PDA

View Full Version : How long do you spend preparing for a campaign?



RndmNumGen
2011-02-27, 11:10 PM
I'm currently DMing my first campaign, and have just been subject to a rather nasty revelation; the balance of power in the game is subject to rapid change. See, I had spent many hours designing quests for my players, balancing the enemies with their loot and how much EXP the players would be getting, when suddenly my three-man group of players became a five-man group of players. I welcome more players, but their presence means the party can now steamroll encounters that would have been a challenge before, so I now have to go in and rebalance everything. I was talking to one of my other friends who has been DMing for years about this, and he told me he never spends more than an hour preparing for a session.

So what about the rest of the playground? How long do you spend preparing for a game? Do you only make the macro-scale stuff, and leave creating the encounters until the players are actually in the dungeon? More? Less? I'm interested to hear how others handle this.

Titanium Fox
2011-02-28, 12:05 AM
The amount of time I usually spend preparing before a campaign is usually about how long it takes me to walk from the Cafeteria to 218 on a Thursday Night. I bounce a couple of ideas off my co-DM, he throws back a couple himself, and we set up the projector.

Honestly, most of my preparation for battle / sequense 2 occurs DURING battle / sequense 1. This is also the incredible bit about having 8 players. They can argue amongst themselves for HOURS during an RP session, so I have all the time in the world after things have gotten started.

Zaydos
2011-02-28, 12:17 AM
Depends upon group. I'm DMing for 2 groups now and last week both did twice as much as I planned for. 1 was because one player missed it and I realized just how much of the time was him. The other was because we played for twice as long as we were supposed to.

The first group is a sand box with me giving them options for the main quest and them turning them down and doing little side quests that I'm making up as things happen. It's a 5 person party and normally missing at least one player and most of the players are passive so they can come to a decision quickly but I can't figure out what it will be just know it is going to include blowing things up. I haven't really tried to plan for it because it really is just explosions and I can make a battle with no books and 5 seconds for 3.X. 2 of the players don't quite understand that characters can have their own goals and treat it like a video game, one understands this but keeps flip-flopping on what his character is (he's been consistent for 2 weeks apparently he made a back story... I don't know what it is though). One has a personality but it could be defined as "try and be contrary" which leaves me with one character's motivations to toy with and those are "kill living spells... possibly anyone who hires me to as well".

The other group I normally plan a little more for because I know what's happening simply because the characters have defined goals and each session has ended at a good ending place which left me with an idea what was happening next. I took no time for the first session (I had scheduled time for character building and everyone came to me separately before session to do it... like they'd told me they couldn't). The next I planned more than usual because they were fighting a large scale battle and I studied the Heroes of Battle rules and agonized over "how many troops should each side have" for a while. And the next I made about a dozen new monsters for... so maybe an hour?

It really varies with free time and players, and my own motivation (when I was in highschool, and homeschooled, I planned/world-built as my main pass time because it's what I enjoyed so I planned far more than was ever necessary and often had several adventures in advanced planned... but I also had a 100% static group).

arguskos
2011-02-28, 12:49 AM
Entirely depends. If I'm kinda running something a bit less seriously and something I'm far more ambivalent about, then I tend to spend approx. 5 minutes prepping. It helps that I've been playing for like 13 years now, so I can just kinda wing things and have it all work out.

However, when I get serious about a session, I spend absurd amounts of time on planning and prep, just because I want it to go well. For instance, I have a campaign starting up in two weeks (the 12th of March, specifically), and in this game, the party is the command staff for a chapter of an adventuring company, so I have done the following work (thus far) for it:
-Designed, using the SBG, the chapter house. It's three floors, 40 stronghold spaces, around 18,000 square feet. I even accounted for hallway space and bathrooms.
-Crafted eleven fellow adventuring members of the chapter, each with detailed backgrounds, personalities, and full statblocks. Each is a fully-fleshed out person.
-Assigned names, personalities, and roles to each of the 29 members of the chapter staff, including all the guards and the servants.
-Created a history of the chapter itself, in case anyone gets curious as to the history for the chapter proper.
-Created contacts, local/national/international politics of relevance, chapter traditions, rival adventuring companies (with scalable, fully-crafted, NPCs), chapter ledger, chapter rules/regulations, AND who the regular customers are and what they tend to hire the chapter's services for.
-A variable job system, so the PCs have their choice of work each session, and can assign NPCs to the other jobs accordingly. Each job is fully-designed, so that no matter what the PCs select to do, I'm ready (and I have a reasonably sized list of stuff that I can draw from for the inevitable "oshi- I didn't plan on that" moments).

