No prep so no procrastination.


When I was doing the Murder mysteries back in the UK I would procrastinate like a bastard but the fact that you have a set date and 60 people who have paid and ten actors who want their parts means in the end you have to get it done.

The glories of D&D in a dungeon you drew 40 years ago....

(As Bugs Bunny would say, "Ain't I a stinker.")

I find GM prep a means to procrastinate from doing other stuff.

Quote from: The Butcher;801529It's been a few (three or four) months now since I last GMed. Ostensibly, I should be working on what I've promised my players: a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in the Amazon Jungle in the 1930s.

In practice, I've been procrastinating lke a little bitch.

Don't get me wrong. In the last few days I've been on my biggest research kick since my old Vampire: the Dark Ages campaign, 10-15 years ago. I've been looking through the geography, fauna and human populations of the Xingu River basin via several Brazilian government websites. I've digged out a copy of the 18th Century manuscript that first caught Percy Fawcett's attention. I've been brushing up on Infectious Diseases and consulted the AD&D 1e DMG for tips on how to handle them (weekly disease checks, ho), which means I'll probably lump them in a table with insect stings and infestations.

I've even drafted an outline: give PCs a bit of trouble as early as their meetup in Rio, and definitely in their last contact with civilization in Cuiabá, the last town at the edge of the jungle (a rough-and-tumble frontier place in the 1930s). After Cuiabá the game becomes a big ol' wilderness crawl powered by dangerous random encounters and disease/hazard checks (which have to be statted and slotted into table entries), with a generous serving of resource management, until (if) they find the Lost City, where it becomes a CoC-powered dungeon crawl.

The research and the ideas come easily enough. Setting pen to paper, though... work, study, social obligations, Christmas shopping, videogames, sometimes it seems RPG prep takes a backseat to everything.

I used to say to myself that it was because I didn't have a deadline, but scheduling unprepared sessions just led to me improvising, which I do well enough but lately I've been finding unsatisfactory. I want a bit more from my gaming.

I also thought, once, that procrastination meant my heart was no longer into the campaign I was running, and took that as a sign to switch games. And yet as I now crave a longer campaign, I realize that every good, long-lived campaign must have its highs and lows and I gotta stick to my guns and get my ass off the chair and kick the engine until it's running again.

Is it just me, or can anyone relate?

I don't know if this helps but I tend to be a research nut and that is often what leads to procrastination for me (I can get caught up researching the details of minor social customs and offices but lose a day of prep doing so). Now I give my self more permission to make stuff up as I go. My players don't seem to care or notice that I do and I get more done.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;801593I don't know if this helps but I tend to be a research nut and that is often what leads to procrastination for me (I can get caught up researching the details of minor social customs and offices but lose a day of prep doing so). Now I give my self more permission to make stuff up as I go. My players don't seem to care or notice that I do and I get more done.

Players perfer to be playing than hearing about how awesome the accuracy of your proto-celtic cuisine is going to be in the next game you run, that is a certainty.

By the time you have some experience under your belt you can just about ad lib anything. As play emerges little things crop us that you can use as strands.
So in my current game the PCs selected the Hornberg micro-settign I posted here. Great. Through play I have had some pilgrims turned up I decided they wore yellow robes. So now Pilgrims wear yellow robes (think mustard yellow monk's habits rather than safron yellowbudist robes) . One of the PCs has a great old one as a warlock patron... well I picked the King in Yellow just cos i like it.... so now in the old times when the Church of the flame was formed the priests took on the Yellow garb of the emperor's who had in turn taken it from the ancient king .... just like popes wearing purple. Not planned not structured and not mentioned to anyone so only I know but it just fits together liek a puzzle box and as we play more stuff will just slip into place like that so in six months the world we feel fully fleshed out through zero effort from myself.

Perhaps its's the story itself wanting to escape and bring parts of itself together, feeding breeding on itself....

I tried quoting everyone but that way madness lies.

Thanks for everyone who responded with advice and encouragement.

Lots of good advice, but some clarification regarding my modus operandi might be in order, regarding my usual prep.

Well, I don't usually do any of it. Most of my games are run with a vague idea of locations and events, maybe a couple of statted-up NPCs, and we go from there. [strike]Not too long[/strike] Two and a half years ago I posted a minor epiphany I had regarding improv vs. prep.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;801542I have had the GM Yips for a bit now. I just feel like the games I'm running recently just don't have the same charm. Not having player complaints, but something feels off to me.

That is exactly what I'm going through right now. I'm fairly skilled at improv, but as I move towards a more sandboxy approach, well, I have to have a frickin' sandbox location prepared (in this case, the Upper Xingu Basin with native inhabitants, settled communities and a Lost City) with inhabitants (native tribes, fauna, settlers/landowners, supernatural baddies) and a decent notion of how these things all interact.

I can make up all of this as they go along, but as a campaign grows longer, the inconsistencies start to pile up. Which is why I'm inclined to kill them off, leading to minor but chronic insatisfaction from both myself and my players (a couple of whom have voiced their frustration at the lack of long-term games).

