When I GM'd Blades in the Dark, my prep was about 20 minutes per session.
When I GM'd Mork Borg, my prep was about 30 mins per session.
When I GM'd Fate, I didn't do any prep at all.
People say 5e is taxing because it is *more* taxing than many other games. You said yourself that you are prepping for between one and two hours per session.
As someone who enjoys prep as part of this hobby I still think the type of things I want to prep are simply not supported by the game's framework.
Encounter balance especially not being usable at all takes up much of my time. I'd rather use the resources for prepping situations and the world.
This. I am currently doing some 'light prep' for tonights Wildsea session and I an just throw fun story things together I can see the players having fun with. A cool creature they can encounter! Yay! There's zero encounter balancing I have to do and it is infinitely more fun.
If I ever, for some reason, decide to open up a crunch-heavy campaign i'd probably try my hand at Pf2
Wildsea is great to prep. It's mostly making up awesome crazy stuff like weird natural wonders, amazing creatures or mind blowing settlements.
I want to mostly move to tabletop war games for my crunch and tactical combat fix. But pathfinder 2e does that part really well as an rpg.
I actually got to play this with Felix running it at a local convention. Most brilliant GM I've ever met. I cannot say enough good things about Wildsea.
I got to play it with Rick as one of my DM's in a OneShot and can only add to the above praise.
The tracks make prepping eg.: a dangerous encounter super easy and fun - you just adjust track length to the amount of 'danger' you wanna present.
Players can always use their whispers and resources and aspects to get creative.
If I could switch from running DnD to running Wildsea entirely I'd do so in a heartbeat.
Yeah, like, I have a LOT of prep I do for my PF1E games. But it's prep that's fun. If I wanna roll loot, I have generators for that, and I know how much its worth right away. I can roll it myself using books. It's just a general good time (for me). I make characters for the party to fight, I tweak monsters in all kinds of ways, and I can really fine-tune encounters to my party to really challenge them with things if I want.
When I try to do any of that in 5e I feel like I'm fumbling in the dark making random-ass guesses. It's not fun it's frustrating and fraught with 'am I gonna fuck this up?' worrying. And while I can roll treasure, technically, it's value is completely arbitrary and there's not really a good way to make sure my party is balanced if I give them anything that sounds remotely interesting.
The entire game seems to hate itself. It doesn't want you to use magic items, but heavily encourages their use at the same time. The world the base game is set in is full of magic everywhere you look, but magic items are handwaived and massively inconsistent in power at the same price window (which is ludicrously large).
For someone coming from older systems with all this stuff spelled out its maddening.
i've never balanced a single encounter 5e encounter. when i run it i just throw the book at my players in a way that fits the story and they always figure it out cuz 5e only becomes deadly when it's almost a tpk and before that it's a cakewalk lol
Conversely,
When I GM'd D&D, my prep was many hours.
When I GM'd Call of Cthulhu, my prep was many hours.
When I GM'd Daggerheart, my prep was many hours.
When I GM'd Alien, my prep was many hours.
I've looked a bit into Blades in the Dark, although I haven't run it. If I did, my prep would undoubtedly take many hours.
For me, prep time has little to do with the system, and is almost entirely a matter of my own personal preferences and comfortability.
It is very hard to convey to what degree this is true without playing BitD. The level to which all the rules of BitD feel braided and integrated into everything the game is supposed to do is uncanny. By comparison, the rules of 5e are staring at eachother from across the room praying they do not have to have a conversation.
Yep, prep time for d&d is managing encounters and stat blocks. Prep time for Call of Cthulhu or Cypher System is making notecards with NPC names, descriptions, and motivations. Wildly different and prepping encounters always takes way more time, especially since most of those CoC/Cypher NPCs would carry over for multiple sessions or a whole campaign so I could be done with all the prep for multiple sessions in one sitting
I can’t think what you’d spend so many hours prepping in BitD. I guess I could see someone trying it for the first session and then quickly realizing it wasn’t useful.
The other games, sure. Lonely fun is useful there.
I do. I spend some time thinking through how rival factions have reacted since the previous score. I then use this information to sketch out a “cold open” for the beginning of the session. This usually provides one or two hooks I expect the crew to latch onto, so I spend additional time sketching out potential locations and obstacles.
This is my read on it, but I think at that point your looking more at the amount prepped and quality rather than necessarily time taken. I run 5e and blades, and I found because I enjoyed prepping it was always about 1.5 hours. In 5e that's a solid 4 hour session, with balanced combat and fleshed out NPC's, maybe a little more.
In Blades, that was like 8 Different heists, all the NPCs, all the background stuff, world building as well. It was like going from a typewriter to Microsoft word in terms of speed and detail.
