D&D General Time spent on D&D outside of actual play

[CydKnight]

I spend no less than twice the time prepping as the group spends at the table. At times it could be at least triple.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

"A ton".
Perhaps even "many tons".

Real life and moving a lot has meant I've often gone long stretches without a group. But I still enjoy reading materials, writing adventures, learning new games, and so forth. Whether I play or not, it's pretty much always in my head, and has been since I started playing as a little kid.

 

[LordEntrails]

A Ton. Now if you subtracted the amount of time I spend on ENWorld, it would be about the same amount of time as I play

 

[Lanefan]

A Ton. Now if you subtracted the amount of time I spend on ENWorld, it would be about the same amount of time as I play

Yeah, this; though even without ENWorld etc. I still spend far more time on non-play stuff than actual play.

And much of that time goes into a category not really covered in the OP: post-game work. Logging, recordkeeping, keeping our game's website up to date and slowly augmenting it over time, that sort of thing.

 

[TwoSix]

Factoring in ENWorld and time spent reading other RPG resources, it's certainly more than I play. Although I'm playing a lot more now than I used to (4 games, all every 2 weeks).

Due to the migration to online play thanks to COVID-19, I spend a lot more time doing prep than I used to, maybe about an hour or so for each game. Which is way too much; I keenly feel the difficulty in being able to improvise in online games.

 

[DND_Reborn]

This is going to be heavily skewed between players and DMs. When I play, I might, maybe, match actual play time with non-play time. When I DM, I put in at least 3 times the amount of hours we'll play.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fluctuates so wildly as to be meaningless, for me. It's not even consistent with when I'm DMing/playing.

In 2E, I often spent pretty much no time thinking about AD&D except when playing it, or maybe reading an adventure immediately before a session. I spent a lot more time reading other RPGs, and discussing them online, as they tended to be much more interesting to discuss and the people discussing them were closer to my age (most people who wanted to discuss D&D back then seemed to be 30+, where I was a teenager, and with very fixed and very dungeon-bash-y ideas about things).

In 3E, I went from spending huge amounts of time discussing the impending 3E, and then 3E after it arrived for a couple of years, and reading 3E books, and so on, and not playing or DMing much, to playing a moderate amount, but not discussing or reading about it at all, unless I specifically was looking something up.

In 4E, I mostly DM'd, and I did a steady moderate amount of prep work, but it was more like 1-5 hours/session of prep, because it was so incredibly easy. The larger numbers would always be where I decided to type up lots of description, or do really complicated maps (I hate maps, I used to love them when I was a kid, but now I just wish people would do them for me). I didn't discuss 4E all that much online either, outside of a couple of few-month-long bursts of more heavy discussion which actually aligned with times when I got to DM it less.

In 5E, I discussed it for a long time whilst not playing any kind of D&D (unless Dungeon World counts), and read about it a fair bit. Then started running it a lot but not really reading about it, and trying to take similar amounts of prep to 4E, which is sadly not really practical, as 4E was more DM-friendly (or friendly to my style of DMing, doesn't matter which), and I had to take increasingly longer times to prep it. And I wasn't discussing it much when I was running it a lot. More recently, I've been discussing it a ton, and playing it more than I have since, ummm, well, wow the '90s really.

So what I'm saying is it just doesn't correlate well. Even with 5E feeling like it needs a lot more prep time than 4E, if I just ran an AP (which I don't want to), that prep time would be cut massively to just reading the AP completely once, and then re-reading and maybe editing bits of it before each session.

 

[ccs]

I don't know, maybe about equal time spent.

Our average sessions are about 4/4.5 hours long x2 per week (a Thur 5e game & a Sunday PF game - different groups). In general, if you could distill out the session time spent eating, BSing, etc I'd say each session would drop to about 2.5 hours in length (and not be worth attending). So about 5 hrs total.

Well. 5 hours total is (generally) what I spend every Wed writing/prepping the next session I'm DMing (5e atm)/updating my PF character/reading whatever new D&D book etc.
I don't count EnWorld in that total, nor the random D&D/gaming thoughts throughout the week....

 

[pogre]

I'm a DM and I visit ENWorld most days. I prepare terrain and miniatures for my adventures. We play once a week for four hours. I spend 8-16 hours a week writing campaign material, preparing props, painting, building, etc. I quantified that as a lot - maybe it is a ton. Depends on your point of view.

 

[Mercurius]

Yeah, this; though even without ENWorld etc. I still spend far more time on non-play stuff than actual play.

And much of that time goes into a category not really covered in the OP: post-game work. Logging, recordkeeping, keeping our game's website up to date and slowly augmenting it over time, that sort of thing.

I'd consider that in the Preparation category, which could be pre- or post- game play. Probably should have called it something else (pre- and post-op?).