The Gaming Den

And how long does it take to prep for a TTRPG session as a GM?


Source: The 2016 Sly Flourish DM Survey

For over 90% of DMs, there is no tradeoff in hassle between rules and setup vs. a modern cooperative combat board game. For over 80%, board games are just better if you and your group mainly care about a good combat experience.

Until 80% or more of GMs surveyed can respond with "30 minutes" or less to prep, board games will continue to eat TTRPGs' lunch. GMs are the bottleneck. No GMs = no game.

APs already exist. If you want your prep time to be thirty minutes, it can be. You can even run an AP out of the book with no prep at all and it'll still kind of work.

brized wrote:And how long does it take to prep for a TTRPG session as a GM?


Source: The 2016 Sly Flourish DM Survey

For over 90% of DMs, there is no tradeoff in hassle between rules and setup vs. a modern cooperative combat board game. For over 80%, board games are just better if you and your group mainly care about a good combat experience.

Until 80% or more of GMs surveyed can respond with "30 minutes" or less to prep, board games will continue to eat TTRPGs' lunch. GMs are the bottleneck. No GMs = no game.

Hours? The guy who did a lot of my GMing in the last few decades has folders packed full of preparation that have probably taken him YEARS (well, hundreds of man-days) to create.

So if games have drifted towards rules-lite and mindcaulk, how do we add mechanical rigor to rules-lite and mindcaulk? How do we add useful scaffolding to magical tea party?

Mask_De_H wrote:So if games have drifted towards rules-lite and mindcaulk, how do we add mechanical rigor to rules-lite and mindcaulk? How do we add useful scaffolding to magical tea party?

You sell miniatures, FFG X-Wing and various skirmish games sell miniatures first, once you have 100$ on miniatures you are invested in fielding them in sound manners

I'm pretty sure the ideal number of units to be commanding in a miniatures war game is somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-12. It definitely isn't one. That's a pretty significant problem for RPGs that plan on leaning on their ruleset. Someone who wants really good combat rules can probably get better ones from something like X-Wing Miniatures even if your combat rules are quite good. Legacy/campaign rules for board games and war games allow them to have the epic scope of a TTRPG, so TTRPGs can't compete on that anymore.

Suzerain wrote:Terrible analogy. McDonalds burgers are actually edible out of the box. Most current RPG rules would either be burgers that are 50% inedible, 10% poisonous, with only 40% actual burger; or just plain being sold a bun and told to imagine the other ingredients.

I'm stealing this for a comic in the future. Just letting you know.

Chamomile wrote:APs already exist. If you want your prep time to be thirty minutes, it can be. You can even run an AP out of the book with no prep at all and it'll still kind of work.

If APs were sufficient in their current state, the data would have come out very differently. The only games I've GM'd for the past decade have been premade adventures for D&D 3.5 and Call of Cthulhu. I find myself spending extra time on:

• 1. Before the first session: Understanding the big picture of the AP so I can improvise in ways that foreshadow or are relevant to the AP.
  2. After the first session: Filling in gaps in the adventure. In D&D, it's usually major NPC writeups and drop-in locations. CoC could use more drop-in NPCs.
  3. How to arrange everything so what I need to reference quickly can be referenced quickly. AP page layout is usually not optimized for this.
  4. Adjusting combat encounters for the party. Why aren't there alternate hard/easy versions of the encounter already, or ways to modulate it baked in?
  5. If there's a dungeon this session, reading the map and getting a sense of where things could get complicated. The more complex the dungeon, and more magic the PCs have, the more time consuming this is.

It usually takes me 2-4 hours to prep with an AP. If I've run it before, it's still usually at least an hour.

I've looked into the lazy DM framework, which claims to get prep down to 30 minutes per 4 hour session, but haven't tested it yet.

brized wrote:

Chamomile wrote:APs already exist. If you want your prep time to be thirty minutes, it can be. You can even run an AP out of the book with no prep at all and it'll still kind of work.

If APs were sufficient in their current state, the data would have come out very differently..

Unless the people who answer surveys about their GM prep are people who enjoy prepping to GM.

Which seems very likely.

Preparing for games is not as much fun as playing them, but it helps playing them happen more and it is fun on it's own.

brized wrote:And how long does it take to prep for a TTRPG session as a GM?


Source: The 2016 Sly Flourish DM Survey

For over 90% of DMs, there is no tradeoff in hassle between rules and setup vs. a modern cooperative combat board game. For over 80%, board games are just better if you and your group mainly care about a good combat experience.