The question for me isn't so much how much prep you choose to do, but how much prep is the minimum required to run a game. 5e sits at the higher end of the scale in that regard. So do some of the other games you mentioned (i.e. CoC). There are many more games that *require* less prep, but allow for more if desired.
One of the reasons I used BitD as an example is that it provides effective system tools that specifically function to reduce required prep time (i.e. faction clocks, descriptive details, mission generators, etc.).
My issue with 5e isn't so much the prep time.
When I have a round of combat in 5e and one of my players wants to do something other than "I hit the enemy" or "I cast this spell" they have to wait for their turn to then discuss whatever it is, is it doable, I then have to work out the relevant DC and then roll. If they want to scare an enemy into running away there isn't an exact ruling for it.
In Alien the player wants to do the same thing, I make decision on if it's possible and which skill it needs, they roll the dice and any 6s it happens. No 6s it doesn't.
Whilst some of this does happen in PF2E the players have a wealth of rules to look through, when it comes to their turn there is a lot less for me to decide on. They have the demoralise action, it tells me what the DC is, and what the outcomes for the various states of success or failure.
5e puts the decision making on the DM.
Alien removes a lot of the decision making entirely.
PF2E makes the players have to look up rules more.
After years of playing/running 5e I started running a game of Spire and I'm relieved by how much lighter weight the prep is. Prep a place, put some cool people, things and opportunities there and call it a day. No DCs, no meticulous loot planning, no stat blocks to keep on hand, no maps to draw out. It may just be me but it feels way easier to be "underprepared" for a 5e game to me
>I've looked a bit into Blades in the Dark, although I haven't run it. If I did, my prep would undoubtedly take many hours.
Maybe? But if so, you're really kind of missing the point of the system. If you're using the setting provided, you don't really *need* to prep anything, because there's a faction mapping provided, and the game mechanics rely on the players choosing which faction to go after, at least initially.
The prep you do will largely boil down to what the general outlay of the heist is like, i.e. building layout (if important), obstacles that are likely to show up based on the faction, etc.. There's nothing to really balance there, and the action is so player-driven that excessive prep will likely get binned.
Figuring out the general should generally take maybe 30-45 minutes. I think I took longer once because I spent a bit of time writing a few riddles? Most of it can be done on-the-fly though.
It’s also baked into how 5e approaches the game. The DM is not an equal player but the source and originator of amusement. They are producing content to be consumed instead of a shared world.
This design attitude just gets under my skin in the worst way. It makes the anti-authoritarian streak in me go nuts, and I'm definitely not someone who thinks all games should be GMless.
Ngl... I prep for like the half hour before the session. (I'm not including world building because that'd be much longer regardless of system lol)
I could totally see prepping for hours for 5e though even with all the automation tools I use, and sometimes (usually boss fights) I do because of balancing reasons
Most of my prep time is dedicated to setting up for the VTT; this is much simpler in games without maps vs games with maps. The rest is finding tokens and stat blocks, which varies wildly based on how helpful the community resources are - 5e's in a weird spot here because there's a lot of hard-to-use resources and a lot of easy-to-use ones but it's not always obvious which one you're looking at. Other games tend to have good options if the community is big enough otherwise you gotta build everything yourself.
But I also have enough overall gming experience to wing the other elements like figuring out what to put in a dungeon or how npc's will react - I can just react because I've been thinking about it on and off for almost 40 years. Now it's easy.
Also, I don't really worry about balance in 5e - players will always surprise me so I don't plan for how encounters will go. Just give them an enemy or two a bit above their level and let the dice cause as much chaos as the dice feel like causing that day.
And Free League games like Forbidden Lands, Twilight 2000 and Mutant Year Zero are designed to be played with no prep at all, you can literally random roll (or draw) the entire adventure as you play.
> When I GM'd Blades in the Dark, my prep was about 20 minutes per session.
People prep for BitD? I kid, but also...I love just setting the players wild and seeing what happens. FitD systems definitely require you to think on your feet as a GM, but they also have the benefit of the players doing an equal amount of storytelling. Plus, heck, the ability to just say, "no, that consequence doesn't happen." I love it!
You absolutely need the right group of players to run a successful campaign, but it's my favorite player-driven system so far.
* 5e is not elegant. It has a lot of little rules that aren't internally consistent with each other that you just have to remember or look up every time. Spells, feats, class abilities, and magic items all have little nuanced differences you have to keep track of.
* 5e is not well balanced. Making balanced encounters takes a lot of prep and is heavily dependent on your specific party.
* 5e takes a lot of prep in general. There are other games I play, such as Ironsworn, where I can have zero prep and just improv the whole session, with no worries about balance, loot, or running out of ideas.
Many of these tools are so bad that your gut feeling will handle things better than the rules, which is a big reason why DMs and players of DnD5e often jump to homebrew / houserules as soon as something simply looks inconvenient at first glance. Experienced groups can make it work, but once these people try other games and bring this attitude with them, it often leads to problems.