In my recent OD&D dungeon-crawl, I didn't think of anything outside the dungeon other than the nearest small town the PCs would use as a base to rest and resupply; the two-day trip between the town and the dungeon was filled with random encounter checks. When they found something in the dungeon and decided to gift the local ruler with it I quickly had to make up the castle, where it was located, its denizens (the ruler and the people they'd interact with in their visit).

I pulled it off, no sweat, but if the campaign turned into a long-term affair, with PCs interacting regularly with the lord, I'd probably need to figure out lieges and vassals, neighbors, and other such things. I don't want to start the campaign with every nook and cranny fully mapped and fleshed out, but with at least enough notes to allow for better, more accurate and consistent improv.

Quote from: Omega;801541I am the opposite. I get everything prepped and then get too revved up to DM.

Send me your notes and I'll run your group through them via Skype. Problem solved for both of us.

I fear i may fall to procrastination tonight i am bulding a deity and am dreading working out its ability scores its going to be hard pushing myself into that part

Procrastination is a problem for me, too. I'll explain why later.

(I'm here all week, try the veal.)

As I'm only recently getting back into GMing, I'm trying very hard to only prepare things that will actually come up in play. I do love creating though. It's like there are two broadly overlapping hobbies -- one where you play RPGs and one where you think about them.

Quote from: tuypo1;801833I fear i may fall to procrastination tonight i am bulding a deity and am dreading working out its ability scores its going to be hard pushing myself into that part

i ended up making it an ascended human so i can just use human ability scores based on its character levels

im quite proud of the lore i made for it auctualy (although i still need to work out what sort of impact being born a hermafrodite would have had on its childhood)

Procrastination is the bane of everyone, especially Game Masters.

I grabbed Never Unprepared, the Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep when it was on 30% off sale last year. Great book about time management and how to prep. Rather than procrastinating on getting my Shaintar game going, I used the processes I learned in the book to get my mind going and setting ideas to digital paper to later print.  

Seems like you have a great feel for research, you just need to get everything down on paper. Real or Digital. I use Microsoft Word for most stuff. A lot of people rave about Microsoft One Note as a note taking software though for its search-ability. Such as Never Unprepared. Sounds like it might be a good program for you to have up to take notes as you research. Or go old school and grab a desk, paper, and pen and write down the information as you find it.

The hassle with getting lots of great research though is the necessity of organizing it all afterward.

These days I just go with current Players' Objective, obstacles to objective (traps, NPCs, etc.), maps/locations to be used, and work through things from there. Savage Worlds has made prep a lot easier on the NPC side of things because they aren't the mounds of information that Earthdawn or D&D 3.x stat blocks become at higher circles/levels.

But as an example, the current need for the group was to mine crysarium to create crysalites to power their arcfire equipment (stolen from the Builders). They fortunately found Phelos Smythe, a Builder who likes Camille, a female Dwarf in the group and they teamed up to mine in the Forges.

They needed to get a mining permit in Olara. So a resource obstacle that needs to be overcome by bribing assay office officials.

Then I set up five potential mines they might find. An abandoned mine, of neutral Olarans mining silver, a trapped mine, an enemy mine of the Malakar Dominion mining blood steeel, a potential enemy mine of Builders mining Crysarium. Then I assigned them card draws, one per each suit of cards with the abandoned mine being a second result of the same suit. So overall five potential mine encounters over the five day mining period. That done, I had enough material for the whole session if needed.

I selected some of the Shaintar statblock cards that would be appropriate, finding that I had most of what I needed stat-wise there.

I printed out some of DramaScape's DungeonScape Volume One tiles. 6 x6 cardstock tiles that I can reconfigure them to the mine used if there is combat. We have Plexiglas that can go over top to smooth the tiles as well and make sure the surface is flat for minis.

The longest part of the prep was making the tiles, I'd say probably 2-3 hours for a session that lasted 3-4 hours. Which is a good prep time to session ratio. If you are investing more hours than the session will actually be its a lot of time being used for prep. Of course, I was helped here timewise by my already printed Shaintar statblock cards being appropriate for what I envisioned.

Quote from: Majus;801839As I'm only recently getting back into GMing, I'm trying very hard to only prepare things that will actually come up in play. I do love creating though. It's like there are two broadly overlapping hobbies -- one where you play RPGs and one where you think about them.

There's absolutely 100% nothing wrong with that at all.

The trick (I find) is to have a place to capture all those neat ideas for later use. If you're prepping "this week's game", and have an awesome idea that doesn't fit, just jot it down on a notecard, or a journal, your phone, whatever works for you. Then over time you end up with this neat little repository of 'awesome ideas!'.

Inevitably at some point you'll find yourself stumped when prepping for another session, and can come back to the Awesome Ideas list.

All that being said, I -highly- recommend setting up just one place to record the ideas. Or at least get into the habit of transcribing your neat ideas into one place every so often. You don't want to have to be sorting through 50 post-its, notes on your phone, and scraps of napkin to find one cool thought.

Mind you, some of my very best game sessions have happened when I had 5 minutes left to think something up.