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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9773176" data-attributes="member: 4937">Your average of 3000 to 4000 words a session sounds to me like a very realistic estimate for planning purposes.  I'm guessing that I'm writing 5000 to 6000 words per session over the course of the campaign, especially when counting the overhead for house rules and such things (for example, I had to do a write up on cybernetics because I wasn't happy with any D6 cybernetics rules I could find).  (Below here my mind wandered, so you can stop reading if you like.)I honestly feel too often I've been under prepped.  I was winging it too much in the late part of "The Dogfish", the middle section of "The Runaway", the early part of "Slaves of the Sith Lord".  Notably these are all "town" sections and I get really tired of prepping towns.  (The Runaway really required prepping three towns and I'd lavished all my attention on the first, for example.)  Similarly, I was just way in over my head through the entirely of "A Corrupted Flesh" because a world city is just a terrible setting for an adventure because its just too freaking big.  I'd also gotten in over my head on "Planets of the Smugglers" for a similar reason - prepping an adventure that can go over multiple worlds, even if those worlds are basically one small town each, still means prepping too many freaking towns.  I never finished the prep because I found I was making a setting guide rather than an adventure.  My latest adventure I've been suffering from burn out and under prepping.  I've got 42000 words but I've needed 65000 and the shortage is critically felt on my part.  Oh and the last section of "Plague of Lies" was just way under prepped because it was both another town section and that adventure had a unique "two adventures" in one structure because they had an official job for the Empire that was a cover for their job for the Rebellion and I didn't actually care that much about the Imperial job of catching the con artist.All of those sections would have benefited from more density to them because if you are making things up you just never have the density of sign posts and motivated characters that you would if you prepped.  Things always feel more empty because they are.What I wouldn't give for some high quality Star Wars setting guides "So you want to run an Ecumenopolis?" with good stock locations and such.  Like I would love to have a some stock Outer Rim settlements where the focus is on NPC service providers and you can change the drapes up to match local architecture and climate.  Give me a whole book of pirate holds or a whole book of smuggler outposts.  It's amazing how hard it is to find good quality content to bring into my game.   In general, Sci Fi is hard because the setting scale is too big.  Of course this is for 4 hour sessions with players that sometimes just take too much of their sweet time and don't get much done.  If you are playing for 8 hour sessions with highly efficient and direct kill teams, you'd probably need more than that.  Or you'd need to switch to a play style that didn't need as much heavy prep.  When I was running weekly open sessions at a local gaming store one summer I started out the first eight weeks or so writing out 8-12 room mini-dungeons like I might design for my own games.  Trying to do that was killing me.  The amount of prep time to play time was just absurd.  I switched to a giant megadungeon with a lot more rooms and no coherent "plot", theme, or purpose just big old dungeon crawl through random nonsense.  With less than half the prep per week I was creating more content than the players could explore in 4 hours, with the dungeon easily sprawling out past their ability to explore after just a few weeks of preparation.  If you don't have to worry about content dense prep and you just have orcs and pie, then things get much easier.</blockquote>

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