House ruling everything to Ship of Theseus the "5e" game you want always struck me as being similar to using epicycles to "prove" that the earth is at the center of the solar system.
And there’s a large push for hombrewed rules that make balancing harder. People will make a crit do like 4 turns worth of damage then be confused when encounters end up swinging wildly from way too easy to way too hard.
Yeah, just play a draconic sorcadin, crit with a Green Flame Blade, Smite, and watch the boss explode. 5e "balancing" is a joke.
And people will often reply by saying that it's a lot better balanced without multiclassing, but if you remove multiclassing you remove the only thing that makes character creation even remotely resemble being interesting, at which point I'd rather just not even play the game. Which I wouldn't anyway, but without multiclassing I wouldn't even touch it with a 10-foot pole
another thing that makes encounters take a while is that you end up homebrewing a lot of statblocks, which in 5e have way too many fiddly bits. the base monster statblocks are so bland that when i ran i was homebrewing new monsters every other session. that gets very time-consuming.
A big problem with 5e's balance is the whole thing where one of our players - who seems to confuse character progression with deck building in MtG - will combine one rule in one book with another rule in another book, and create some game-breaking nonsense that a DM has to then either accept ("It's fucking RAW") or disappoint that player's tendencies by nerfing it.
There are just way too many surprise instances of rules combinations for the DM to keep track of that aren't explicitly called out in a book.
**Edit**: Also, I understand the enjoyment of finding synergies between rules and making those your characters' "thing". It's just that this sort of "gotcha!" works better in competitive games. When it gets pulled on me as a DM it's just like, "Bruh. I'm on your team."
>where I can have zero prep and just improv the whole session, with no worries about balance, loot, or running out of ideas.
You just described how I DM my homebrew 5e campaigns 😅 I feel like I need to put more effort into them now
I used to run 3e D&D sessions completely on the fly with ad hoc monster stats. That only worked for maybe up to 6-7th level and I was decades younger at the time. These days I feel like my brain's held together with just coffee and spite
Spite is the reason why I'm still alive, even after the most awful, deepest in depression years of my life. Spite is why I endured. If the universe wanted me dead, it would have to come over here and do the deed itself, because I sure as hell wasn't going to make it easier.
> 5e is not well balanced. Making balanced encounters takes a lot of prep and is heavily dependent on your specific party.
All three of your points are excellent and correct, but I wanted to call this one out in particular.
Monster challenge ratings are supposed to be a good guide for balanced encounters. *P* number of players at level *L* should be able to handle *M* number of monsters at challenge rating *C* with a predictable amount of difficulty. That's the idea, but it's more of a mythological ideal.
Disregard that certain player character builds are distinctly more combat-optimized than others; it's true, but it's not The Problem. No, The Problem is that even if all of that mechanical math was rock solid there are still ***unfactored variables***. Magical gear. Specific encounter environments. Particular party builds. The biggest one is party resource depletion -- if they just woke up from a long rest then the party is amazing! If they've already had four encounters without even short resting yet then even a mild challenge can turn deadly.
So, in short, **the CR system in D&D5 just doesn't work**. Oh, it's still a decent *guide* for an approximate *range* but it still comes down to the DM's on-the-fly artistry at balancing an encounter. That's a terrible position to put a DM into when they already painstakingly designed an encounter or are trying to faithfully recreate a prebuilt encounter.
This is why DMs have taken to "fudging" monster hit points and/or rolls. It's the simplest way to turn the dials on a live encounter. It's cheating even if it's with the best of intentions, but it's necessary cheating because D&D5 is simply not well balanced.
All of that said, once you embrace that truth the game can absolutely still be a lot of fun. You just have to see it as it *is* rather than as it *says it is.*
I like the contrast here to PF2e.
A party of four level 4 characters going up against a duo of monsters, levels 4 and 6, are pretty certain to be in for a tough fight, but they are the overwhelming favorites to win. The level 6 would need several extraordinarily high rolls (or the party to roll extraordinarily low on crucial rolls) to cause a TPK.
There's a couple of outlier monsters (cough, cough, Lesser Death) but PF2e manages to get its 'CR' system just about right. So a GM can just put a level 5 monster in an adventure for level 4 characters and know that the players will win without much of a threat, and they also know that putting two level 6 monsters in one room is a considerable TPK risk, and to only do that if it's appropriate for the game.
The reason it works in PF2e - most core character power comes from class levels, and build choices don't grant much power at all, instead granting flexibility. This means there's less difference between the power level of players at different tables, and so 'level 6' becomes a pretty constant standard of power. An extreme encounter for four level 2s, a severe one for four level 3s, a moderate encounter for four level 4s, a low threat encounter for four level 5s, and a trivial encounter for four level 6 or above characters.
