How much preparation do you put in as a DM/GM?

[J-H]

Castlevania/Castle Dracula was entirely written by me with about 40-50 custom monsters and a good number (15? 25? don't recall) custom magic items. I thought Super Castlevania IV would be a good D&D campaign, and it was. I ended up cleaning it up and putting it on the DM's Guild. It ended up at about 70 pages + items + monsters at the standard font size 9/2 column format. It ran to 20-25 sessions.

My current one (Against the Idol of the Sun), which is sort of a sequel (same characters, different part of the world and nearly no narrative link) is a big hexcrawl with a 18x16 map, with each hex having at least one interesting/unique thing in it, 30 different random encounter tables, and a bunch of factions. I'm pretty sure the pagecount is over 250 pages, but it's scattered about in a bunch of different files. I have it in about 8 different manila folders at the table to make it easy to find things. We are at 20 sessions in and it'll probably go between 30 and 40 total, or maybe a bit more.

I've been told I'm the most hyper-prepared GM any of my players have seen.

My other campaign, an episodic dungeon-crawl, has 5-7 pages of notes on the setting (player-generated) plus my future plans both short and medium term, and the dungeons themselves are generally from the DM's Guild with a few penciled in notes where I alter loot or make a few other changes. Much lower prep. I'll have to custom-build a dungeon and statblocks for the kython infestation, but they haven't seen any signs of it yet, so prep time has been a lot lower for that one.

For the heavily-prepared ones, once I'm done preparing, I'm done preparing unless I need to edit something. I can go 4 sessions with 0 prep work required between sessions. On the big Hexcrawl, I have one city left to prep (the enemy main city), and nothing else except fine-tuning. I could probably go 10 sessions right now with no prep work between sessions aside for assembling one or two enemy strike forces from pre-done NPC foes. I don't think the party is going to go after the divine avatar of Huitzopochitl until they've hit level 20 and killed all the subsidiary temples.

[Pauly]

Prep time is

1) Mastering the system and building any player aids needed to speed up play. This is reading the rule book, running through several scenarios by myself to see how different abilities and skills interact. If I identify anything as difficult to grasp or complex I’ll build some kind of player aid, some examples include flow charts, a set of cards with abilities printed on them, re-building the character sheet.
I dislike D&D and PbtA profoundly, so I almost always have at least one player new to the system I’m running
I’ve also taken systems for Renaissance Europe and reskinned them for Edo era Japan, so again there is a lot of prep time involved in the reskin.
For me this is the longest prep time and usually takes months for a new system.

2) World building. I generally build off real world history, sometimes off a propriety setting. I don’t create new worlds from scratch because I find players are more comfortable in a setting the know a out before starting an adventure. I’ll prepare a little about the whole world, a moderate amount about the country and a lot about the area the campaign is set in. I’ll also build stat blocks for key NPCs and generate a portfolio of interesting encounters that can be inserted as needed. For generic NPCs and generic enemies I’ll build short form stat blocks.
This usually takes a few weeks before I’m ready to start a campaign.

Steps (1) and (2) obviously can get re-used so prep time comes down for subsequent campaign in the same system/world.

3) Campaign overview. I’ll build several major plot hooks and think of different ways to stitch them together. I let the party choose which plot hooks they follow and which they leave alone.
For example if I’m doing a 3 Musketeers type setting I might have
The King - patron of the players
King’s Spymaster/Dutch spymaster - engaged in spy war about French influence in the low countries.
Spanish Ambassador - trying to get the king's cousin on the throne.
The Queen - engaged in an affair with an Austrian Archduke.
The second son - the Dauphin is an idiot who needs to be prevented from ascending to the throne.
As the players engage with the plot hooks one of the major NPCs becomes the BBEG and the others become player patrons, obstacles, allies of the BBEG or whatever is needed for the plot.
I don’t sketch anything out in detail but build a net of plausible interactions depending on how the players take the campaign.
This gets rolled into step (2) if it’s the first time I’m running a world, if I’m re-using a world maybe 2 or 3 weeks of collecting ideas.

4) sessions zero and one.
I try to put a lot of effort into this to give a good launch pad for the campaign. I want the players to be comfortable with the setting and mechanics of the system. So probably 5 or 6 hours.

5) sessions 2+
By now everything should be flowing smoothly and prep time for each session should be no more than an hour. Sometimes I can get by with no prep at all.

6) Review.
After each session I write up a quick review of the session. Milestone plot events and a few comments about each PC. Maybe 20 to 30 minutes. This allow me to keep track of what’s happening in the campaign.

In my process all the heavy lifting is done in the weeks/months before a campaign starts. After that it usually smooth sailing unless the players really go deep into the weeds, like the time my players turned my Intrigue in aftermath of Treaty of Westphalia Holland with hooks to pre Civil War England campaign into a Piracy in the Caribbean campaign.

[HidesHisEyes]

I'm just curious about what amounts of preparation is actually put into running a game?

I'll confess that in the past, I've ran games without any preparation whatsoever. And I think it shows in the previous games I've ran here in the Playground.

The most I've ever put into preparation is a plan for the first encounter in my head. It's something I really need to change.


So how about you? How much preparation does go into the games that you run?

Depends on the game and on how much time and enthusiasm I have. For Dungeon World (my game of choice) my minimum prep is absolutely none if I’m running a one-shot or maybe the first session of a very short campaign and we play as intended by setting up the premise and setting through character creation and I throw a scenario together on the fly based on what comes out of that process. Then once the campaign gets going I’ll spend about half an hour, minimum, making a mind map of the stuff the players are most likely to interact with in the coming session, and jotting down any stats etc that I’ll need.

If I have the time and enthusiasm I might put together a little database about the world at large, the stuff going on in it and most importantly countdown clocks for the ongoing situations ticking away in the background.

The most important thing is that if I find myself planning out actual events that will happen in the session and which rely on the players making certain choices, I will rip it up and start again and give myself a stern talking to. The key is that I’m not “planning a session”, I’m just creating a bunch of content that I can deploy at the table to make the session happen.

[Bounty Hunter]

It depends on the game, the group, and the rules system.

I could start a D&D 5e one-shot right now with five folks from my normal player pool and do zero prep and we'd all still have a grand time.

On the other hand my session tomorrow as a new GM trying their hand at Star Wars RPG with a bunch of random players? Alllll the prep.

[Balain]

Most recently I have been running Conan 2d20 Exiles over Roll20.

I have a list of basic rumours and a list of major rumours. As the list gets depleted I will add more. Also have a list of random encounters, again as they get used up I create some more.

I have a general idea of what the group is planning to do next. As well as an ultimate goal of to leave the exiled lands.

The day before playing I will pick some random encounters they might run into while travelling. If no mLs already made for a destination I will come up with one. With planned encounters for the map.

Before hand I also created many hand outs the players and myself can reference as we play and combat maps, a few of potentially different terrains they might fight in(forest, desserts, mountains, jungles etc)