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Message: <blockquote data-quote="der_kluge" data-source="post: 1356043" data-attributes="member: 945">We play every other week, and I am the current DM.  If we played every week, I'm certain that I would get completely burnt out.  I'm running game to game right now (kind of the equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck), so once one game is complete, I go back home and begin working on the next.  Fortunately, I do have some purchased modules in the works, and will be able to utilize those in a few levels, and that will save me some work.But, I'm really anal about my DM'ing.  I admit I'm not the greatest at adlibing stuff (it really comes and goes), so I like to be prepared.  I probably spent 80 hours over two weeks for the last game.  Yes, seriously.  I worked on it probably a little every night.  And you can see the maps of that work in the Cartography area.  The story involved the PCs interacting with Modrons, and was probably one of the most intricate, complex things I'd ever put together.  The execution was *ok*, but nothing special.  This week, I'm working on a big dungeon-delve into an ancient dwarven stronghold.  I've got lots of maps (5 levels deep, and a side map into a cavern) so 6 full pages of maps that I created.  Only problem for me now is that I haven't had time to populate any of the rooms, so I'll probably get to adlib a lot of that stuff, but it might be kind of fun, who knows.  But I have committed to myself, and I will have to inform the players of this, that I'm not going to spend as much time preparing, since I have recently begun an online master's degree program, and that's where I need to be spending some portion of my time.  So, when I start adlibing, things get kind of weird, and they should just expect that.But, that raises an interesting topic about how much time DM's prepare between sessions.  I spend far too much time, I suspect, and probably working on things that are ultimately not that important (like the contents of chests), and tactics of monsters, etc.</blockquote>

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