can do that myself.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I really dont understand these critiques of modern adventures. I have never viewed them as scripts, but as kits. The supplemental material is a great bonus reading pleasure for me and a springboard for my own ideas to bring it all to life. I dont need to pay somebody for a map and list of bullet points. Anybody should be able to whip that up on their own.

Well, maybe not the map, but there's plenty of tile based map things out there.

 

[zakael19]

generally don't run published material anymore, but there are a few things I’d like to potentially run

What besides the DG adventures? I still have a weird hankering to run RHoD sometime for some reason.

 

[Reynard]

That really sounds like dammed if you do situation. Folks complain that the adventure is a railroad if they can run it like a script, give them a kit and its not straightforward and requires too much work.

The problem isn't that it is a kit. The problem is that it is not designed or written to be run. Important information is buried in walls of text. Stats are missing or in an entirely different part of the book. There are almost never useful flowcharts or interaction webs. Maps very rarely have GM useful information directly on them.

SO MUCH could be done to make adventure layout and information packaging useful to GMs, and neither WotC nor Paizo make an effort to do so.

 

[payn]

The problem isn't that it is a kit. The problem is that it is not designed or written to be run. Important information is buried in walls of text. Stats are missing or in an entirely different part of the book. There are almost never useful flowcharts or interaction webs. Maps very rarely have GM useful information directly on them.

SO MUCH could be done to make adventure layout and information packaging useful to GMs, and neither WotC nor Paizo make an effort to do so.

I use Paizo PDFs even when im playing on table top face to face and keeping track of all I need is rather easy and convenient that way. Prep is more or less just reading the material over and organizing it a way to use it as I need it during the sessions. I really dont know how they could make it any easier than that other then literally just use maps and bullet points.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I really dont understand these critiques of modern adventures. I have never viewed them as scripts, but as kits. The supplemental material is a great bonus reading pleasure for me and a springboard for my own ideas to bring it all to life. I dont need to pay somebody for a map and list of bullet points. Anybody should be able to whip that up on their own.

One man’s trash is another’s treasure. It’s all a matter of preference, really.

But for me… I grew up running modules. I did plenty of homebrew stuff, but we played every module we could find. The further back you go, the smaller they were (generally speaking). They were also less complex. They could be skimmed by the GM and then run. Even if the GM decided to read the whole thing in full, they were 16 or 32 pages, most often.

As time passed, they got bigger and more complex and more plot heavy. They weren’t just location based type scenarios… they were ongoing series of events and so on. And I continued to buy and run them.

So it was a kind of gradual thing that happened over time and editions. A few years ago, I found myself running Tomb of Annihilation. The first part… the hexcrawl through Chult… went well and was pretty straightforward. Pretty classic wilderness type adventure. But once we moved into the tomb proper, our game started to suffer. It just became a kind of meticulous dungeon crawl. Lots of the things in the dungeon were very complex without needing to be or without justifying the workload. You had to really study it to run it as written.

I struggled to do it. And I realized I was being way too faithful to the text. And on top of that, it was going for a kind of play that D&D in general and my group in particular has shifted away from, and for which it’s not best suited.

Once I realized what was happening, I stopped worrying about the text. I shifted the focus and improvised more, and things improved. The players were happier, I was happier, the game was more fun.

Ultimately, if I want to read for pleasure, there are many options I can go with. What I want out of a game book of any kind is utility at the table.

To contrast with ToA, the Mothership module A Pound of Flesh is 64 pages long on digest size pages. It presents a space station for use as a “home base” type location for a campaign. It’s packed with NPCs and factions and locations, and tables to generate more. It has three ongoing situations that can develop on their own if the PCs don’t get involved, with stages for each so that the station is a dynamic place. And it’s all laid out with the expectation that a GM will be referencing this book in play… so it’s organized accordingly. All the locations are on either one page or a two page spread, with all the info you’ll need for that location, including NPCs. Everything is presented in small, easy to reference lists or bullet points.

