D&D General Prep is Not Play. . . Or is it?

[Henry]

By strict definition, I’d say no, but it’s no less fun.

In my opinion, “cooking” or “baking” would not be defined as going out to buy fresh ingredients to stock your fridge, spending the day searching bookstores or the internet for new recipes to try, and watching videos of how to make a specific dish. However, it carries its own fun, sense of anticipation, and payoff for when it comes time to actually get in the kitchen, pull out the mixing bowls, and fire the oven.

Did the person who spent the entire day preparing to bake, “bake” that day?

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

As I enjoy prepping (and watching my work getting destroyed by players being players) it is definitely party of the gaming fun for me as a DM.

 

[Richards]

If I can get my son to hunt up his digital camera, I might be able to post some pictures of the hand-crafted monster minis I've made for our past several campaigns. That's always fun, too, and although it takes a fair amount of time to do so it's usually worth the effort.

So my son hunted up his digital camera and although I'm not much of a photographer, here's the kind of stuff I occasionally get up to.

First up: a garrison tower keep I made out of cardboard for an adventure two campaigns ago. This tower has been used at least once in my two subsequent campaigns and I think in two of my younger son's campaigns as well.

Then, realizing how easy it had been to make a tower keep, I made four more and connected them with cardboard from the backs of old desk calendars. I added stairs, some buildings for the interior, and I ended up with Vandergrotten Keep, which the PCs in my first campaign with my current group - Wing Three - had to attack. (They were successful and as a result it was renamed as Battershield Keep and became the headquarters for the PCs in my second campaign with my current group - The Kordovian Adventurers Guild.)

At the end of the Wing Three campaign, the PCs ended up fighting off enemies on The Low Planes Drifter, a paddleboat run by a mercane trader while on the River Lethe. Here's the paddleboat I made out of black poster board:

The Wing Three PCs had one week-long adventure on the Elemental Plane of Earth, where they plane shifted an entire magic tower run by dwarven miners (and secretly run by mind flayers). Here's the Black Tower:

On a smaller scale, here's the Daern's instant fortress I made for the Kordovian campaign:

Finally, here's The Planar Scout, an experimental vehicle crafted by an Archmage allied with the Wing Three PCs:

Johnathan

 

[Richards]

That last post was long enough, so I thought I'd do a separate one for some of the creature "miniatures" I've made as well.

First up is a purple worm. We play using the 3.5 rules and I dislike the fact that they'd have all purple worms fight while coiled up so the entire creature fit in a standard square shape. I decided I'd rather have an "uncoiled" worm so I could decide which squares were threatened by the worm's head and which could be targeted by the tail spike. Here's the second appearance of the purple worm, in a recent adventure in my son's Raiders of the Overreach campaign:

And here's how I made it: the "connected" purple worm next to the "unconnected" pieces to a larger, "voidspawn" purple worm I used for an adventure in my Kordovian campaign:

Next up is a zygomind, a Pathfinder creature made up of a coral-like structure. I made this out of pink construction paper:

I made a couple more creatures from the Pathfinder Bestiaries. Here's a stone colossus I created for use in a Wing Three adventure. The torso and head were mounted on a paper towel roll, so they could turn a bit to either side as needed.

And here's a wood colossus that I built for an adventure I sent my Kordovian PCs through:

Finally, here's the walking brain I made for a Kordovian excursion into Gamma World. The "brain" was fashioned out of pink construction paper and mounted on bendy straws for the tentacle-legs that supported it.

Johnathan

 

[Fenris-77]

I don't see any downside to calling this play, at least for the DM. It's not exactly the same as game play, but it's related, and I don't find a lot of use in being precious about gatekeeping the notion of what and what isn't 'play'. If it's related to the hobby that's good enough for me. YMMV

That said, I'd have a different response if we were having some sort of philosophidemical argument about the nature of RPGs or whatever. For common usage, I'm fine with play. It's in the same ballpark as char gen for players IMO. I've built literally thousands of pieces of scenery for tabletop games though, so my perspective here may be somewhat non-standard.

 

[Iry]

For some people, it most certainly is Play. For others, it is something decidedly less than Play. Personally, I used to enjoy building flowcharts, designing devious traps (ala Grimtooth), setting up engaging scenes, listening to countless hours of music to find just the right song, and hand drawing dungeons and trying to get them published in Dungeon.

Now? I just don't have the time. I think my game is less glorious than it could be, and that gnaws at my pride. But such is life!

 

[el-remmen]

So my son hunted up his digital camera and although I'm not much of a photographer, here's the kind of stuff I occasionally get up to.

<SNIP>

That stuff is awesome! You should consider making an instagram acct and snapping more/better pics of this stuff for sharing, there is a huge DnD makers community on there that I've been really enjoying sharing pics of the stuff I am work on with.

 

[el-remmen]

Resurrecting this thread because I have been thinking about DM prep and the varying attitudes about it regarding the amount of time it takes and how onerous it might be.

Looking back at my original post, I have made so many pieces of terrain of various sizes and degree of detail and literally painted over 500 minis since I first posted it and enjoyed every minute of it.

I also continue to find session prep and building monsters and writing up magical items (and even creating my own homebrew ruleset) a whole lot fun and a form of play. I’ve prepped probably 50 sessions of D&D since then.

One of the most recent pieces of scatter terrain I’ve built.

Looking back of the responses, I think some posters interpreted my claim as "prep is the same as playing an RPG" (a claim I never made), but when what I mean is that it feels playful and fun and an exercise of the imagination. For some others it seems that thinking about anything is overthinking it, but it is our understanding of things that often help us engage with them in a way that make them more productive or pleasurable or both.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Prep isn’t play. I see it as a craft in itself with the purpose of creating optimal conditions for max fun during play sessions, and constantly molding and remolding campaign frames, based on both player actions in play and my own ideas to give the campaing openings and directions to twist and bloom in interesting ways.

Nowadays, to me that means I spend the majority of my prep time developing interesting NPCs, intrigues and conspiracies for the characters to interact with, and constantly updating and developing the npcs and moving parts based on the players actions. I also spend a bit of time to make the inevitable conflict set pieces as fun and engaging as possible, but that is not my favourite part of prep.

The above is true for all systems I GM.

 

[Reynard]

Prep is play for the kind of GM that likes prep. But prep.is also mostly unnecessary. At least, extensive prep. The hobby is inherently ephemeral. The joy that happens during play is eternal, but the details are fleeting. I understand and appreciate that some people love making terrain or writing reams of world building, but those activities are for the doer, not the rest of the group. I have never met players that refused to have fun because the GM did not create custom terrain.