Until 80% or more of GMs surveyed can respond with "30 minutes" or less to prep, board games will continue to eat TTRPGs' lunch. GMs are the bottleneck. No GMs = no game.

Shadowrun is fairly easy to GM for. Most of your prep work is reminding yourself of some neat scenes from Escape from New York, rewatching Heat, or thinking of things while you're stuck in traffic/work. Most game prep for GMs is done when you're daydreaming anyway. My sitting down writing stuff up time was probably half hour on average.

Kaelik wrote:

brized wrote:

Chamomile wrote:APs already exist. If you want your prep time to be thirty minutes, it can be. You can even run an AP out of the book with no prep at all and it'll still kind of work.

If APs were sufficient in their current state, the data would have come out very differently..

Unless the people who answer surveys about their GM prep are people who enjoy prepping to GM.

Which seems very likely.

Preparing for games is not as much fun as playing them, but it helps playing them happen more and it is fun on it's own.

I think you might just be good and very practiced at prepping, Kaelik. I think the Age of Worms modules generally took me a couple hours each at least, and I don't exactly enjoy prepping to GM.

I think prep time is going to vary from person to person and game to game as a rule. When I GM I do a rough outline of 'here there be plot hooks' and rely on random tables for the rest. There's even a random dungeon generator that only takes a couple minutes of cleanup to look presentable.

And then there's GMs who make lovingly hand crafted encounters because they care about things like balance and design, the nerds.

brized wrote:The only games I've GM'd for the past decade have been premade adventures for D&D 3.5 and Call of Cthulhu.

I GM premade APs from Paizo or WotC four times a week. Although they are sometimes terrible railroads (and even by that standard, WotC APs are hit and miss but not consistent failures - Paizo APs are consistent failures with, so far as I can tell, the sole exception of Kingmaker), they can be run with no more prep than reading the adventure, extracting maps into Roll20, and making tokens. Typically I like to read the adventure in advance and make edits for balance and to try and open up the rails as much as possible, but if I only have thirty minutes of prep time for that session, it works.

Kaelik wrote:Unless the people who answer surveys about their GM prep are people who enjoy prepping to GM.

Which seems very likely.

Why speculate when there's evidence?

[url=http://slyflourish.com/2016_dm_survey_results.html wrote:The 2016 Sly Flourish DM Survey[/url]]Of 6,600 respondents on primary adventures used, 64% answered personal adventures and 36% answered published adventures.

Sure, the majority don't run APs as their primary adventures. But again, 39% take an hour or less to prep, and 16.7% take 30 minutes or fewer to prep. If APs were effective at getting prep down to 30 minutes or fewer, why don't we see that reflected in the data? Why don't we see something close to 36% of people taking 30 minutes or fewer to prep? Why do we see less than half of that?

Either all GMs are really slow readers, or else they're like me: They can run an AP confidently with 30 minutes of prep time, but they'd prefer to have a full hour to not only read the AP, but also be able to make adjustments to it.

brized wrote:

Kaelik wrote:Unless the people who answer surveys about their GM prep are people who enjoy prepping to GM.

Which seems very likely.

Why speculate when there's evidence?

[url=http://slyflourish.com/2016_dm_survey_results.html wrote:The 2016 Sly Flourish DM Survey[/url]]Of 6,600 respondents on primary adventures used, 64% answered personal adventures and 36% answered published adventures.

Sure, the majority don't run APs as their primary adventures. But again, 39% take an hour or less to prep, and 16.7% take 30 minutes or fewer to prep. If APs were effective at getting prep down to 30 minutes or fewer, why don't we see that reflected in the data? Why don't we see something close to 36% of people taking 30 minutes or fewer to prep? Why do we see less than half of that?

This data does not in fact address the point I made in any way.

"DMs who like to prep." is not in any way answered by what they run, it's not like you don't prep modules. If you own 30 modules and you've only ever run 5 of them you might classify reading all the other ones as prep, but also have it be a thing you clearly like doing.

brized wrote: In MMORPGs, computers handle the rules seamlessly. In cooperative combat board games, the scope of the game is tight enough that the rules can be picked up quickly and playtested into better quality than a TTRPG. Descent and Mansions of Madness now have official mobile apps that run an AI for the enemies and game structure, so it's even more clear.

And the AI also ensures that any bad game sessions can be blamed on the AI or the game, rather than the GM. That alone is a huge social pressure load off the GM, and makes it far easier to get a group together to play.

Its less a setup issue, and more a social pressure issue. Magic Tea Party dominates because GMs can wing it and basically say yes to everything, or to work with players for a particular narrative outcome. By contrast RAW tends to create an adversarial relationship between the GM and players.