How much prep is too much prep? I find I can read the same notes or prepare for anything in a scenario over and over without much really changing. How do you deal with prepping so much that most of it doesn’t affect the game?

>>95909572 (OP)
the only notes I write down are mechanical, like npc stats
everything else is loose brainstormed memory that is partially improvised at the table

>>95909572 (OP)
>How do you deal with prepping so much that most of it doesn’t affect the game?
What's there to deal with? I've prepared material and it doesn't see use. That's fine. Would the game be better if I had spent that time watching a movie instead?

>>95909572 (OP)
>How much prep is too much prep?

In your case it sounds like you're asking the wrong question. Perhaps you should be asking yourself: "What kinds of prep would be most beneficial to my game / campaign?" Part of the answer to that will involve knowing what your players enjoy most, and then figuring out what kinds of prep will be helpful to enhancing their enjoyment as well as your own. Doing tons of wrote 'generic stat block #2,378' cookie-cutter mook when your players want memorable opponents will only leave you worn out and frustrated. I generally take a lot of notes during or just after the game to remind myself of any events or encounters that the PCs deemed important so that I can keep names, locations, dates, etc, straight. I've seen one GM who had a superb memory and often had little more than a 'cocktail-napkin' sketch of a plot / adventure outline and let the players fill it in with a combination of their own intuition and his wicked plot-twists.

>>95909599
>Would the game be better if I had spent that time watching a movie instead?
fully and completely without irony: yes

Graphical battlemaps are the single biggest GM noob trap
>placing ugly jpegs on a roll20 board to pre-arrange your scenery
>curating a collection of artisanal premade battlemaps (that you will never be able to kludge into your campaign)
>scrambling to come up with content when your party decides "nah, let's not go to the spooky graveyard"
all these things are a huge waste of time and energy

>>95911075
>placing ugly jpegs on a roll20 board to pre-arrange your scenery
>curating a collection of artisanal premade battlemaps (that you will never be able to kludge into your campaign)
>scrambling to come up with content when your party decides "nah, let's not go to the spooky graveyard"
That's literally me when I started GMing! Horrible times.

>>95911075
>Not making generic maps for your world
>Utilizing generic maps when the players go off the rails
>Almost always prepared for any scenario
>Theater of Mind when absolutely unprepared
NGMI

Just focus on end of campaign and how to steer your players towards it. I usually prep by giving players option A as main and then give them illusion of choice B and C with effective railroading tools, NPCs and events to bring them back on the quest. My goal is for them to look as organic as possible and not just
>hah, it turns out that if you go this way, a dragon will attack you
The rest is improv

>>95909572 (OP)
There is not too much prep. Maps are cool, having your plot figured out and written down is good, you usually know your players so you know if they go for your plothook or if they might need multiple plot hooks or they just start doing anything other than main plot(lich and gay marriages greentext comes to mind).
Having everything prepared before time is good, just have mindset that your prep work is not set in stone and you might to be flexible, change stuff as you go, but it's easier to change stuff you alredy have than to make everything up on the fly and then to try to remember what have happened. There is never too much prep, just you must be not turbo autistic about it, it's interactive game with multiple people not your own book, you might need to make some adjustment during game.

>>95909572 (OP)
is that a good ME RPG?

>>95911512
Telling by the font and format, no. Someone probably hammered Mass Effect to mush so it'd fit in the D&D 5e mold.

>>95911522
what a shame.

Regarding prepping I think it's important to not overdo it, which means you need to know your players (what they want and intend to do) and know the scenario your game is in.

Some games are more structured than others in terms of encounters, shifts/watches, timekeeping, events occurring outside player view and so on so that could also be a help to you if you're playing those games. It can also be a bit overbearing though so beware.

So having an overarching idea for what the game is about and the major plot points that isn't too detailed to allow the players to interact with something while keeping to flexible enough to respond to player actions.

Doesn't hurt to be clear with how it works when you prepare things between sessions. I think there's a surprising amount of players that don't understand that there is a workload between sitting down to play and for that reason it can be good to explain that you can prepare X amount of content and if the players don't follow up on this you're improvising and the quality may vary. Also I wouldn't be afraid of nothing happening if the players for example run into the wilderness or stay at a farm instead of picking up on plot hooks. They run around the forest wasting time, it's a normal forest nothing in particular happens (unless random encounters) unless they have some idea.

It's pretty much adapt or die. You under prep? Learn to improvise or you'll be an abysmal gm. Over prep? Learn how to better manage your time, effort and prepared content or you'll burn out.
I'm in the former category and I basically took some months toying with solo GMing tools, which now greatly helped me improvise and come up with plots with only a few words, or a sentence. I did of course learn to prep more than nothing.
Shame all my players are all of the "can't do shit unless it has a quest marker kind"

>>95911420
>Just focus on end of campaign and how to steer your players towards it. I usually prep by giving players option A as main and then give them illusion of choice B and C with effective railroading tools, NPCs and events to bring them back on the quest.
that is horrible

>>95911018
Elaborate

>>95911018
Spending time on one activity that ends up being unrelated to the game versus spending time on a different activity that ends up being unrelated to the game doesn't sound like a huge delta.

