Quote from: Adric;736762Here's an interesting question: Do you use different levels of prep for your online games than you do you in person games? How about the difference between play by post and more 'live' games like roll20, Google hangouts, or IRC?

Another thing I'm interested in is how many of you use online resources like obsidian portal and the like to not only store information but organize games?

In addition to deciding whether I'm willing to run an online game, I am currently trying to decide whether I am going to use Roll20..  I've never run a game with such tools (though I have played in a few) mostly because I want to run an RPG, not fiddle with an interface**.  Roll20 seemed to be the first one to actually suggest and easily allow just using it as an interactive white board while you play (with little to no prep) and so far seems to have the most intuitive interface for doing this during game.  The search function for icons seems minimally intrusive in the short time I've looked at it as well.

That said, I might be happier with a camera pointed at my whiteboard and a chat server.  Either way, as much as possible, I think a tool should support the way I do things rather than force too much of a change to it.  At a certain point, I'm happier playing an MMO,.

I use Obsidian Portal as a player, but I haven't felt it was necessary for things I've run.  In a perhaps odd twist, I'm MUCH more willing to work on my characters out of game as a player than work on anything as a GM.


* My whiteboard is probably the most important tool I bring to a game.  I draw maps, relationships, diagrams, sketches of items or characters,whatever on it.  I take photos of it with my phone if I need to reference it later.  Back before carrying around a camera on my phone was normal, I did it with a stack of blank paper or a number of battlemats I could keep around.

** I work in IT/programming, I certainly can learn such things, but beyond a certain point, I'd rather be doing something else with my time.

Quote from: BranderI think games have almost nothing to do with writing

This statement confuses me.  Isn't a roleplaying game pretty much made of words?

Quote from: Steerpike;736857This statement confuses me.  Isn't a roleplaying game pretty much made of words?

I think improvisational theater is the closest thing to roleplaying, but I really think roleplaying is it's own thing.

Quote from: Brander;736865I think improvisational theater is the closest thing to roleplaying, but I really think roleplaying is it's own thing.

There are games that bring improv theatre to the forefront, others that focus more on tactical combat decisions, some focus on crafting a unique personal history or creating fantasy worlds, others still that focus on different elements of the hobby. While I have a personal preference for improv theatre set to certain themes, the other styles of play are no less valid, and games can mix them to certain degrees. Some will, through virtue of the rules require more preparation beforehand. It's just one of the dials that can be fiddled with.

Some games will deliver a more enjoyable experience when there is no prep. Others will be more enjoyable with more prep. There are plenty more that fall in the middle, with a balance of some prep and some "blank spots" that get defined through play. When I say games here, I don't just mean Gary's d&d campaign vs Fred's d&d campaign, though they are factors. I mean rule sets that enable different styles of play.

There's a big different between a game that let's you play how you want by not getting in the way, and a game that helps you play how you want by stepping in and guiding you when you need it.

Quote from: Adric;736762Another thing I'm interested in is how many of you use online resources like obsidian portal and the like to not only store information but organize games?

I don't.  I've seen Obsidian Portal, what with a bunch of people recommending it, but I haven't seen where it'd enhance my game.

Generally to the heavy prep GMs.

For me as I noted NPCs are the most important element.

As you can see from my Sig I also think tactical combat and creating a deep rich believable world are important (I call this story or the fiction but here I guess the gameworld is the popular term).

I don't need prep to do any of those things though.

I generally run games I understand the rules too , even if I just made those rules up which is common. So I can run a set of commandos in a very believable manner or a bunch of mindless zombies or a slick super trained assassin. To be honest all of that is just extension of the NPC character and personality. The way a character approaches conflict to me is as much about their character as how they speak, debate a point of politics or haggle for a discount at the tavern.

