I watched Ginny Di’s video on DM Preparation this past week, or rather on over preparation. Then, I did just that. Or rather, I tried to do just that, but ended up doing just enough to calm myself down. And way more than was actually needed.
As a new DM, I still haven’t figured out how to determine how long something is going to take. I posit, that this is impossible. Just as your players will never follow a plan, or go the way you expect, I don’t feel like it’s possible to guess how far a session will get. I am baffled by people who run successful one-shots, or even my friends who run weekend marathons. How do you know they’ll finish? Or that you’ll have enough for the whole weekend? I’m sure the answer is experience that I just don’t have, yet. But sometimes it’s not, sometimes things will just not work out like even the most experienced DMs expect or plan for. One such marathon, we finished on Saturday, so the DM made up a magical transformation (Beauty and the Beast style) and our newly humanoid characters set off on a new quest for Sunday.
In my case, the party had gotten to the rest point of their travel, with some social interactions to start with, and then one big fight to finish their travel to the destination. I was concerned that they’d run through all this quickly and get into the city and skim through the social interactions there and head right for the big dungeon. So, I panicked for days and accomplished nothing.
Then, I dug in and made sure I had everything ready to finish the travel. Changed up the fight encounter several times to make it more interesting. Fleshed out the NPCs a little more and made sure there was some interesting items for sale in the traveling caravan. Then I turned to the city. I made sure I understood each of the encounters there, and added some details to each one. I needed to do OGAS on the NPCs, but my panic was the dungeon, and I just couldn’t focus. So, I skimmed through the dungeon, pulling out the monster stat blocks. Most of the dungeon looks like traps and puzzles, but I couldn’t even concentrate on most of those. I went back to the town, convinced I could run the fights if necessary at that point, and that the book would guide me through the puzzles. I added even more details and stat blocks, and NPCs to the town encounters. But I still did not flesh out the book’s NPCs. Eventually, I just had to stop, it was almost time for the game at that point.
As always, my group surprised me. They had some good roleplay around a campfire (not surprising). Then, they spent more than an hour shopping at the little caravan. I gave them too many good choices of things to buy, I guess, and they still have pretty limited funds. Good guys are always poorer in DnD. So, by the time they got to the fight for the session, it was already later than I expected. The fight went really well for me. I got some really good hits in, a couple characters played yo-yo, and no one died. I’m still trying to find a good balance, but I feel like it was a good fight. I do have to figure out how to have a good fight with slightly weaker monsters. I want them to be a threat, but it’s not my intention to “one-shot” every time (put a character down with one round of attacks from one monster). This was also the first time in a while that I rolled really well during a fight. Fortunately, the party is large and full of healing (as well as healing potions), so it worked out.
By the time they got done with this fight and the harvesting, and a little bit of RP, and then on to their destination, it was almost time to end. I brought them into the city, and gave them the setup for what happens next and then we called the session so as not to run super late with the next event. So, they got exactly where I wanted them to be. As if by magic.
All my panic for naught. Now, though, I really do have to OGAS the NPCs, and read through the dungeon properly for next week. This is where things start to get complicated.