>>95911075
>>95911242
>>95911299
>have literally 40gb of maps and tokens
>have used maybe 0.05% of them
The older I get the more I feel like a generic battlemap you can use on the fly is best. Having detailed maps makes things feel much more railroaded.

>>95913316
>>95913365
collecting influences from media is extremely useful for people who need to write and improv. if you don't collect new influences your work will become incestuous.
and
it's important to look away from your campaign to prevent burnout. the energy you have for any single campaign is finite and should be invested at the table instead of during the masturbatory process of preparation.

>>95909572 (OP)
>I find I can read the same notes or prepare for anything in a scenario over and over
Reading over and over isn't prep.

Contingency planning is prep. Consider all the clever/retarded/oddball/etc things your players might do, how the world will respond to that, how you'll handle it mechanically. They'll do something else but the thought exercise will leave you better prepared to improvise something.

>>95913115
Yes, it is horrible, little player. You should do something about that (which unbeknownst to you will lead you to option A) because you (believe that) you have agency.

>>95913365
Spending time on one activity that ends up being unrelated to the game but is actually relaxing is a big delta compared to spending time on one activity that ends up being unrelated to the game but takes effort with no benefit

>>95919911
I find session planning more relaxing than watching most movies.

>>95913371
This is why I ended up going to zonal combat with index cards. The five foot step doesn't matter 99% of the time and I can throw out an interesting battlespace in seconds now, not hours.

>>95911075
>Graphical battlemaps are the single biggest GM noob trap
The worst campaigns I've ever ran were the ones where I spent more time agonizing over finding "the perfect map" than looking forward to roleplaying Slappy Schmidt, owner of the Slop Shop. The only maps you should ever put time into looking for are,
>Overland maps, such as the campaign region or city
>Boss maps, when you have an entire week to prep and can afford the time to get a little fancy.
Maps for bog-standard skirmishes or, god forbid, *roleplaying* are utter wastes of time. Actually, they're worse than wastes of time, because the variety of maps you can find is endless and will swiftly trap you in obsessing over "which works better for this scene" which leaves you panicking on Game Day because you realize you haven't actually found a satisfying voice for every NPC involved.

You're not writing a book. You're not writing a play. You're writing the set-up for your friends to join in and start the daisy chain of conversation that can lead to four hours of fun and laughter. Any drama that happens in the campaign should come from careful prep of understanding the "core values" of your campaign, not making sure the map of That Tavern is exactly to-scale. God, if I could go back in time and throttle Young Me! So many promising premises lost to the mire of minutia. Take it from me, readers, do not seek out battlemaps!

>>95919577
Guarantee you're not as clever as you think and the players in fact do see your very obvious railroad. They're just too kind or aren't invested enough to care.

>>95920405
Don't feed the troll. You're right, but he knows that.
>>95920396
True and based.

>>95920396
To add to this, when I moved away from using battlemaps, I found that my players ended up more engaged and creative in combat. Bereft of a graphical representation of what was present in their immediate surroundings, they would ask me questions--questions that wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise. They come up with more ways of interacting with the environment because they're imagining it, rather than quickly glancing it over while they decide where to move next.

>>95920396
>>95920521
Battlemaps outside of select "setpieces" (boss fights, etc, major shit you know is going to happen in advance) are extremely limiting. It's not a video game, it's an imagination game. Think of those old text adventures and similar.

Now I do think visuals like scene handouts and overworld maps are essential, but detailed battlemaps are a massive time sink with minimal returns 95% of the time.

>>95920756
To add it's basically spending hours or days on a map your players might spend 30 minutes on or miss entirely. Like spending 20 hours modding a Bethesda game only to play it for an hour and get bored and quit.

>>95920756
>>95920756
The only time I’ve ever found skirmish battlemaps useful was when I chanced on the perfect map for the scenario I presented. Like, I’m not discounting a good battlemap but the moment you’re “hunting” for one it’s too much effort.

>>95920829
It's even worse if you try to make your own. OCD will cripple you.

>>95911075
I'm too far gone with these. I love these kinds of maps even though I know they're a creative lodestone around the neck. I genuinely find inspiration from looking at maps (as well as landscape and character art).

>>95921133
If you use them as personal references to help you describe and imagine the area, I mean, it's not a bad idea.
I use TTS due to online play, and I found a tool for automatically building saved maps. I just saved a few to have a collection of generic battlefields (city street, warehouse, ship interior, field), and just tweak it at the moment, adding or removing cover and points of interest as needed. I even give my players the option to place a couple items each. Whole process takes a couple of minutes, and since it's not a videogame, repetitiveness isn't a thing

>>95909572 (OP)
>How much prep is too much prep?
When you're no longer having fun with it.
> find I can read the same notes or prepare for anything in a scenario over and over without much really changing.
Correct. You don't need to do massive amounts of prep and the amount of prep you do plateaus in its contribution to the game very quickly.
>How do you deal with prepping so much that most of it doesn’t affect the game?
I only prep when doing so is fun. Playing the thing I prepped isn't the goal. Do the thing you're doing. The prepping is a goal. The GMing is a different goal. Like both of them. Or don't do the one you don't like. You can just worldbuild if it's fun. You can run without prepping a damn thing, if it isn't.

