It’s been a month since I’ve had to D&D prep so I spent a good part of my Sunday doing that today while letting season 1 of Fantasy High play in the background. I get caught up going down rabbit holes of potential plot hooks and cool maps that don’t even work for the campaign I’m running. I’m saving stuff for later on Pinterest boards and in my Notion.
We were going to a new area of the map for our session tonight so I had to spend a little more time fleshing out that area and figure out what’s going on as the party enters a new chapter of the campaign. As well as making sure I had some random encounters in case folks rolled low on their daily encounter checks at sea.
It’s all very good DM practice. And good improv practice. I definitely didn’t have prepared a halfling peddler who upcharged on worthless items out of desperation. But now my party has a halfling cloak and some raggedy orange half-giant long johns, so there you go.
It’s fun to put pieces in a world and then watch players interact with them — often in ways I didn’t expect.
I wish I could spend more time doing this, less time doing . . . a lot of other stuff. But I’ll take what I can get. It’s been a full year of DM’ing at this point. My first session DM’ing for this current campaign happened on January 8th last year — so almost a full year exactly. I had done two sessions for a haunted house oneshot to practice the week before that. So I believe 27 sessions in total? Probably around 55-60 hours all in and a lot more than that on prep.
Hopefully, I’ll continue to learn and improve in 2024.
With Love,
Natalie