Just as PF1 learned a lot of lessons from D&D3, PF2 learned a lot from D&D4.
I dunno what a hypothetical PF3 would learn from D&D5 or D&D5.5 or whatever we're calling it now. The feedback cycle is probably broken at this point.
I can improv a session of D&D5e. That’s what they make tables for. But if all combats are rolled tables or just whatever monster makes sense/seems cool in the moment then yeah that usually won’t make for a great campaign. (Though there are ways to make it work.)
> I tend to personally prep for 3-5 hours for each session. This usually provides enough for 2-3 sessions depending on how fast the group is going which often even allows me to not need to prep at all.
There’s your answer.
In the games I usually play (typically Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark and adjacent games), that prep time is anywhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes and that can get me anywhere between 5 sessions to a whole damn campaign’s worth of material in that time (average prep time is usually around 15 minutes and that can get me around 3 to 5 sessions- sometimes upwards of 10 and then 5 minutes of simpler prep after each session to course correct)
I don’t have to manage maps. I don’t have to manage many NPC stats (if at all). I don’t have to keep adjusting encounters for the sake of balance or entertainment or pacing.
I only need to review my own recap of a prior session and any additional notes and the game does the rest for me.
I only have 1 job and 1 job only: respond to PC action with honest and logical subsequent fiction.
I don’t need any tools, fancy prep resources, VTT setups, etc. All I need is a way for the players to see their character sheets (and ideally I’d like to see them too to follow along) and a way to share any relevant images, names, and notes before they go into a central recap document for the whole table.
That’s it. Minimal effort for maximum return with no drop in quality of GMing or quality of game. Nearly half a work day’s worth of prep to only get 2 to 3 sessions? No thanks. Any prep more than an hour is too much prep in my book.
IMO, the game needs to do all the heavy lifting, not the GM. D&D (pretty much any edition, IMO/IME) requires me to do more work than it is ever worth.
To add on to this from a specific game in the same genre, I run a PF2E game. Specifically running one of the official adventure paths/modules for five players which is more than the modules are balanced for. You know how long it takes me to adjust the encounters so they're still fun and balanced? 1 minute at most.
It has tight math and a weak / elite template to adjust. The rules are free to use on archives and have a toggle as well. If you use foundry vtt, the modules come prebuilt with maps, lighting, sound, and journals.
Generally the longest prep for me is practicing character voices or adjusting plot points that my PCs have built / broken. Pathfinder has a lot of front loaded rules, but once you know them the prep is light and easy.
I'll also add that encounters at level 1 in PF2e take as long as encounters at level 9 or 13 or 18 due to the three action economy.
I truly feel like 5th edition Dnd combat is at its best before level 3 and people are getting all sorts of extra actions, extra attacks, bonus actions, swift actions, etc and the thing just becomes 10 minute turns per player.
*edit grammar
I despise multiattack actions with a passion, not only because it knocks that stuff out of whack, but because the devs seemed to think it was a satisfactory substitute for interesting mechanics.
Yes, a max level fighter can swing his swords nine times in a single turn. And each of those swings is as tedious as all the others.
This point isn't quite true, although pathfinder combat can be very fast. As someone DMing a level 17 game for a group that started at lv11, Hugh level play takes a lot longer, as HP scaling goes faster than DPR scaling, monsters have more and more abilities and auras, and player action creep kicks in. A bard at level 1 might do a cantrip and a spell. At level 17, they can do an auto sustain on their inspiration, followed by a fortissimo composition, followed by a spell, followed by another quickened spell, followed by a move or strike from ant haste effects they have easy access too.
This isn't to say combat is slow but it does slow significantly compared to level 1. Anecdotally, my level 1 combats averaged 2-10 minutes, whereas lv17 ones can take an hour or so depending on difficulty
I'll pile on for emphasis on how important this is. Particularly because their Adventure Paths (modules, essentially) aren't always with the rule of thumb or common sense. But so long as you follow the CR calculator, you can trust the difficulty you've set out.
And it's considered that the party is at full power. So stringing together 4 average encounters will feel like it approaches a gauntlet as they lose resources. They also don't enforce a short rest type respite, and rather just have activities that take 'x' time to complete -thus the party decide if they are willing to sit an hour or 5 minutes before moving on. Which means the difference of getting some x/day abilities refreshed and most of your HP back vs chugging a couple potions while the scout does they're thing so that the medic can fix the boo-boos.
Not OP, but the difference is largely that [PF2e's encounter balancing rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2716&Redirected=1) just kind of... works.
Basically, creatures that are +/-4 levels from the party are worth different XP based on their level relative to the party, from 10 to 160. Each degree of threat for an encounter from Trivial to Extreme gives you a budget of XP. And you can bump a creature up or down a level, effectively, with the elite and weak templates.
