Celebrim
Legend
In the "DMing: from fun to work" thread several DMs noted that DMing becomes 'work' when the amount of time spent in preparation began to exceed the time spent in play.
This boggles my mind, because even if you take away that time spent in prepping mechanical issues (stat blocks, ect.), it seems to me that every game requires the game master spend more time in preperation than in play.
So, can anyone explain to me how they manage to run games were the total preperation time for each session is less than the session? What tricks are you using to keep the preperation time small?
I assume there are out there some few DMs that can run session after intriguing session with minimal preperation, but in 25 years of gaming I've never met one (although I've met several that thought they could), so I'm working under the assumption here that they aren't very common. If there are such DMs, I'd expect to find them at EnWorld, but if you are superhuman like that, what wisdom can you impart to us poor mortals that have to work to have good sessions?
This boggles my mind, because even if you take away that time spent in prepping mechanical issues (stat blocks, ect.), it seems to me that every game requires the game master spend more time in preperation than in play.
So, can anyone explain to me how they manage to run games were the total preperation time for each session is less than the session? What tricks are you using to keep the preperation time small?
I assume there are out there some few DMs that can run session after intriguing session with minimal preperation, but in 25 years of gaming I've never met one (although I've met several that thought they could), so I'm working under the assumption here that they aren't very common. If there are such DMs, I'd expect to find them at EnWorld, but if you are superhuman like that, what wisdom can you impart to us poor mortals that have to work to have good sessions?