Rich believable worlds are a place where prep seems obviously advantageous but I can spin up a world in far less time than it takes me to write down. In the design thread I detailed a couple each of which took my less than 5 mins to think up but 20 minutes to actually write. When I think of a world the details are all there already, what sort of drink do they have in the bars, what is the local delicasy, where do the names for these things come from and how are they related to the archaic script the party might find on a tomb later on. All that stuff springs unbidden.
Now I do use shortcuts. So I might take a religion from a game I already ran years ago. Say the Cult of the Flame. Now that religion grew up over a 1 year game about 20 years ago. I understand it very well, it's theology, it's  types of priests, the way it interacts with the D&D mechanics (specifically 2e priests and differentiated priest subclasses). I know how it's temples look their design and layout etc.  Now if I am playing with my old game group in the UK who I have been gaming with since we were 10 using the Cult of the flame is great because they all have a working knowlege of the religion, at least from a layman's perspective. If I use it with a new group then its great because here is a rich fully formed religion much more than just "worship Zeus".  Or I could take the religion of Westeros straight from ASoFaI everyone worships the 7 etc etc again I am fully familiar and most players will be too. The ones that aren't will pick it up.

I could take that concept of the seven and I could play with it. They Worship the 5 gods of the Hand. The Father, the Mother, the Reaper, the Trickster and the Virgin. Again a religion falls out of there almost unbidden as these are all very familiar archetypes.

That is just religion you can do the same thing with architecture, weapons and armour, language, clothing and fashion. Where you have a good fresh idea you use it where you don't you can take something "classic" and it provides you with a homage to the original.

So yes you can do all this stuff last week and write it down or you can do it now as the game is unfolding about you. It's the same source, all your previous life experience

Describe a busy market, well I have been in busy markets from Oxford to Istanbul, from Cairo to Hong Kong so I can describe a market pretty well. Describe a castle, well again, I have clambered over the ruins of many a great castle, I have watched jousts at Warwick toured Chambord and Himeji. So no problem.

So where specifically do you spend the bulk of your prep time? What areas of the game do you think benefit most from good preparation? If say you had a 20 session game to plan out and you had 10 hours to prep it how would you spend that time (numbers picked deliberately due to ease of expression as % )?

Quote from: Brander;736840And my position is that this is clearly untrue and a position of opinion and aesthetics (and mostly a non-issue at the actual table where so many other variables can swing the game one way or another).

I would be remiss if I did not address this, a tangential pet peeve from proprietary dice/FFG EotE topic.

I agree with your assessment, Brander, on the whole. However I do agree from experience about Lord Vreeg's observation about prep leaving a noticeable mark on well-developed settings. If one spends lengthy amounts of campaign time you begin to spot greater layers of detail. There, the happy sandwich of mutual recognition out of the way.

But that's not the important part, which is this: it should be understood by the very nature of this being a mere forum that this is not "objective" or let alone "scientific." It's not peer reviewed like even an humanities journal, and it's all about imagination land, so there's really zero grounds for accusations of bias. It's all bias, it's all opinion. And insisting upon this obvious fact -- in favor of an objectivity that cannot contribute fruitfully beyond static facts like MSRPs -- adds nothing to these discussion.

Just like the uselessness of 'The Balance,' 'The Objectivity' is an equally useless canard plaguing our community conversations for way too long now. It adds nothing and improves nothing. And yes, I just expressed an opinion as non-cited fact. We're all just going to have to learn to be critical readers, and critical thinkers, and COPE with that.

You may return to your regularly scheduled topic.

Quote from: jibbajibba;736965So where specifically do you spend the bulk of your prep time? What areas of the game do you think benefit most from good preparation? If say you had a 20 session game to plan out and you had 10 hours to prep it how would you spend that time (numbers picked deliberately due to ease of expression as % )?

Depends on the group.
If we are talking about the pool of players I would tap for a D&D game it would be:
Making the creatures
Detailing the map
Layering the 'world in motion'

However there's no way I could do that in 10 hours.
That's a minimum of 40 creatures I need to write up.. Even at a mere 5.5 minutes per creature that's 3.5 hours alone.
Minimum of 20 cities*, with at least 5 detailed npcs and 5 semi-detailed npcs.  Just the npcs will take me 6.5 hours.