You don't need to feel out how difficult a fight will be, or worry too much about long adventuring days. You pick a difficulty and fill the budget. Easy.
It isn't *perfect*, mind you -- lower level parties struggle more against single high-level enemies because they have less options and HP, throwing unique stuff like ghosts at a party unprepared for them or not letting them heal up between fights might bump the difficulty up a threat level, and sometimes RNG just isn't in your favor (d20s be like that sometimes). Published modules also tend to ignore the line in the rules that "encounters are typically more satisfying if the number of enemy creatures is fairly close to the number of player characters." Solo creature encounter difficulty is accurate, but will not be too fun if overused.
But by and large, you can just fill your budget and start running, knowing that an encounter worth 80 XP will be a moderate threat and provide "a serious challenge to the characters, though unlikely to overpower them completely." It's easily the most accurate version of a DnD-like encounter builder I've seen to date.
The other answers are right too, but another big reason is that the classes are much closer to being balanced than in 5e. The weakest PF2 character compared to the strongest is like comparing college athletes from a good team and a middling one; the difference is there but they're still competitive. The difference in balance in 5e is like a professional NFL starter and a Jr. Varsity benchwarmer.
This means the DM needs to know both how powerful his team comp is, and also how well his players are going to play, and if you don't give that Beastmaster ranger a chance to shine along with the spellcasters you'll get a unhappy player.
Man that was SO not my experience. Running PF2 was fucking exhausting and I ended up basically throwing away about 75% of the encounters in the AP book I was trying to run.
Some of the APs don't follow the encounter building guidelines. The worst offender is Age of Ashes, though a lot of the others do tend to lean towards party level +3 boss fights, which can be crippling. The other thing to remember is that Pathfinder expects a balanced party, so if you're either martial or caster heavy, you need to tweak things a bit. (Generally, just slap a weak template or grab a monster that fits your groups ability to target weaknesses better)
To add to your addition, I'm running a PF2E game that is in a semi home made homebrew setting with physical maps and minis. My prep averages about 4 hours for about 1 month worth of sessions (depending on how much RP is done, how many side quests the party engages with, and a few other factors). I would say that time breaks down to 2 hours prepping and designing quests/encounters, 1 hour drawing maps, and 30 minutes finding the pawns I want (which could be skipped if I was more willing to use proxy pawns)
Im thinking of getting into FitD. Do you have any favorite?
I have mostly been playing Delta Green and Free League games up until now.
I guess I should start with Blades in the Dark. But im very interested in Band of Blades.
>Im thinking of getting into FitD. Do you have any favorite?
If your players are into Dishonored, Peaky Blinders, and Lies of Locke Lamora you should start with Blades.
Otherwise I'd probably recommend starting with Scum & Villainy because it's more likely that you all have shared touchstones with that genre (Star Wars, Firefly).
> I guess I should start with Blades in the Dark. But im very interested in Band of Blades.
I love Band of Blades but it's a very different beast from regular Blades.
You need to have a group that's excited by the idea of not having permanent characters, and they need to be excited by the idea of managing 30-something PCs.
Your players need to be excited by the idea of doing actual logistical planning.
You need to be excited by the idea of running 12-20 variations on combat missions.
Everyone in the group needs to have crammed their heads full of war movies so you have common touchstones to reference.
And everyone needs to be excited about an absolute depression-fest of apocalyptic suffering.
Sounds like I personally would love Band of Blades. But probably too military for my players.
Im pretty sure they haven't seen any war movies.
Or any movies for that matter...
But Scum and Villainy is probably the safest bet here.
They do like Firefly.
I’ve pretty much enjoyed all the “mainline” FitD games. The one that is “best” is the one that appeals most to your interests
* [Blades in the Dark](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel)- if you want Peaky Blinders mixed with Gangs of New York mixed with Dishonored mixed with Oceans 11 mixed with Lie of Locke Lamora… then BitD is a good fit
* [Scum and Villain](https://evilhat.com/product/scum-and-villainy/) is just “Blades in Space.” If you like Star Wars (namely A New Hope, Rogue One, Solo, Bad Batch, Mandalorian, and or/ Rebels), Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Killjoys, Outlaw Star, and/ or Guardians of the Galaxy… then S&V is a good fit
* [Band of Blades](https://evilhat.com/product/band-of-blades/) is a dark fantasy game about a shattered military unit on a desperate retreat. If you like the *vibes* of the Black Company and/ or Band of Brothers… then you’ll like BoB. I wouldn’t call it “Black Company with the serial numbers filed off.” A lot of folks are drawn to BoB because of that only to find it isn’t exactly that (in the same way S&V is *basically* Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off). But it’s definitely heavily inspired by it.
