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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4467248" data-attributes="member: 74166">What I've always enjoyed about D&D is that it was a pretty good excuse for getting together with other people who were okay with pretending to hack around a dungeon. Sometimes we wouldn't even play D&D, we'd get caught up in a ridiculously huge mix of Munchkin or the more cerebral guy would make an attempt to teach us how to play Puerto Rico (I think we got the directions right the fifth time through, maybe?) and that'd be the night.And most times I didn't really mind, because I was the DM and my head was all full of numbers that I really couldn't connect to each other. But one time I was really humming. I had some complete dead space at my day job, so I spent a week working on a way to mix up a bunch of encounters for an open-ended ruin the PCs were heading into. I built separate creature decks for the different factions, created some rules that sounded right to create tactically balanced encounters, and spent a lot of time tuning a small selection of monsters with various level adjustments and NPC classes and PC classes and feat selections and a lot of time checking and double-checking the math for all that. The one thing I was really proud of was putting a few simple combat options on each monster card based on existing skills or magical items I gave them.I also had a deck containing various bits of treasure, mostly random wealth with the occasional magic item and the more occasional item the PCs might want. I think we spent a few months in that ruin, rotating new monsters through the deck as the PCs dropped the old ones. It was fairly easy to get going and I definitely threw in some ad-libs about the giant ruined city, survivors, and some of the less intelligent creatures, but for the most part the random drawing gave me enough to work with most weeks. And then the decks were exhausted, the bosses down, and we moved on... and I didn't have nearly as much time to prep every week and the campaign fell apart. But I was really humming.And then, some time later, I cracked the new DMG and MM, and the feeling that I'd just walked into the Twilight Zone gradually gave way to the realization that I could prep like that all the time.</blockquote>

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