I hit the 10 hour prep without detailing the cities, adding in any 'world in motion' items to the setting, drawing any maps, etc.

Or

I use an existing campaign and plop the PCs down in a part they never went to much if at all.  Then my prep is minimal.  Consisting of do I reset the 'world in motion' or just continue with where it is.

Quote from: Sommerjon;736980Depends on the group.
If we are talking about the pool of players I would tap for a D&D game it would be:
Making the creatures
Detailing the map
Layering the 'world in motion'

However there's no way I could do that in 10 hours.
That's a minimum of 40 creatures I need to write up.. Even at a mere 5.5 minutes per creature that's 3.5 hours alone.
Minimum of 20 cities*, with at least 5 detailed npcs and 5 semi-detailed npcs.  Just the npcs will take me 6.5 hours.

I hit the 10 hour prep without detailing the cities, adding in any 'world in motion' items to the setting, drawing any maps, etc.

Or

I use an existing campaign and plop the PCs down in a part they never went to much if at all.  Then my prep is minimal.  Consisting of do I reset the 'world in motion' or just continue with where it is.

That is interesting.

Re creatures why are you writing them up? What are you doing there that adds value to them in play?

I can see that having a picture of a creature is useful. I don't play 3e or 4e so I don't have to pick from a menu of powers for my creatures. In my own games if I was playing D&D (2e is my zone, 1e is where I learnt the game) I would just say .. these creatures have 5hd, AC 3, 2 attacks 1d6+1/1d6+1, they suprise on a 1-3 (+1 sup in 2e parlance) they can leap upto 12 feet and will use this to attack on the first round.  I woudl just make that up on the spur of the moment. Similarly I might have 12 orcs and make 1 the captain and try to bring the rest to life (this is just an extension of my NPC point above).
I rarely play obscure monsters I either use the classic stuff or make it up on the fly about 25% classic (orcs, gnolls, goblins, dragons, giants, trolls , undead etc), 75% just thought of it flying jellyfish like monsters that use psionic attacks to level drain, or Silver skinned humanoids that can shape change at will.

What are you doing when you prep your monsters are you copying out stat blocks or are you doing stuff like generating random treasure and making sure that the monster uses anything relevant, assigning random personality traits? What sort of activity is happening here.

Maps - well I rarely bother. For a con game where I need to have some prep I will typically nick a chunk of a medieval city, edit it and print it out to give to each player. For most games meh.  There was a time when I did really fancy maps then I realised that only I was goign to be able to use them. Once I even had a Map of the Evil Mastermind's complex up on the wall in a james Bond game just so I could show my beautiful map to the players . I have a degree in geography and I used to teach geography in high school so I love a map as much, if not more than the next guy but I just don't find them very relevant in play. When I play I typically map out he space for the PCs as I go on the table. Currently I am using big A1 sheets of paper that all my stuff was packed in when we moved from the UK. That sits on the table I sketch out the room, geography, city whatever on the paper. I know geography pretty well so I can sketch you a realistic U shaped valley with terminal morraine, hanging valleys etc in about a minute.
I can see why a map is key to some sorts of games. If the party are based in a singel locale, or indeed if they travel back to a locale you want the geography to be consistent. Most of the time I find I need to be very consistent and detailed at the lowest level but the city is really made up of sectors and landmarks and I will sketch that out as they arrive at the city . River here, docks, poor quarter, markets, watch woters etc etc logic of he culture will inform the city structure so it kind of draws itself.
If I draw a dungeon I make it up as I go. I start by superimposing a base structure on the blank sheet. Temple complex NE, dungeon cells, SE, natureal caverns centre and Nother , below N caverns ancient city of the Vali (deserted) etc . Then as the pCs move into those areas I extrapolate them outand draw in rooms and stuff.
I don't do dungeons very often.
Now an exception to this is my Goblin Gauntlet games which are prepped and mapped. Different sort of game. The idea is for me to build a realistic goblin warren using technology and skill available to goblins but designed to kill all the players as quickly as possible. The players aim is to get as deep as they can before they are killed. I could ad lib these, to be honest my process is identical when I prep something in advance or if I do it on the fly. But part of it is a competition between DM and Players so writing it all down in advance seems to be the best way to keep it all above board.

