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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 3668054" data-attributes="member: 50322">I absolutely, positively have to overprepare in order to have sufficient confidence to sit in the chair.  I know I'm going to overlook something obvious, I know the players are going to surprise me, I know I'm working too hard - but I have to do it.  The process of working out where all the NPCs are, what they're doing, what their motivations are, how long it takes to get places, working up tailored random encounter tables for specific areas, figuring out the weather, etc., grounds me sufficiently in the story and setting that, when the play happens, I don't look at the notes often and react properly on the fly.  All this means that I have to use modules, as doing all this from scratch would mean about a year between sessions.  This is identical to my method when writing a historical or prehistorical story - I read up on relevant information, checking out stacks of books and writing copious illegible, poorly-organized notes that I seldom refer to when writing, because the information is composted in my head and the story grows naturally out of it.Frustratingly, no matter how hard I overprepare, there's always something I don't put into my notes that obviously needs to be there.  When a module refers to a Monster Manual page, for example, in order to keep from having a half-dozen books open, or flipping back and forth in the same book, I type  up the stat blocks.  Ideally, this fixes the monster's capabilities in my brain so I don't have to refer to the block in order to decide (for example) whether it is reckless, cautious, vicious, or a good team player when it confronts the PCs.  But there's always at least one monster that doesn't get all his capacities copied, like the infamous time I forgot to note down that barghests have DR and the party's horses kicked them to death.  But if I didn't do the overpreparing, I'd still overlook things like that during the game, would take longer about it, and combats would take even longer than they do now.A lot of the changes in our DMing styles we see as we get older are due to  physical changes in our brains as we age.  Our brains are in a state of perpetual growth until our early twenties, when our temporal lobes finally finish growing in.  From that point, we spend most of our learning time reinforcing certain connections and neglecting others.  The result is that, though we get better and better at recognizing patterns and dealing with familiar types of problems, we get worse and worse at dealing with novel situations.  Some DMs get worse at winging it because they get less creative, or because the patterns that are most fixed in their brains don't apply as well in a gaming context (I think this is the biggest problem with railroad DMs - they keep trying to apply the same pattern and can't recognize when it's become counterproductive), while others get better because they have reinforced game-related connections to the point that they can see the  underlying structure in every situation.  They understand the system well enough and have seen enough that nothing surprises them any more.You have to understand your own strengths and weaknesses in order to produce a good game.  Young DMs, with brains still involved in reinventing the wheel and improving it because they don't know what a wheel is supposed to be like, may be able to wing games entirely because they wing everything in their lives, but as we get older, we lose this capacity outside our areas of expertise.  If you have the rules down cold but don't understand story structure or character motivation well, you might have to do copious background preparation but get by without any stat blocks at all.  DMs who have devoted large amounts of their liesure time to gaming may get better and better at improvisation because they have laid such an extensive groundwork of synapses, but the more you do this in one system the harder it will be to transfer your skills to a different one.  Once you understand why it's hard, you can compensate.</blockquote>

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