Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FalcWP" data-source="post: 3880739" data-attributes="member: 16858">Hmm.  Well, my prep time is probably something like this:10%:  Vow to stop doing so much prep, because my players end up being too creative/chaotic/clever/stupid/another adjective, which is why a lot of my prep work from the previous adventure didn't get used (as they ran past rooms, out-thought monsters, NPCs or traps, or went in one of a million directions I just did not see coming).30%:  Sit at the computer or with a notebook, trying to come up with an idea that's flexible enough to account for whatever the players do, while still giving me enough framework to not have to completely improvise.20%:  Get bored with that and start working on some really cool monsters.  Some are actually finished in time for the game, but most are between 50% and 75% complete.25%:  Realize I really, really need to get *something* finished for an adventure, so I begin paging through old issues of Dungeon, looking around online, trying to find something to steal, while jotting down any cool ideas I come across.  This time is also used for looking for maps, since I'm horrible at drawing my own.13%:  Get the adventure maybe two-thirds of the way done... it is now far less flexible than I had planned, and if the players blindly skip past a few things I'll likely run out of prepped material.  Which means I'll have to wing it.  This is essentially taking whatever I've actually come up with in the previous three steps (So, any ideas I had originally, any ideas I found elsewhere, a map that almost certainly came from a third source, and any of the completed NPCs or monsters I made while I was bored) and combining them into something logical.  I'm really doing this in the back of my mind throughout the process, but this is the point where things start coming together.2%:  Toss in some of those half-prepared monsters I mentioned earlier, and frantically try and finish them before the game starts.  Then promptly forget half their abilities anyway.The next adventure is something similar, except my vow is to do *MORE* prep work, as I obviously didn't have enough for the previous adventure.  Luckily, I think I'm narrowing down the precise range I want to be in.</blockquote>

Verification