It's basically Bioware the RPG too, since each of the 11 adventuring NPCs have personal quests that can be undertaken if desired (and likely will unlock prestige classes for them) and interact with each other and the other NPCs as the PCs do whatever they do.

Finally, there is a meta-plot I've woven into the sub-jobs all over the place, with minor hints here and there as whim takes me. Talking to NPCs anywhere (the markets, the temple, the STREETS, wherever) will yield all sorts of curious information, some of which could well be related to the meta-plot. As the PCs take jobs, the ramifications of those jobs could well be felt by the common folk in the streets of their city, depending on the job of course.

I'm really striving to make it Bioware the RPG. Not sure if I've succeeded. Guess we'll see on the 12th.

NichG
2011-02-28, 03:45 AM
Generally I divide time in various ways. From most to least:

I spend most of my prep time on homebrew mechanics and options, weird items and their powers, etc. This is sort of an as I get to it thing, but it can be several hours here and there of prep.

Second-most prep time is framing broad things, like lists of places that exist, lists of major NPCs and roughly what their functions and abilities are. This is usually stuff I'll think about while in transit places, or going to sleep, or whatever.

If I run a dungeon or something (which I don't do often), I'll spend an afternoon drafting up rooms, puzzles, and such.

Beyond that, I don't spend much prep time at all. I don't bother setting NPC stats until just before they're needed (or even just as they're needed) - the result there is I can adjust things if the party has some huge random jump in power. For the plot of a given session, usually I just figure out the broad aspects and generate the rest of the details dynamically. And thats usually for the best since the PCs rarely stay on the lines of any particular thing - they might randomly say 'okay, we go and invade heaven today' and while I'm not prepared for it, I'm no less prepared for it than anything else.

potatocubed
2011-02-28, 03:56 AM
My rule of thumb is "never spend longer preparing for a session than you're going to spend playing that session".

My campaign prep generally involves coming up with a setting in broad strokes, a bunch of NPCs who all want mutually exclusive things, and a simple set-up to get the PCs involved. I may also throw in the odd hour here and there knocking together homebrew monsters and enemies.

On the whole, PCs are too unpredictable to make huge plans around - better to have a flexible scheme and calculate appropriate reactions to the PCs' shenanigans.

Altair_the_Vexed
2011-02-28, 06:32 AM
I've never stopped preparing my campaign material. Started when I was 14, still working on it now at nearly 40.
So the time spent before playing was zero, but since starting there've been thousands of hours working on it.

Of course, I'm old school, so when I say "campaign", you might more likely say "setting". But then, every adventure that runs in my setting has effects on the rest of that setting... so it really is just one campaign, with one constant player: me, the DM.

some guy
2011-02-28, 08:18 AM
Second-most prep time is framing broad things, like lists of places that exist, lists of major NPCs and roughly what their functions and abilities are. This is usually stuff I'll think about while in transit places, or going to sleep, or whatever.

This and I usually spend an hour/hour and an half preparing that evening's session. Thinking about combat, options the players have, options the players are likely to take, thinking about last time's session, thinking about details.

valadil
2011-02-28, 09:37 AM
When I first started GMing I spent 10-20 hours on each session. Now I'm down to about even time, meaning 1 hour of prep yields one hour of game. Combats and dungeons give better returns, but I like plot and RP better.

I don't plan more than a session in advance. It's too hard to predict where the players will be and most of my efforts beyond that point just go to waste.

What system are you running? I'm finding 4e makes combats pretty adaptable. Right now I have a 2000xp budget for each of my fights. If one of my five players leaves (or if someone else joined unexpectedly, but that hasn't happened yet), I cut out 1/5 of the encounter. It's a trivial adjustment and my players don't even notice.

Zuljita
2011-02-28, 02:21 PM
I run a game on maptool every 3 weeks, and prep for that can be pretty intense... I steal other peoples work as often as possible when it comes to maps etc. i probably put in about even time, sometimes more sometimes less for my sessions.