NPCs , well I just make them up. Like I said uppost I used Jyhad cards in my epic Vampire game and I would be tempted to use magic cards for a D&D game. Not for inspirationa s much as for the really cool artwork.

Quote from: Adric;736762Here's an interesting question: Do you use different levels of prep for your online games than you do you in person games? How about the difference between play by post and more 'live' games like roll20, Google hangouts, or IRC?

Another thing I'm interested in is how many of you use online resources like obsidian portal and the like to not only store information but organize games?

While I have not personally. A friend of mine runs online RPG sessions and seems for them the prep time is a little longer for online as they have to prep maps at the very least for the online system they use.

I've sat in on and observed a Neverwinter game in progress and I have no clue how that was pulled off. The village and NPCs had to have been prepped before hand. The wilderness encounter I saw though not sure.

Quote from: Omega;737010While I have not personally. A friend of mine runs online RPG sessions and seems for them the prep time is a little longer for online as they have to prep maps at the very least for the online system they use.

I've sat in on and observed a Neverwinter game in progress and I have no clue how that was pulled off. The village and NPCs had to have been prepped before hand. The wilderness encounter I saw though not sure.

I tried running nwn games back in the day but was never able to pull it off. I would prep for hours and hours and hours and when i played i realised that the game would be better with an npc encounter here or whatever. I just hated the fact i was unable to improv.
The prep wasn't great either because i was looking to give as much flexibility as when i played. A city home to 10,000 people each building detailed with inhabitants patrols etecetc.  It just got to unmanageable i need about 12 developers to work on it for a year. That the flexibility i get from improv:-)

Jibbajibba, I envy your improvisation skills.  Speaking for myself, I can improvise adequate world details when needed, but they're almost never as interesting or well-thought-out or intriguing as stuff I've prepared; and, also, remembering all of the details I invent and making sure they're consistent between sessions can become troublesome.  In particular, the stranger and more fantastic the setting, the more difficult it is to think of good descriptions on the fly (conversely: the more generic/mundane the setting, the easier it is to improvise for me).

In reference to your market example, for instance: say I'm describing a market in Sigil, or the Star Wars universe, or Sharn.  I could describe the market based on my real world experiences or cobble together something on the fly based on my knowledge of the settings in question, but, speaking personally, if I spend a few minutes before the game thinking about the different races and creatures that might be in the market, some unusual items the might sell, perhaps some possible minor encounters in the market (swindlers, pickpockets, street performers), maybe consulting a few sourcebooks along the way, the gaming experience is going to be far richer.

Quote from: jibbajibbaSo where specifically do you spend the bulk of your prep time? What areas of the game do you think benefit most from good preparation? If say you had a 20 session game to plan out and you had 10 hours to prep it how would you spend that time (numbers picked deliberately due to ease of expression as %)?

As with Sommerjon I'd say it depends on the game in question.

For a city-based urban game I'd spend a lot of time (probably 5 hours, 50%) mapping and detailing individual districts, streets, and landmarks, and then make sure there are a few encounters planned so that the city doesn't feel like a stage set (1 hour, 10%), as well as some major NPCs (2 hours, 20%) and then sketch out a plot - or at least a few adventure seeds - using the remaining time (2 hours, 20%).

For a dungeon-based game I'd spend most of my time (80%, 8 hours) mapping and detailing the dungeon, using the prep time specifically to ensure that the layout is thoughtful and intricate, with interesting features like chutes and secret doors, unusual rooms, puzzles, monster patrol routes, strange new creatures, old creatures with a twist, etc.  I'd use the remaining 2 hours to deal with things like rival adventuring parties, nearby villages, and the local wilderness.

Quote from: jibbajibba;736988That is interesting.

Re creatures why are you writing them up? What are you doing there that adds value to them in play?

