GMs: What is your prep to play ratio?

[payn]

I've never used generative AI for scenario design.

But this is an example of what an Agon island looks like (it's one I wrote up):
As you can see if you go back to the thread I originally posted this in, it was inspired by a list of "Iron DM" ingredients. But will AI create something like this, based on a list of ingredients and an instruction to design an Agon island? @Gorgon Zee's post makes me doubtful.

This chunking or using iron GM ingredients is precisely the type of thing A.I. is good at. No, if you go to an untrained prompt and ask for an RPG adventure it won’t be like this but given opportunity to learn it could spit outlines out just like this.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Given that I only run homebrewed campaigns and dismissing pre-campaign prep, I probably average at 1.5 to 2 x prep time to hour played. But for major setpieces and evolving intrigues and conspiracies it can be way more. But that’s a major part of myGMing fun.

 

[Scott Christian]

That's like a part-time job.

It is, but it is only for summer. And, it's fun!

Here are a few of the adventures I have made. Some are quests (more linear) and others are sandboxes.

For the record, I do not sell these. They are just for me and friends.

 

[zakael19]

It is, but it is only for summer. And, it's fun!

Here are a few of the adventures I have made. Some are quests (more linear) and others are sandboxes.

For the record, I do not sell these. They are just for me and friends.

Gotcha, that's on a slightly different scale!

 

[Gorgon Zee]

This chunking or using iron GM ingredients is precisely the type of thing A.I. is good at. No, if you go to an untrained prompt and ask for an RPG adventure it won’t be like this but given opportunity to learn it could spit outlines out just like this.

Yes, definitely. It will indeed spit out outlines looking just like this. And it can be made to produce a dozen or so outlines and they will all feel just a bit same-y. If you add enough prompts, it will produce something different, but it will still be trying to do it in the generic way it has been trained to.

AI is really good for producing boring material; those are the use cases I build for in my work — summarizing and generating boilerplate. But it’s not great at being creative. If you really want to use AI for your home game, come up with the ideas yourself and just have AI format it nicely and fix spelling/grammar. It’s good at that

 

[rmcoen]

I'd say my prep time averages about 1 hour for a 3.5 hour session, but what tends to actually happen to make that average is several hours of thinking about things while mowing or doing other chores, anywhere from 1-4 hours writing up notes from the vague thoughts, then 30-60 minutes making sure I have statblocks pulled up for the night's likely encounters... and then discovering that "this will be a great night!" turns into "this will take them 2-4 sessions to complete, at least", which means the next several sessions require only 10 minutes to pull the statblocks up again right before the game.

Campaign prep is a whole other beast, of course. I mention it, though, because after an "adventure" completes, I generally also have some campaign-work to do, advancing plots and stories based on how long the party was away, so the world feel more "alive" and time spent actually matters. Getting the dungeon done in single day instead of "we long rest after each fight so we can nova" has impacts on the world around them!

And of course, I need to have some 1-to-3-line notes of other things that could happen when (not if!) the PCs go a completely different direction than what I expect. I don't want to spend hours prepping a really amazing "convention experience" session with amazing maps and copious details and whatnot, only to have them decide not to "do the thing".


Having said all that, last session the party was pretty much fully committed to a spectacle ("Battle of the Bands", starring the party's bard, in the kingdom's capital), so I felt more comfortable in dedicating a Saturday afternoon prepping for the event. (And part of Sunday, and maybe a little more just before the session.) There were a dozen impactful options of things to at the Carnival before the Performance, nuances of impacts each PC could do besides "watch the bard play", NPCs to encounter, judges to influence, and a "surprise event" that would bring everyone back together, with a carefully crafted map.

(And the very first player I asked "so, what do you do?", after laying it all out, still went off-script and pursued a PC-specific side quest rather than interact with the Carnival. And another one decided to run his own "charity battle event" halfway through the Carnival!)

 

[Bill Zebub]

I can't even answer this because it varies so much. But when I really pour time into prep it tends to be because of maps. One time I scaled a map from a pre-written adventure to battlemap scale, printed it on foam core board, then used an Xacto knife to cut out each area. As the players explored I put the areas back into the map like a jigsaw puzzle:

 

[Evaniel]

As I've gotten older, I find prep to be the most odious part of DMing. I think it's a large part of why I moved away from 5/5.5e back to B/X (by way of OSE). I use published adventures in a published world (Known World). If I can spend less than 15 minutes of prep for a session, I'm a happy guy. When I was running 5e, even using published adventures, I spent FAR more time prepping to balance and tie PCs into the "story."

The looser rules and emergent storytelling style of OSE has made those things nonfactors. I'm not saying this is better objectively--younger me LOVED that kind of prep. I just can't bother now.

 

[payn]

I can't even answer this because it varies so much. But when I really pour time into prep it tends to be because of maps. One time I scaled a map from a pre-written adventure to battlemap scale, printed it on foam core board, then used an Xacto knife to cut out each area. As the players explored I put the areas back into the map like a jigsaw puzzle:

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Id love doing a project like this with my 3D printers. I dont play F2F anymore though...

 

[zakael19]

But when I really pour time into prep it tends to be because of maps.

Yeah, having to do VTT map selection for Draw Steel! has changed my prep time and requirement a lot recently. I didn't miss that, but at least the combats are fun to make up for it.