Prep time in two hours or less?

[ThoughtBubble]

So, with more work than ever, and some people making good on a promise I made to run another game if they ever wanted, I am officially looking at a situation where I need to get a plan for a session done as efficiently as possible. To all you expierenced DMs out there, is it possible to do a halfway decent preparation job in two hours? Have any tips for reducing the amount of time to be ready for a session?

My best tip is to re-use everything. If they're in a town, stick around there for a while. Those orcs from last week make good bandits, with a nudge or two. The nice thing about this is that, if I can add a thing or two into the game each week, I get a positively huge bank of things to work with.

Oh, and a personal note: I have a hard time using pre-made materials, so if anyone has any tips on that, I'd be greatful for those as well.

Thanks!

 

[Bloodstone Press]

If I were in your shoes I'd pull out a game that I've run before with a different group and re-use that. 2 hours isn't a lot of time to start from scratch.

However, if you do plan to start from scratch, I'd stick with using monsters and NPCs straight out of the books, and not waste time making unique stat blocks. I'd spend the 2 hours working out the plot and encounters.

 

[kolvar]

I allways find, that the two hours prep only works, if I have a realy good knowledge of players and characters (as well as the campaign). In these cases, I just have to think about what they might want to do and fill in some blank spots with some generators.
Keeping good notes from the sessions helps tremendously, because of the reuse value they got.

 

[Crothian]

How good are your ad libing skills? With that type of prep time I'd come up with gerneal plot ideas, names of PCs, and maybe some encounters....but any stats I'd either make up when they became important or look up at that time. If you have a solid plot idea, a good hold of the what the world is like this is very doible. But it also helps if you are running a not so combat oriented game. Stat blocks can take a while to copy down or figure out.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

However, if you do plan to start from scratch, I'd stick with using monsters and NPCs straight out of the books, and not waste time making unique stat blocks. I'd spend the 2 hours working out the plot and encounters.

I'd agree. I'd also go so far as to say that the plot should be brazenly stolen from whatever source strikes you as being cool and easy to file the names off of (so clever players don't immediately see what you're plagiarizing).

For example, if I had to run our Saturday game on just two hours of notice, at this point I'd probably be swiping the framework of the plot to Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, just because it's what I'm reading at the moment and I know only one of the players has even the slightest chance of having read this book himself.

I'd likely end up with a plot where the party is confronted by a sudden, inexplicable loss (probably an NPC they like, but maybe a McGuffin or a treasured item or whatever), and is then barraged with quirky, bizarre, and somewhat unsettling offers from various NPCs to either help them regain what they lost or to bully them into giving it up forever. Center most of the action around one area (just as ThoughtBubble suggests himself in the first post), look for places to bring the party into direct conflict with some kind of bad-guy Goon Squad out to drive them away, let them get closer to what they're looking for, and then lather-rinse-repeat this process until they've got a pretty clear idea of what they're going to do, then trigger the big climax and let them try to get their prize.

That's about ten minutes of my prep time, so I can now throw twenty or so into the town, twenty more on quick-and-dirty NPC notes (names and a few "what they know" ideas, mostly), half an hour on pulling out stats and important rules for NPCs and things I can try out this time around, and the rest of the time on trying to come up with two or three good, big obstacles for the party to deal with (fights and so on).

Won't be the greatest thing ever written, but assuming I could get the players to buy into the general premise of it all, it's a decent enough story for an afternoon of gaming, and easier on me by far than trying to be original or even just trying to have something less free-form put together in under 2 hours.

(I kinda know that this works already, because I already did it once, stealing brazenly from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep for a story about a wizard and his two younger apprentices, a missing flesh golem, and an assassin's guild, and it looked like everyone was having fun for most of it.)

--
i find that preparing to run a published module actually takes more effort
ryan

 

[Fenes]

I can plug my post here, deals with all these issues:

How to make the most of your prep time as a DM

Edit: The link text could have been taken wrong, so I changed it. My post deals with getting the most bang for your buck where time spent preparing is concerned.

 

[Trainz]

Last sunday, the PC's finished the adventure quicker than expected, and I had to improvise the remaining hour.

Turned out well. One campaign we once played, I improvised 80% of the time and it went well. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable doing that today.

 

[Agemegos]

I am officially looking at a situation where I need to get a plan for a session done as efficiently as possible. To all you experienced DMs out there, is it possible to do a halfway decent preparation job in two hours?

Back when I was GMing a lot and therefore in good practice, I used to back myself to prep an adventure for an arbitrary campaign in seventeen minutes, and to prep a new campaign in the time it took players to generate new characters (typically about an hour).

The trick was (and is) to design adventures in terms of situation, not location. It wouldn't work for dungeon crawls, nor for Champions adventures in which characters' abilities in game terms matter in detail. So I guess what you have to ask yourself is whether you are married to D&D, or whether you might get better bang for your time spent by running something in another genre--detective stories, film noir, modern-day or period action/thrillers, SF, or even non-D&D-type fantasy.

It helps enormously to have a detailed and consistent setting, because if your setting is consistent you can safely extemporise details with no fear that they will contradict something that you have established before, or create clashes with anything you want to add in the future. For this purpose, it is a great idea to use historical models (of cultures, political systems, economies, people, political situations…)

Don't re-invent the wheel. In about the time it would take you to map out a large castle you could read a book on the history of castles, which would be much more useful to you in thelong run. Undeerstnding how castles were built, you will be able to extemporise castle layouts as fast as parties move through them: moreover, in time your players willlearn the schema for a castle in your world. That will give them more options than to kick in the doors one by one and kill everyone. And having extra options will allow them to engage with the world.

And my best advice: limit your palette. Use a small range of things as typical of your world: pretty quickly they will grow familiar and you'll find that you don't need to refer to rules or books so often. Prep and winging it will become a lot easier. And the players will find themselves with more knowledge of what the world is like, and therefore more power to deal with it. Only add in something from off your usual palette for a special occasion.

 

[Ibram]

When I was dm I did most of the actual planning for the game (stat blocks and maps wise) the night before, or the morning of, the game. Not much time, but then I have a binder full of my house rules, and stat blocks for bunches of monsters (thugs and the like) that I have collected over the years (none of my players know this but they have fought the exact same "thugs" at leats 10 times over the past two years). In situations where very little prep time is available its best to reuse an adventure that they have not played through yet, or you could go to the WotC website and look up their "Random Encounters" (most major aspects of the plot has already been worked out).

 

[der_kluge]

If it were me, I'd opt for a real role-play intensive, combat light game. Something probably set in a city, with some political intrigue. You're not going to have time to make up vast dungeons and populate treasure vaults, and rooms of monsters, and traps. That stuff takes uber time.

Keep it simple. Spend an hour in the city just role-playing with PCs. Heck, you might even consider playing an evil party. You're players are liable to come up with their own nefarious plots, and you can just run with it from there. That's probably what I'd do.