How long do you spend preparing a game?

[Grymar]

I said 10+ for my Eberron/Pathfinder campaign, but it can shift.

The average session I spend 8-12 hours prepping for a 6 hour session, but most of that is doing maps, graphics, newspapers...I'm slow and still learning on that stuff, so it takes me a while. When I decide to do a news paper (usually 4 pages) I can easily spend 5 hours on it alone.

Stat blocks I usually do at work while on hold or waiting for a scan to finish or even during lunch. In those cases it really depends on the adventure. Going through a basic 1st or 2nd level tomb? Easy and fast. Tracking down an 8th level npc with bodyguard and magical protections? Slow and painful.

So yeah, I probably do about 2 hours of prep for every hour of game. And that doesn't include thinking time or emailing to players about updates and roleplaying opportunities.

 

[Ariosto]

DMing a 4E scenario someone else has written, I'll prep for an hour or less. The scenarios tend to be somewhat linear, and the players are unlikely to get through very much in 4-6 hours. My DMing might benefit from more preparation, if the time is available, as there's a lot of tricky game-mechanical stuff to digest in getting the most out of monsters. Writing my own was 1:1 or more, as there are so many mechanical details -- and with few encounters per session, I felt obliged to give each one the sort of attention I would otherwise reserve for a few. I don't have a D&D Insider account, or a lot of 4E experience.

Running a 1E campaign, it's harder to figure because hardly any work is peculiar to a given session; a lot gets reused (including information produced in play). I'm guessing about two hours per six-hour session (1:3). The players can accomplish a lot more per session, and which way they'll go is less predictable, but it takes a lot less work to go from idea to game element; often, my notes are in plain English (plain to me, anyhow).

The prep time I put into running a 1E module is usually about 1:3, because I tend to choose fairly complex ones. I sometimes spend as much time adapting the situation to the specifics of my campaign. A straightforward, "hack & slash" module can be run nearly "on the fly".

 

[Skallgrim]

I selected the 1-2 hour option, but I'm not entirely sure that it is correct.

I use the prewritten adventures, but i alter the treasure parcels, map out the level advancement, and alter encounters and storylines to fit my version of the world and my players (and their characters) better.

I also spend a good deal of time emailing players back and forth about character development ideas which will turn up in future sessions.

Finally, I make my own maps with the provided maps, and GIMP, which takes a pretty good amount of time, but is both frontloaded (I do most of this at the start of a new adventure) and done in bursts (I will often do all of one "story location" at a time, and then wait until they get near finishing it before doing another). This is time-consuming, and isn't helped by WOTC only providing maps with monsters printed on them. If I didn't have to photoshop every encounter to remove the monster locations, it would be a work of mere minutes. WTF, WOTC? On the other hand, it is really nice to plunk down a room when they open the door, or reveal a hallway when they penetrate the illusion.

As I haven't kept up with the math, it's really hard for me to guess exactly how much time that works out to per session. It does mean that some weeks I spend a LOT of time on prep, but other weeks, I spend 15-20 minutes looking over the stuff that the PCs could possibly get to that session.

Given how much time I spend making maps (but they are such awesome maps), I'm SO glad I used the pregenerated adventures. I don't know if I would have enough time to actually create everything from scratch.

 

[Jack99]

Less than 1 hour per week (we play 5 hours every week).

I play 4e and do not use modules.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

For a full session of a normal campaing (which sadly doesn´t happen right now), that is 8 hours plus, about 1 hour approx. For my current online campaign (3 hours max. every week) about 10-20 minutes. 4e, and especially DDI, have reduced my prep in unimaginable ways.

 

[Wormwood]

Thanks to the Dungeon, the D&D Compendium, and the fairly streamlined nature of 4e in general, I spend less than 2 hours prepping for a 5 hour session.

As someone who has run RPGs for over 20 years, this is the new Golden Age.

 

[MichaelK]

Zero hours.

I run games on the wing. If a group of people came up to me and said, "we'd like to play D&D right now" I'd be ready to run the game by the time they'd made their characters. In fact I've done exactly that plenty of times. This works great and has a lot of advantages. Most importantly I could completely avoid railroading because it's all getting made up as it goes along.

Lately though I've been starting to wonder if I could run a better game if I actually prepared. It's something I want to do for my next campaign, but to be honest, I have no idea how to go about it. At the moment I'm working on learning how to prepare games, but it's much more difficult than it seems.

(I'm always surprised when people talk about how 3.x takes so much preparation. I run it without any. Just like I did with 2nd ed and OD&D).

 

[Holy Bovine]

1-2 hours when I was running my 4E games. 6-10 hours for my 3E games. This was for one 5-6 hour session and I generally used all of the prepared material for each session. 4E's time is so much lower mainly because I used the Compendium almost exclusively to cut n' paste creatures right out of it while I usually had to type up or modify 3E monsters.

 

[karlindel]

The answer depends a bit on what you consider prep-work. I am running 4E D&D at the moment. I selected 1-2 hours, because that is about the amount of time I sit down and put together a session, pulling monster stats, giving NPCs names and personalities, writing down details, picking out magic items, and the like. Game sessions tend to run about 6-8 hours (as either one session or two shorter sessions) with that amount of prep.

I don't really know how much time I spend thinking about plot arcs and storylines, because I do that off and on while at work, out on a walk, driving around, etc.

Similarly, if you count just reading through the game books for fun and turning up ideas, I don't know how much time I spend on that, either.

Other game systems can require different amounts of prep. I remember in 3E and 3.5E I tended to put in about 3-4 hours per game session.

 

[kitsune9]

So I recently found myself with a lot of spare time and by coincidence landed a DM'ing gig. I decided to go all out and create a 2D/3D scenario for it and planned out a whole set of encounters and customised monsters, etc.

The reason I landed the gig was because the current chair was feeling the time-pressure of his job and couldn't devote enough time to game prep. I worked out that I've so far spent roughly four hours putting this scenario together and will probably have to spend another two hours finishing it.

Six hours once a fortnight doesn't sound like a lot, but then I generally have a fair amount of spare time. I was wondering what the average was for most people in the hobby, hence the poll .

I will spend about 16-20 hours writing an adventure and having it ready. It will last about two to three sessions which a session for us is 8 hours on a Sat once every two weeks.