What are you doing when you prep your monsters are you copying out stat blocks or are you doing stuff like generating random treasure and making sure that the monster uses anything relevant, assigning random personality traits? What sort of activity is happening here.

I've found that D&D players are the worst metagamers out there. Of course noone here does that or plays with people who do  
I combat that by making my own creatures. Plus I have grown tired of 90% of the creatures in D&D.
However, yes I make the stat blocks, generate their items, define their combat philosophies, typical personality traits, etc.

Quote from: jibbajibba;736988Maps - well I rarely bother.

Maps to me is the big 'sandbox' map.  I have the master map that has more than geography and towns on it.  It also lists the 'world in motion' things
I also make maps for the players of the areas they grew up in
 

Quote from: jibbajibba;736988I don't do dungeons very often.

Same here.
 

Quote from: jibbajibba;736988NPCs , well I just make them up. Like I said uppost I used Jyhad cards in my epic Vampire game and I would be tempted to use magic cards for a D&D game. Not for inspirationa s much as for the really cool artwork.

I have too many NPCs to keep track of.


Opaopajr:  "If one spends lengthy amounts of campaign time you begin to spot greater layers of detail."
Steerpike:  "remembering all of the details I invent and making sure they're consistent between settings can become troublesome."

These are the other reasons.  I get my mental orgasms from the layers of detail that the players start to unravel.

Quote from: Sommerjon;737058I've found that D&D players are the worst metagamers out there. Of course noone here does that or plays with people who do  
I combat that by making my own creatures. Plus I have grown tired of 90% of the creatures in D&D.
However, yes I make the stat blocks, generate their items, define their combat philosophies, typical personality traits, etc.

How big is the stat block for a D&D monster on average? How many minutes would it take you to stat one up?

Quote from: Sommerjon;737058Maps to me is the big 'sandbox' map.  I have the master map that has more than geography and towns on it.  It also lists the 'world in motion' things
I also make maps for the players of the areas they grew up in

Maps are great! I'll start the game with a blank piece of paper and make the maps as we play. Noting down details as they are mentioned. As events change the world, the map gets revised and updated.

Quote from: Sommerjon;737058I have too many NPCs to keep track of.

I take notes as I play. NPCs start as a name, and maybe 2 or 3 words to describe them. as new traits come to light, I'll jot them down.

Quote from: Sommerjon;737058Opaopajr:  "If one spends lengthy amounts of campaign time you begin to spot greater layers of detail."
Steerpike:  "remembering all of the details I invent and making sure they're consistent between settings can become troublesome."

These are the other reasons.  I get my mental orgasms from the layers of detail that the players start to unravel.

I enjoy unraveling and discovering the layers and making connections with my players. I've found that things often resolve into sensible cohesiveness with surprising regularity. New details are organically layered on top of existing ones, creating an emergent world through play.

My style of play does demand more input from players beyond "I hit it with my sword", but that is more to do with my preference in playing, and not as much to do with improvisation.

Quote from: Adric;737128How big is the stat block for a D&D monster on average? How many minutes would it take you to stat one up?


 
Maps are great! I'll start the game with a blank piece of paper and make the maps as we play. Noting down details as they are mentioned. As events change the world, the map gets revised and updated.



I take notes as I play. NPCs start as a name, and maybe 2 or 3 words to describe them. as new traits come to light, I'll jot them down.



I enjoy unraveling and discovering the layers and making connections with my players. I've found that things often resolve into sensible cohesiveness with surprising regularity. New details are organically layered on top of existing ones, creating an emergent world through play.

My style of play does demand more input from players beyond "I hit it with my sword", but that is more to do with my preference in playing, and not as much to do with improvisation.

Agree with most of that.
with NPCs, well how may people do you know on a first name basis maybe 400something like that. When I was teaching I taught about 13 classes of 30 kids so about 400 extra people on top of all the people you actually know.  For each kid I needed to remember their name, their rough GPA, their hobbies, their family situation etc etc . .... Now if you can do that, and it's in no way exceptional, then tracking 30 NPCs that you actually thought up and created yourself so you have had genuine input into is relatively easy.