How much time?

[Nightshade]

After reading many of the threads on these forums, I began to wonder. How much time do people spend creating their campaigns? I don't (just) mean the prep time for the game. I mean the actual world (universe) creation for the game.

I like large, multi-empire games with a lot of detail. My fantasy game, for example, is almost 147 pages of just text, plus maps and other relevant artwork. Each of my over 60 empires has a write-up of between 5 and 15 pages of text. I am not even close to half-way through all of them. I have ideas for most of my empires, enough to run a game involving a character from that realm, but not enough to run a game in that area. It is my intention to make every empire in my game interesting and detailed enough to run an entire campaign in.

Needless to say, I have spent literally hundreds of hours working on my fantasy world. Every empire takes between 2 and 3 hours to create (I am using Aria Worlds for some of it, which helps) and type up, excluding mapping and any characters I want to generate.

How about you guys? Any thoughts?

Nightshade

[Blue]

Results may vary!

My champions campaign is the result of years of thinking about things, not so much mapping out the world, but getting ideas and knitting them together only tangentially because I'll always think of how these things fit together at a later time.

My fantasy hero campaign (long deceased) was very off-the-cuff. There was practically no prep, my world was drawn by hand on the spot, the items and foes were straight out of the book, and the adventures were often influenced by movies, tv, and whatever my favorite cassette was at the time (I had yet to buy a CD player).

My original champions campaign was constant prep work on the characters and nothing else. I drew no maps, made no worlds, changed nothing from what a conventional heroic world was. I simply made characters... round the clock. I had 1st ed champions memorized inside and out and could make whole characters in class (which explains my grades for Freshman and Sophmore years until my players moved away).

[Nightshade]

You know, you bring up a good point. It probably depends quite a bit on genre.

My Champions game will very likely need a lot less time and effort than my fantasy game does, mostly due to scope and the standards of the genre. For that game, I pretty much only have to detail a single city (although a lot of detail, to make it internally consistent). Then it is just a matter of setting the system dynamics (how many active points and defenses, etc.) and away we go.

Additionally, since my game is basically on Earth (though in a fictitious city), I don't need to come up with all of the races for the game. That does tend to cut down on the time.

Nightshade

[JohnOSpencer]

I think mine up on the fly. Everytime someone ask a question I pull an answer out of my butt and remember it. It all sort of builds up and once in a while I'll write down notes and fix any problems and infrom the players of the change.

John Spencer

[Mark Taylor]

I improvise a lot, good improvisation combined with a good memory (you need to remember the details you made up on the spot!) can get you a long way. The lion's share of the prep work I will do for any campaign will be before the campaign actually starts, once it's off and running I prefer to fly by the seat of my pants.

The amount of pre-campaign prep work depends very much on the world - if it's a reasonably detailed published world I don't need to do much, just set up the motivations and interactions of the imporant individuals and groups involved, because that will set the scene for the large scale plot. If it's a world I've made myself from scratch, I might do a LOT of work, everything from mapping to making up histories, building empires, making characters and character templates etc. etc. because even though my GM style is basically improvisational, I do like to work with a world which has a decent level of detail in it to begin with. It will always seem more 'real' to the players if they can look at maps, read some handouts etc. and of course it lightens the load of constantly improvising once the game has begun.

[Fitz]

I once tended to do a lot of pointless campaign background work -- pointless because by the time I'd spent all that time on it, I was bored with the concepts and so then I just made stuff up on the spur of the moment anyway.

These days I mostly make stuff up as I go along and pray that I don't lose the notes I make to remind me just what the hell's going on :)

[Farkling]

If any of my players are reading, keep in mind the way I take notes and appear to not listen to Danny or Jason when they are explaining what THEY see happening....

I improvise a lot. I have a short outline of plots in motion by the various background agencies, and I keep note of what various organizations "find out" during the course of adventures. I learned from Mage to not to plan anything. My players deviated from any story or plotline I made, so I have a collection of "crux points" that may or may not have influence by the characters. I update the "crus list" once a month from my notes, less now if we move to two games a month.

However...the Superspies/MetaAgents game I am ref'ing at the moment requires more work to lay out the plots. Not so bad as mage, but I need the "scenes behind the scenes" laid out. Plot lines meshing at crux points. :)

[Nightshade]

It looks to me that there are actually two different forms of preparation. The first is preparing the setting in general, the second is preparing the plot or story for the PC's in the setting.

