Published Adventures Prep time?

[Wraith-Hunter]

I am wondering how much prep time the WotC adventures need. My 10 year old whom I home school wants to play and I don't have much if any free time. Can I just pick one up and start playing? Any recomendations? Dungeon crawls are fine. I probably prefer more DC than anything else.

 

[The_Gunslinger658]

I am wondering how much prep time the WotC adventures need. My 10 year old whom I home school wants to play and I don't have much if any free time. Can I just pick one up and start playing? Any recomendations? Dungeon crawls are fine. I probably prefer more DC than anything else.

Hi-

Its always best to at least read through the adventure once, thus you have some kind of idea how to run encounters. I usually read the adventure , then read it again making side notes of what the NPC's plan to do, rules notations and PHB/ MM page references. Index cards are a DM's best friend indeed.

Oh ya, I highly recommend The Twilight Tomb, low level adventure and lots of fun.


Scott

 

[Wik]

For running the first episode of Savage Tide (which is similar to a lot of wotc adventures) I:

1) Read the adventure in it's entirety.
2) Read it again.
3) Skimmed the statblocks, highlighting any special abilities I should keep in mind, Damage Reductions, and the like. I also put some thought into how the PCs would react in the encounter.
4) Took a nice long look at the maps. When you skim the map while reading room descriptions, you don't really get an idea of what's going to happen. Where are the chokepoints? Is it a linear map, or what? The dungeon I was looking at was an exploration map that turned linear - I didn't figure this out until I really looked at the maps.
5) Think about the maps. One thing I didn't notice about the adventure was that there are numerous fights in very cramped conditions. When I actually started running it, there were a few times where all the combatants couldn't even fit into the room they were fighting in! I had to think on my toes because I didn't see the problem coming up.

All this work takes about two, three hours... longer for a bigger adventure. Of course, while steps 1 & 2 are important, you could only do the next steps for what you think you're going to run that session - in fact, it's probably a better way to go.

 

[Faraer]

At a minimum:

If you don't look at it all in advance, you'll have to take pauses to read ahead. You can get by if you give it just a skim through, but you'll have to think on your feet as you find yourself thinking things like 'I should have done this earlier' and 'I didn't realize that was going on'. Of course, it partly depends on the scenario's complexity, and how happy you are improvising.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

It depends. You can run it after just having read through it once. However I think that you can run the adventure much better and make it more enjoyable for the players if you have time to make notes, look up the different spells and abilities that are used and think about the bad guys' tactics.

Of course if you're running it for your 10-year-old son, he probably won't notice much difference as long as you keep the action going for him. I imagine that preparing enough so that you don't have to stop too much would be the best option.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Isn't Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde designed to be an easy-to-run low-prep adventure?

 

[Ghostwind]

As long as you thoroughly read the adventure first, you can usually get away with about an hour's worth of prep time before running the adventure on lower level adventures (6th level or less). When you get to mid-levels and higher, the prep time jumps to 2 or more hours easy.

 

[The_Gunslinger658]

Isn't Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde designed to be an easy-to-run low-prep adventure?

Hi there WD;

I bought SGoS a few days ago, the adventure looks pretty cool with lots of cool toys, nice maps and I think three booklets. I like the folder concept and am glad Wizards did this adventure that way, alot easier to digest then flipping back and forth in a bound adventure, of course there is photo copying.

My only complaint was the cheapness of the paper the adventure books were printed on. Almost felt like newspaper to me.

Scott

 

[Theron]

SGoS is definitely low prep.

 

[Wraith-Hunter]

I'm definitely good at improv. I GM'd some WEG Star Wars and a 3.0 campaign when it first came out and about 50% of what happened was on the fly. Never told my players but at least 6 out of 10 classed NPC's they fought I did on the fly. And they always seemed to like my games and I usually had to turn people away, I can only handle so many. One of my players co-DMed the 3.0 game we ran and was surprised at how much improv I did. He thought it was all planned out. I'm just kind of tapped out right now.

My kid, girl actually, likes the dice (they are pretty) and killing things and taking their loot. I use it to make math and reading more fun. But with work, home schooling and 4 yr old twins running around I really need something I can jut grab and start playing.