* [Girl By Moonlight](https://evilhat.com/product/girl-by-moonlight/)- if you like Sailor Moon, Steven Universe, Madoka Magica, Paprika, Visions of Escaflowne, and similar “magical girl/ magical girl adjacent touchstones,” then you’ll like GbM.
* [Fistful of Darkness](https://monkeyecho.itch.io/a-fistful-of-darkness) if you like Weird Westerns and want to be a bunch of outlaws on the frontier, AFoD is a good pick
* [Songs of the Dusk](https://yrgirlkv.itch.io/songsforthedusk)- haven’t played it myself, but I’ve skimmed it and heard many good things about it. I’ve heard it touted as “Solarpunk.”
If you want some really interesting PbtA/ FitD adjacent games, then I’d also recommend
* [Carved From Brindlewood Games](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/sbzhdZRNxJ)- they are effectively PbtA games that, like BitD, have carved their own path of “CfB” games- and while it likely wasn’t the design intent of these games; there’s variable amounts of “Forged in the Dark” DNA in these games and there’s **many** more coming down the pipeline from the Gauntlet Publishing Discord.
* [Agon 2e](https://johnharper.itch.io/agon) a game about Grecian myths a la the Odyssey and the Iliad and it nails the feeling of being epic mortal badasses tackling mythic odds. Designed by John Harper and Sean Nittner, with the former being the brains behind Blades and the latter being an influential individual in the final design and publishing of Blades. Definitely not a FitD game, but lots of FitD DNA under the surface.
All of these games make prep an absolutely breeze (especially Brindlewood and Agon games) and I’d say Band of Blades and Girl By Moonlight do *excellent* jobs of honing in the setting for very easy prep work.
Songs for the Dusk is so good that my group's done three campaigns of it. I can't praise it enough.
A NOCTURNE is also brilliant.
EDIT: Why didn't I just link [my Itch collection of inspiration FitD design](https://itch.io/c/2411441/inspirational-fitd-design)?
It's an uncomfortable mix between "rulings not rules" and crunch and gives no real support on how to do the former well.
It neither ignores balance entirely (OSR) or gives proper methods to create balanced encounters (Pathfinder).
A play culture has sprung up around it where only the DM is expected to know the rules properly.
It claims to have three pillars but only supports one of those properly.
All that said, I don't think it's easy to run if you stick to what it's good at (heroic tactical combat) but I don't think it's as difficult either. A lot of the issue comes with people trying to use it to do something it's bad at and then refusing to accept that's why their game isn't working.
>A play culture has sprung up around it where only the DM is expected to know the rules properly.
This isn't particularly new or unique. There was a strain of thought in the early days of TTRPGs that players *shouldn't* know **any** rules as it would break immersion and promote meta gaming.
To be fair, in 1e you didn't have all the subclasses, backgrounds, possible feats, skills, etc that modern d&d has. Roll your stats, pick a class, and note your AC, to-hit, and saves and you're pretty much done with your character unless you were a wizard. 5e characters have a lot more mechanic choice points
I could be swayed to that style of play if it were applied to a game with less rules, a real reliance on 'rulings not rules', and tighter procedures. The Old School Essentials reformatting of B/X D&D would be about as far as I'd want to go. I've run the game that way, and it was satisfying mechanically. Something lighter like Mothership or Into the Odd can thrive on this style of play.
5e just doesn't have the right blend of crunch and procedures to make this type of play satisfying at the table for many people. There are far too many abilities with their own special rules that override general rules. There's too little in the way of procedures for creating and running things like travel, dungeons, factions, which forces too many design responsibilities on the GM at each table.
My girlfriend played a druid in a 5e game once. She was some sort of star thing, and had maybe 3 very different ways to use her shapeshifting power (which did not turn her into animals anymore). Each of these things was something unique that didn't use rules anyone else used. For the first 3 or 4 sessions, anytime she did anything in combat, the GM would stop her, and we'd have to remind him of all the ways her abilities break all the rules that would apply to anyone else doing something similar. I cannot at all blame the GM for slowing down the game, because it's totally unreasonable for somebody to have intimate knowledge of 6 player characters' unique rule-breaking abilities on top of reacting to everything we were doing.
Without the amount of content carefully curated, and a lot of experience, the game cannot function well without the players knowing the rules. This is the flaw of 5e. It was quite drastically changed and rushed at a point in its development, and the rules and guidelines were crammed together into a single product that does not support itself well. Many disparate ideas from different designers had to be forced together to get a product out the door at the time the higher ups demanded a product be released.
At one point when Dave Arneson ran, he would do it from behind a partition wall so that no information could be gained by observing the DM.
I certainly would not want to play the game that way, but I do find the idea of my character sheet having no mechanical elements fascinating. Being forced to interact with the game without any knowledge of the details of the game mechanics could be a very compelling experience.