So yeah… when it comes to modules, I vastly prefer utility over volume. My group got easily as much out of A Pound of Flesh as we did Tomb of Annihilation. And at about 20% of the cost and with maybe 20% of the effort to read and run it.

What besides the DG adventures? I still have a weird hankering to run RHoD sometime for some reason.

I ran RHoD during my group’s 3e days!

The one that springs to mind most immediately is The Dracula Dossier for Night’s Black Agents (though I’d use a different system because I am no fan of Gumshoe, probably use Against the Dark Conspiracy).

The campaign just appeals to me because I’m a huge fan of the novel Dracula and because it’s so ambitious. It takes the premise that the novel is actually an after action report of a British intelligence attempt to recruit Dracula as an asset. The novel as we know it is a redacted version, published in an attempt to cast the events off as fiction.

In the modern day, the PCs are given an Unredacted copy, with marginal notes from agents through the years. They actually published Dracula Unredacted which you can hand to your players. They can then use the marginal notes as prompts for investigation and so on. Dracula is of course, still alive and out there. It’s highly improvisational, with multiple takes on the novel’s original characters and their legacies through the modern day.

I just am impressed by it and think it could be a lot of fun with the right group, so I want to give it a try.

 

[payn]

One man’s trash is another’s treasure. It’s all a matter of preference, really.

But for me… I grew up running modules. I did plenty of homebrew stuff, but we played every module we could find. The further back you go, the smaller they were (generally speaking). They were also less complex. They could be skimmed by the GM and then run. Even if the GM decided to read the whole thing in full, they were 16 or 32 pages, most often.

As time passed, they got bigger and more complex and more plot heavy. They weren’t just location based type scenarios… they were ongoing series of events and so on. And I continued to buy and run them.

So it was a kind of gradual thing that happened over time and editions. A few years ago, I found myself running Tomb of Annihilation. The first part… the hexcrawl through Chult… went well and was pretty straightforward. Pretty classic wilderness type adventure. But once we moved into the tomb proper, our game started to suffer. It just became a kind of meticulous dungeon crawl. Lots of the things in the dungeon were very complex without needing to be or without justifying the workload. You had to really study it to run it as written.

I struggled to do it. And I realized I was being way too faithful to the text. And on top of that, it was going for a kind of play that D&D in general and my group in particular has shifted away from, and for which it’s not best suited.

Once I realized what was happening, I stopped worrying about the text. I shifted the focus and improvised more, and things improved. The players were happier, I was happier, the game was more fun.

Ultimately, if I want to read for pleasure, there are many options I can go with. What I want out of a game book of any kind is utility at the table.

To contrast with ToA, the Mothership module A Pound of Flesh is 64 pages long on digest size pages. It presents a space station for use as a “home base” type location for a campaign. It’s packed with NPCs and factions and locations, and tables to generate more. It has three ongoing situations that can develop on their own if the PCs don’t get involved, with stages for each so that the station is a dynamic place. And it’s all laid out with the expectation that a GM will be referencing this book in play… so it’s organized accordingly. All the locations are on either one page or a two page spread, with all the info you’ll need for that location, including NPCs. Everything is presented in small, easy to reference lists or bullet points.

So yeah… when it comes to modules, I vastly prefer utility over volume. My group got easily as much out of A Pound of Flesh as we did Tomb of Annihilation. And at about 20% of the cost and with maybe 20% of the effort to read and run it.

One thing folks often don’t get is the APs from Paizo (until the recent change anyway) is that AP modules do not need to be run in their entirety. When you skip the supplemental material you get to about 60 pages in a chapter and with minimal changes you got a stand alone adventure.

I know Mothership modules are all the rage along with a number of other recent RPGs. I won’t go so far as to say the adventure experiences were bad for me, but they definitely felt thin. Quicker, less complex, like an episodic tv show. I’m an odd bird in that doesn’t intrigue me for the long haul but as you say it’s just preferences.