@Sarlax: I was pretty shocked the first time you told me about your relatively short prep time — I would have guessed you spent much longer on it, based on the level of detail in our campaign.

I find the best thing I can do is to know my campaign world and the big people in it. Although the scope of the campaign is continental and planar, the actual setting is no more than a half-dozen cities and a small number of other locales. The NPCs tend to last, so there’s a small cast to manage as well.

I’ve always avoided writing up particular outcomes in the game; I don’t want to rule the game. At this point, though, it’s a moot issue – the PCs would be impossible to control – they’re 16th level now and have a set of abilities that allow them to do nearly anything.

Instead of trying to make things happen, I spend my short prep time working out ways to let things happen.

I also find that my prep brainstorms never come when I need them to. When I have the ideas, I write. When I don’t, I do other things to free up time for the brainstorm.

I’ve said it before: If you’re playing D&D, and you’re not using HeroForge to stat up your NPCs, you are wasting time.

HeroForge is a free Excel spreadsheet that handles almost every WotC sourcebook. SpellForge handles spell selection for the same. Both can manage characters up to 60th level, including epic rules, magic items, templates, oddball races, etc. Because it’s Excel, it can be modified to fit many House Rules.

Caveat: I have worked with the dev team for quite a while, so I may be a bit biased. But rolling up an accurate 40th level Fiendish Half Black Dragon Drow Scout-True Necromancer-Thrall of Orcus in 10 minutes is pretty awesome.

For prep, I’ve gone more and more towards using stock villian templates and giving them a few key powers, almost like how you want to give an NPC one or two memorable or unique traits. That’s what the players will remember, in my experience. For example, a lot of the mages I use have the same base template, but specialize in a few spells I know will be an interesting mix for the players.

Kids, wives, jobs–you gotta cut the fat from your prep time. Which stinks, because I like the worldbuilding aspect it can provide. I’d fall asleep if all I did was stat out minions.

My other group is playing PTA. There, I spend the time sketching out a barebones plot for the episode, a few key players, and their relations. A lot the prep is strongly focussed by the Screen Presence of the different protagonists. For the next session, one PC has a SP of 3, so a lot of the NPCs and plot prep ties into the character’s background.

@NukeHavoc: Man, three pages sounds like some kind of crazy dream! My last session writeup ran about 20 pages. Now I feel all bloated.

And then I had kids.

Now I’m far more focused, striving to knock out my adventure notes in an hour or so, and keeping my adventure write-ups to three pages or less. I wrote this up as my Three-Page Manifesto over on Nuketown; the gist of it is that I need to write less in order to be able to GM more.

i mean.. The plan of the evil, when and how it will be realized.. some sort of festivities.. everything that hasn’t nothing to do with the heroes.. than i imagine some “Film Scene” that i would love to play and i work on ‘em.. than i work on NPCs and little but non deleteble anyway by PGs.. than i prepare some preps for the players and then i leave imagination flows with the PG

I must say, though, that this is partly because I have too little actual game time in my busy life, and the prep (or just any reading up on fluff or crunch) is a nice substitute on the actual gaming. Also, I can easily make time for prep while I’m on the train to and from work.

That said, I often do still miss the ball during my sessions, in that I have been ‘preparing’ unnecessary stuff, or even not the most important things. So your tips are definitely worth a try for me!

My prep looks somewhat like this (keeping in mind that these days I only run published material):
- WAY in advance, I read the material cover to cover, to have an idea of the plot, setting, and overal mood. I like this part so much, that I now have a lot of published stuff that I never have even played, and probably never will play.
- A couple of months before the first session, I start copying the entire adventure to my notebook, so I have easy access to all the stats, encounters, ideas, PCs, … This includes properly translating all the descriptions to my language, so I don’t need to worry about realtime translations (which tends to get in the way of the description itself, and kills the mood).
- Before each session, I go over the material again, making a (mostly overestimated) guess on how far my players will get that session.
- If I have time left, I plan for extra things, like specialized combat tactics for important encounters, extra events in the campaign that have nothing to do with the adventure except to add flavor, etcetera.

Thanks for the tips, I especially think some post-gaming evaluation would sort me out most of all. Trouble is, most of my games are run in the evening and I’m off to bed afterwards and by the morning I’ve forgotten everything I wanted to go over!

I’m just about to start DMing for a long term campaign, and whilst I’ll be using the D&D 4e modules (starting with Keep on the Shadowfell) it’ll be a useful exercise to keep a track of the prep that I end up needing to do.

I’m hoping that by putting some good notes in the adventure text itself (eg “This innkeeper likes to shout!”) I can keep the game interesting without getting bogged down in detail.