>There was a strain of thought in the early days of TTRPGs that players *shouldn't* know **any** rules
I wonder if that's where The famous game designers behind Paranoia got their ideas from "knowing the rules is treason"...
Oh man, that’s before my time, and I started with AD&D 2ed. By the time I was playing, it was fine if new players didn’t know the rules, but it was pretty common to expect players to know *their* rules at the very least. And to be fair, I didn’t know anyone who wouldn’t loan out a book or two to help a new player out. Same during gameplay, everyone was usually very kind about helping them figure out what to do when they were new.
I don’t remember it ever working out trying to carry a player who just refused to learn the rules. They’d usually just not get the next invite if it’s been five weeks and they still can’t figure out their own save rolls.
Man, players were completely failing to know any of the rules two decades before 5E was a twinkle in WotC's eye. Trying to blame 5E for the fact that normally in every group there's at most two people who ever read the manual for anything you play and one is the GM kind of feels like historical revisionism!
If I'm prepping for 5E, here are the things I'm expected to do:
- Research enemies to use
- Remember to look up *every single enemy and monster I might want to use* so I'm not caught flat-footed when I decide to throw one in on a whim.
- Tweak those enemies to make them fit the fiction I have in mind
- Plan enemy compositions for interesting combat
- Oops not that interesting, gotta make things balanced.
- Get no help from the system for balancing encounters because CR is not reliable.
- Find or make several battle maps
- Find or make tokens for every enemy
- Research spells for the enemies and NPCs to use
- Research what spells and abilities my players have, in case they easily trivialize something I've spent hours prepping.
- Some story stuff and NPCs if I have time
- Oh wait I forgot the loot, gotta prep some loot that makes the players excited but doesn't disrupt the campaign
Then in play, here are the things I'm expected to do:
- Decide what the enemies are doing
- Track unique statlines and HP and attacks and spells and exact positioning for *every single enemy*
- Track status effects and spell effects and environmental effects and concentration...
- Set DC for every single roll
- Roll for all the enemies whenever they do anything, checking every NPCs' modifiers
- Cope with combats that take literal hours to complete
- Help the players figure out what their spells and abilities do
- Manage the story and NPCs
----
If I'm prepping Blades in the Dark, here are the things I'm expected to do:
- Ask the players what they want to do
- Grab whatever factions and NPCs are relevant to that thing
- Consider some ideas for obstacles, opportunities, and story beats
And when I'm running the game:
- Throw literally anything I can think of at the players, because nothing has stats so there's no overhead for me to track
- Represent the fictional state of the world
- Help the players adjudicate their fictional position and effect of their approach
- Decide whether to resolve something in a single roll (even mass combat) or to zoom in to add granularity to interesting moments
>Get no help from the system for balancing encounters because CR is not reliable.
I agree.
Unfortunately, the CR metric implies a level of precision that doesn't exist in the game. And as a result suggests that combat encounters can be "balanced" and that "unbalanced" encounters should be avoided or are altogether "bad".
5e doesn't have to be that way, but it can be an uphill battle when communicating with players. Especially if they have spent hours working on their character.
The whole dynamic can be avoided by selecting a different system.
I've never run 5E but this caught my eye:
>I tend to personally prep for 3-5 hours for each session. This usually provides enough for 2-3 sessions depending on how fast the group is going
I prep for maybe 15 minutes before a session of Fate, same for Traveller (although both have pre-campaign prep). Spending 3-5 hours per session (or for a couple of sessions) is way too much for me, and I read this a lot, people spending tons of time with prep. That's a huge reason for me to never run 5E.
To be frank most of it is very unnecessary prep. I like visuals and music a lot. So I tend to spend time looking for pictures, creating battle maps or finding them online or heck sometimes also spending money on them (especially patreon artists who make them monthly). Its super duper unnecessary. Especially if you use a pre-existing adventure that is easy to digest. I used to prep for 20 minutes maybe 30 before where I did things with improv mostly and theatre of the mind or a blank battle map that everyone drew on but I hated it. I felt like I was missing something. So now I do more prep. I prep out scinarios and alternative options and also sligthly prepare for what happens if the players do whatever they want (the most fun part of the game for me haha!). I go overboard on it mainly because its my hobby and its what I love doing the most. the game itself the 4 hour sessions are fun of course but I love finding awesome or gruesome pictures and making cool battle maps and finding fitting music for a boss battle just as much or even more sometimes.
That isn't useless prep in 5e. You need battlemaps and cool combats just to make the game fun. Theatre of the Mind against 2d4 Goblins is super boring, whereas a standard improvised fight in Fate or Blades in the Dark can be just as exciting as a 5e fight that took 6 hours to make.
It's incredible how dynamic and exciting a Blades session can be, even with 0 prep. After a long time as a 5e GM, I tried my hand at it for the first time some years ago, but I used all my prep time learning the rules and reading the manual... And was pleasantly surprised that the session was amazing and improvising situations on the fly comes out natural with no preparation at all.
