What takes you the longest in adventure preperation?

[DragonLancer]

Put me down for another vote on NPC design.

D&D3 is much more modular than prior editions, but trying to create NPC's especially above 5 becomes far too time consuming.

 

[Gundark]

It is interesting to see that most of the replies are for stating out the NPCs. I think this is the one place where 3.X suffers. As has been pointed out espically at higher levels. While there are those NPCs of all classes in the DMG that you can use, they still take time. Whether it be picking spells, feats, coming up with strategies or whatever. I'm hoping that the DMG 2 might address this.

 

[francisca]

Used to be stating out the NPCs/applying templates, etc...

Then I quit being so anal about it, and get it "close enough". My players don't seem to notice the difference, even after I told them I no longer spent scads of time sweating all of the skill points, etc. Giving up on DMing 3.5 for the forseeable future will see the time spent stating go even down even further.

Now, it's daydreaming about adventures and my loose plots.

 

[Wombat]

The big thing is coming up with a plot that fits both the world and the PCs.

After that, everything is downhill.

 

[Christopher Lambert]

IME statting out the baddies takes the longest time. It's a lot easier to use a monster than an NPC because you don't need to cover the monster with magic items, but using another generic monster is pretty boring. If you start giving that monster class levels you end up making a lot more work for yourself.

Desigining low-magic (or non-magic) NPCs is a lot easier but you need a somewhat different ruleset to do that.

I find choosing skills, feats and even spells takes less time than dealing with magic items (spells and skills take a long time, while feats are done in a flash unless you're dealing with a fighter of 14th-level or higher).

Coming up with maps for a cool combat session often takes a long time, too.

And finally, treasure. I can't stand dealing with it. I found a random treasure generator online that would print the results, but it just reminded me that I had to hand out completely unrealistic amounts of treasure to preserve any kind of game balance in 3.x.

 

[Crothian]

traps and DCs are easy, stating out bad guys is a easy since I cheat and don't fully stat out anything, ideas area dime a dozen, towns are easy as they don't need a deep design, treasure is simple since my players will ignore it anyway.

Other: what takes me the longests is the figuring out the choices the players can make and coming up with what will hjappen no matter what they do. I don't micro manage the ideas, but I'm talking aboiut the big ones like where to go next

 

[Castellan]

My first post!

Welcome!

I find that statting NPCs and monsters takes an extreme amount of time. Maybe we ENWorlders should voluntarily "generate" a bunch of NPCs for everyone to use?

 

[IronWolf]

I chose Dungeon Design, but for me I meant that to include the why something it there, DC's, traps, placing creatures, etc. And since not all of my campaigns are actually in a Dungeon I meant for it to include above ground adventure obstacles/challenges.

I see a large number of people are saying the NPC's are the longest time. My campaign is low-level at this time so it may be awhile before I come to realize how much of a time sink it may be in the future. For the most part now, I don't stat out NPC's fully *unless* he or she is central to the plot. And even in some of those cases the statting out is pretty loose. So much of the information goes unused I only stat out the basics. If the NPC is a spellcaster I do plot out his or her spells so as not to be tempted to let them have unfettered access to certain spells depending on what the party does (i.e. keep me honest).

Again, this may change as my campaigns reach a higer level where there are more feats, magical items and such to take into account in order to challenge the party.

 

[Emirikol]

The longest thing in preparing an adventure (as opposed to writing one) is that I use DUNGEON magazine or whatever old adventure I can find and that I have to read the darn thing. If the ADVENTURE SUMMARY at the beginning is not easy to use, it takes forever.

Join us at LGWriters and MOHWriters if you'd like to see how to improve that sort of stuff:
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/lgwriters
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/mohwriters

Now, when it comes to writing my own adventures here is the the order of timing for scenario writing (as experienced by having written a couple RPGA scenarios):

1. Coming up with an idea and actually deciding to sit down and write and adventure
2. EDITING
3. Writing DM's text
4. Writing read-aloud text
5. Playtesting
6. Statting out monsters (I either use generic MM/DMG reference or use a quick-generation program). No need to think too hard here. They're always just fodder anyways.
7. Re-writing the adventure summary to make sure I got everything
8. Writing the background
9. Doing basic maps
10. Writing the blurb and title page
11. Coming up with treasure

jh

 

[Emirikol]

Welcome!

I find that statting NPCs and monsters takes an extreme amount of time. Maybe we ENWorlders should voluntarily "generate" a bunch of NPCs for everyone to use?

I've been pushing for DRAGON and DUNGEON to do more statting for multiple levels. How about when they present a new prestige class or character that they have it for levels 1, 5, 10, and 15?



jh