I was actually only asking about the former - worldbuilding. However, I think that the response has been very interesting. I would have thought that the more time one has spent on the setting, the less time would be needed on plot, as some of the features of the plot are already there. That has certainly been my experience, which is why I have spent so much time on my worlds. However, reading through what people have said, there seems to be no correlation.

I guess here is another question:

Do you use published settings, modify published settings, or create your own settings from scratch? That would certainly affect how much time is needed to run a game.

Nightshade

[tkdguy]

Lately, I've been doing a lot of science on my world building, at least in the astrophysics and geology sections. Or at least touch upon them. That gives me a realistic base to work with.

I also use different sourcebooks from various settings to detail my cultures (having a sister who's an anthropologist also helps). Then I try to show why each culture is unique.

Pros: Very detailed, consistent world. Cons: Time consuming and sometimes frustrating.

[Talon]

Hundreds of hours for fantasy, I tend to get obsessed. (My current campaign world started by thinking about a map, which turned into a 500x500 mile detailed contour map, in CorelDRAW, by hand. Yay.)

I've tended to spend less on supers campaigns, but I think that's because I was running lighter, more combat-heavy games. If I went to do a serious one now I'd probably put a lot of time into it. But at least I wouldn't have to do a map!

[Killer Shrike]

I tend to put a lot of time in on the setting, even if prepublished.

Then I come up with interesting NPCs and organizations (or incorporate published ones), and fit them into the setting. In this context "organizations" can include companies, superteams, fantasy kingdoms, whatever is appropriate to the setting & genre, and at all scales.

Then I come up with 2-5 action concepts or threade regarding things that are currently going on and detail them backwards, fitting them into the setting.

Then I go into "sim" mode, and basically posit if X, Y, and Z were happening (the action threads), what effect would it have on the NPCs and organizations. I write down all my thoughts on who's doing what to whom in pursuit of the action threads, splicing in tangents and counter-spins as they occur to me. If its particularly complex, Ill draw out a line & block "relationship" diagram, WW style to help me keep it all straight at a glance.

Once Ive got the back story in place, I write a very brief startup encounter detailing how to get the PCs involved, trying to hook each of them via their background, and then run it. After that for a given session I just need to react to what the players are doing and write up enough text to advance the action threads based upon events that occur in play or to introduce some new concept or spin Ive come up with.


When this works its a lot of fun. Its fatal weakness however is reactive players. It totally fails if the players are all reactive, and fares badly if most of the players are reactive. Reactive players sit around waiting for a Mr Johnson or the fantasy equivalent (the guy in the tavern with the adventure hook) to tell them what to do, and then just do it, or simply react when attacked. Very frustrating for all concerned.

In the past my groups were composed of very active players that were going off the hook most of the time, and my GMing style was shaped by this, but my current crop of players tend to be much more linear and reactive. So, lately, Ive just taken to giving them lots of closed scenarios with a lot of combat in a superheroic campaign. Frustrating for me, but they seem to enjoy it.

It remains to be seen what will happen when I switch back to Fantasy sometime this fall, as that is where my machiavellian multi-angle plots are most often seen.....

[Farkling]

I cannot run a game without Machiavellian plots. It's inherent in my world design and very very difficult for me to suppress.

So, my Supers tend towards Heroes against the world at the beginning, with them having the ability to change the world AND public opinion. Setting? It's on the news and outside my door. The MetaAgents are off to investigate the source of the power blackout back east, and have sent an NPC to check out the gas shortages in Arizona. The co-ordinator is interested in the company that owns the pipeline. His Psych limits have him convinced it's a terrorist plot. :)

The heroes game is in full comic book mode, and the setting is part cyberpunk/Blade Runer, part post present America. they have not yet settled on an actual plotline or interest to follow, so I have a few more 'disposable' encounters to run as things start to happen around them.

What do you actually mean by setting? If you mean the nuts and bolts of the sets and places, well, neither I nor the gaming group are too particular about bona-fide maps/layouts. There last GM was way too oriented towards 'complete and accurate' ... soft style sketched on a battlemat is working just fine. The only games I have ever made maps for were Gamma World and a few Fantasy Cities. I'm away from that I guess. Modern games gives a lot of familiarity with the setting, so maps are less necessary.

If you mean the poeple and places and organizations that the GM needs, let's see....6 hours work time for a new one and integrating it into the back story. 2 hours per major organization during creation. If I need something fleshed out that isn't anything but outline, ...maybe another hour to do that and lay out combat tactics and control sheets if necessary. Big battles are planned. Confrontations can be pulled off without even full stats, just outline notes of "stronger than Cory, faster flier than the witch, manipulates kinetics"