What takes you the longest in adventure preperation?

[Campbell]

Statting out NPCs use to take alengthy amount of time for me until I got ahold of UK's CR document. Now, rather than going magic item shopping I'll generate the bare character without items, and apply other factors to arrive at the right AC, Attack bonus, and saving throw numbers, and other stuff, all representing a character's magical items, padding the NPCs CR to fit the encounter. By basically designing NPCs as monsters I've saved myself a lot of time. If a PC picks up that sword an NPC used I'll work with the player to determine the stats for the sword. To complement this I use a resource point system for PCs so that a PCs value in gear is almost always equal to what a character of their level should have, rather than fiddling with treasure for my adventures.

 

[Sejs]

Coming up with the plot probably takes me the most time, due in part to the fact that I rarely just sit down and think things out with a pen and pad of paper. It comes to me when it comes.

Cooking up stats for the relevant NPCs, badguys, and filing the serial numbers off various monsters easily takes the most work, though.

 

[Thunhus]

Stats take too much time. I make only stats for main villain. I love and use D&D Miniatures stat cards.

Thunhus