>>95920396
>Take it from me
I use Inkarnate. Takes 15 minutes to make a decent battlemap ready for TTS. I've been running games for many decades and gotta say, since getting old enough that the notion of five people gathering in person on a regular basis seems less plausible than personally flying to the moon? TTS is awesome, battlemaps bring the game to life, and we're having as much or more fun than we ever did.

>>95920353
>zonal combat with index cards
Sounds neat, how do you do it exactly?

>>95921550
>since getting old enough that the notion of five people gathering in person on a regular basis seems less plausible
That's weird, I started having more frequent in-person games after I hit my mid-thirties.

>>95922131
https://www.reddit.com/r/NSRRPG/comments/xr3oe1/a_complete_guide_for_zone_based_index_card_combat/

https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html#zonebasedcombat

Here's a couple of straightforward guides. I use 10m zones as a baseline, because that's convenient for the system.
Basically it's battlemaps but no drawing and big "mushy" 10m "squares."

>>95922246
I think you might have a minority experience there, anon. Careers and kids make the idea of fucking off for six hours something that is rather hard to do, for most of us.

>>95922316
>Careers
That's actually part of what's made it more consistent, though. People no longer work weird hours, instead having a solid 9-to-5 that leaves the weekends free. Scheduling-wise, it's not really that different from a dinner party, especially if you have a guest room or two that you can put people up in--that lets you run until midnight or later without issue.

>>95922344
I'm not accusing you of lying, anon. I'm just saying "good for you if that's true for you. It's not for most of us."

>>95922344
>People no longer work weird hours
Where do you live that this is true?

>>95911075
The more time has passed the more I'm inclined to agree. I used to spend hours trying to find the perfect map for a scenario or writing a scenario around a cool map I'd found. Some of the best adventures I've run used a cool map I'd seen as inspiration, but I think the ones remembered most fondly by my players were the ones where I didn't stress about the map so much or where the map was just something I tossed in to frame the area. Generic battlemaps with terrain and tokens tossed up on the fly have served me well and reduced prep time by countless hours.
My current biggest hurdle in DMing is the creation of a massive subterranean dungeon dive I had promised ages ago as an epilogue to our longest running campaign that came to a close. I wanted to run something classic and do it all myself from scratch and people were excited by the idea of a big sprawling dungeon map, but it's so much harder to pull something like that together than I gave it credit for. I have a handful of cool ideas for things to include in it, but I find myself worrying about how to "fill it out" inbetween the points of high interest.

The best advice is to just stop worrying. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

>>95923429
>but I find myself worrying about how to "fill it out" inbetween the points of high interest.
This is a mental trap you need to break, because session prep is secretly a fractal that endlessly expands the more you dig into it. I've once caught myself genuinely asking, "what should I put on the menu of this tavern?" Because you can always find something about the map or the moment to expand upon.

>>95922591
In the six-digit income bracket.

>>95923655
Yeah, I've gotten better at that over time, but I over-promised on this particular venture because I wanted it to be a big ol' deal for the completion of a multi-year campaign that actually managed to cross the finish line. It was originally going to be a 13-floor mega dungeon, but I've since scaled back the concept to keep it focused on more of the cool ideas and reduce the chaff.
I'd like to get the whole dungeon mapped out before actually bringing it to table, but it's definitely most upfront work I've given myself for a game and it flies in the face of some of the lessons I've learned as a DM over the years, but the initial concept of a totally set-in-stone dungeon for the players to explore was too appealing to me.

>>95923966
And you're on this cesspit? I hope you're lying because of not that's really sad.

>>95909572 (OP)
Vague idea of where I am aiming my players, maybe some stats for impotant things or a map if the place is a big deal, let the chaos happen. Nothing else is required but also my players aren't cunts so that probably helps a lot.

>>95926698
Sometimes life be that way.
Some people scroll Facebook, or Xitter, or Tik Tok, or whatever the fuck else for hours and consume vast quantities of meaningless content that they probably won't even remember an hour later. Even moderately successful people aren't immune to this.
4chan at least offers reciprocal engagement about my niche hobbies and surprisingly illuminating discussion at times. You can find it in the oddest places at that. You can be discussing tiddy proportions of some strange alien species on /tg/ one minute and then have a deep philosophical debate about the nature of human connection in a thread on /a/ the next. Just because you haven't gotten much out of your time here doesn't mean others haven't. We can't leave for a reason.

>>95926698
Unironically a better place for conversation than most forms of social media. I've been posting here since I was an undergrad in college. It's a habit I never felt a need to break, especially given some of the absurd social media meltdowns I've heard about.

>>95926698
NTA, but I am the CEO of a multimillion dollar startup, and I'm on /tg/ every damn day.