How much time do you spend thinking/reading about gaming vs. actual play time?

[Mercurius]

I was thinking about how much time I spend in online forums such as this one, browsing websites, reading game books, buying books, etc, and how when it comes down to total number of hours spent thinking about or planning for or reading or doing anything RPG-related that is not actually playingfar out-weighs the time I actually play! I'm sure there are other hobbies like this but I'm guessing RPGs is especially egregious in this manner.

I run a twice-monthly game session in which we average about 4 hours per session. Occasionally we'll pick up an extra session but more often we'll miss a session so that we probably play about 20 times a year, or 80 hours total, or approximately 1.5 hours a week. How much time do I spend per week doing something RPG-related other than play? It is hard to say for sure, but I would guesstimate about 10 hours a week, maybe more. Some weeks it will be none, some it will be 20 hours, so I'm going with 10 as an average. This means that I spend about six times as much time "non-gaming gaming" than gaming.

What about you? I'll throw in a poll for good measure.

 

[Jacob Marley]

More than I ought to. I DM 10 hours (on average) a month and play a PC an additional 20 hours (on average) a month. I probably spend between 2 and 3 hours a day prepping my campaign/characters or reading/posting about the game. Usually this time is spread out throughout the day.

 

[El Mahdi]

An approximate ratio of 42 to 1...

 

[Crothian]

It is down to about even for me. I'm not running a weekly game anymore and not doing as much reviewing and I'm no longer and ENnie Judge. This week I spent maybe 30 m inutes finishing up my Pathfinder character and then working on my Dresden Files one shots for the Albany Game day.

 

[Nadaka]

10x or more... I rarely get to play, busy with life and living 2 states away from my gaming groups.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I would say at least a 5:1 ratio of thinking about gaming as compared to actual gaming. I'm the DM, so it's my job to read, plan, think and compile everything for each session. Plus, also plan out things for the longer-term as well. At lower level, it is less prep time for an individual session than it is planning out things for the longer-term. At higher levels, I've hopefully planned well enough for the longer term, but need the extra time to build cool and complex encounters.

 

[karlindel]

I chose 5x or more, although it's pretty hard to quantify how much time is spent thining/reading about gaming in order to make the comparison. I play fairly often, so I doubt it's anywhere near the 10x number.

However, I might fall to the 2-4x category depending on how much time I've spent on ENWorld and other things relative to how often my games have been running (there was a two month span in which I gamed only once or twice, where normally I game about 6-8 times per month).

The ratio is also a bit higher lately as I have been reading over the rules for my weekly game (it is a playtest for a homebrew system, and a new revision just came out), and my current pleasure reading is Legend of the Five Rings 4th Edition.

 

[Scribe Ineti]

I GM way more than I play, but I'd say that for every 4 hour session I run with my group, I'm putting in at least 3x that in thinking, plotting, planning, scheming, researching, and actually putting the session notes and elements together (picking out tiles and maps and counters and so on).

4e make actual game prep pretty easy, so the majority of my time is in plotting and planning and idea generating.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Quite a bit. I have a 2 hour 1 way commute each day which is where I mentally write most of my material. Only get to play once every 2 weeks besides the odd gameday game or one shots at the FLGS. I wish we could do something weekly.

 

[Umbran]

What about you?

Classic case of skewed population sample. We will, of course, be heavily biased towards spending more time thinking and such than playing, given that every instant we spend on the boards counts.