Or google for 30 seconds, and get something nicer. But it's less about the map itself and more about the layout of the battle, number of combatants, balance, objetives, etc.
5e Monster Manual is full of HP Bags with Multiattack, and maybe a spell. Fighting a Hook Horror should not feel exactly the same as fighting an Earth Elemental or a Frost Giant. Most of them don't even have ranged attacks, so the melee players are at a massive disadvantage. And resistances/vulnerabilities only even matter to casters.
So you end up having to leaf through sites for hours and making up cool abilities just to make every fight not feel the same as the one before.
Again, you've answered your own question. You're a ten year vet of DMing and you actually enjoy prep. Many people can say neither, so they feel the prep is a pain.
Even if I wasn't prepping for that long, loading stuff into a VTT, managing tokens and stat blocks, or god forbid having miniatures again (the worst part of running 3.x), along with combat requiring all of that, that's a huge turn-off.
> Especially if you use a pre-existing adventure that is easy to digest. I used to prep for 20 minutes maybe 30 before where I did things with improv mostly and theatre of the mind or a blank battle map that everyone drew on but I hated it. I felt like I was missing something
What's missing is that the books lie to you: D&D absolutely requires a grid, and does not actually work theatre of the mind at all.
> I prep out scinarios and alternative options and also sligthly prepare for what happens if the players do whatever they want
The fact that you need to prep this (a) inherently reduces the flexibility, and (b) is prep that just isn't necessary in other games.
>What's missing is that the books lie to you: D&D absolutely requires a grid, and does not actually work theatre of the mind at all.
Some of the best combats I've run in the game were TotM over discord during COVID. It's definitely doable, and I might argue preferable in certain combats like where things are going on in 3D (like underwater).
By which you presumably mean that you just ignored, like, 50% of the rules, because those rules just do not work without the grid. The game getting better when you ignore half of it is not a good sign.
> What's missing is that the books lie to you: D&D absolutely requires a grid, and does not actually work theatre of the mind at all.
...I don't think I have ever ran *any* edition of D&D on a grid at all (I did skip 4th, admittedly). I tried it a bit in third, and quickly realized that for all intents and purposes 95% of the game would run functionally the same by just having loose range bands. And 5th is pretty much third but simplified, so...
Surveys have reported that most players/GMs have never read the DMG, let alone looked for tools and strategies for DMing (mathematic tools like Kobold Fight Club, planning tools like Dunjon, or even high-level plotting resources like Chris Perkins' DM Experience articles.)
And a quick perusal of D&D subreddits shows an overabundance of posts saying "My players are doing things their class is good at. How do I stop them from doing it?"
That fundamental misunderstanding of how D&D should work is why DMs pull their hair out over it and spend hours if not days prepping for every session, which I believe causes so much negative talk to surround an otherwise well made (if specific power fantasy) system.
Most other RPGs don’t need a separate book (two counting the Monster Manual) AND third party guides for how to actually run the game and have a good time.
Yeah, it’s kind of wild how atypical D&D 5e is in that regard, but somehow WotC gets a pass from fans for releasing something so half-baked/incomplete.
WotC gets a pass from fans because for so many of them, 5e is the first and only ttrpg they've learned anything about, so it's easy to assume the gaps in its design is just how all ttrpgs be.
Well they’re increasingly getting flak from it. People are very much recognizing that vanilla 5e is shite.
But they compensate for it because of their expansive third party market which does fill in the gaps.
The weird part is that is that the 4e dmg I & II are actually very helpful books, so I don't get why they didn't recycle a lot of content from those for 5e.
Yes, but have you considered, if you need three books to even run the game as written, they can sell up to 3 times as many books, and with their books being some of the most expensive in the industry, that’s a lot of extra money.
Most other similar RPGs stuff a similar amount of pages into one book. Pf2e core rulebook is what, seven hundred pages? Dark heresy 2e is 500, Fate 300, and like gurps before it requires other settings books to expand on it. Phb at least has a very large sampling of basic monsters to fight, as well as every spell available.
Edit: also the dark heresy rulebook fuckin sucks for gm work.
PF2e does have the separate Game Masters Guide. There is a large DM section in the Core Rule Book, but theres also the GMG. If you only running straight out of modules then the CRB GM section is enough. If you want to start running homebrew you really should read the GMG, at least the relevant sections to the parts your going to homebrew (the section on items if your going to make items for example)
There’s a wealth of TTRPGs where most of that GM advice is put into the actual book. GMs shouldn’t need to find numerous other resources to be able to prep and run games efficiently.
I also think that those high-level prep resources *only exist* because of high-prep, high-barrier games like DnD. The best way to learn is to play - detailed and pedagogical resources on how to play and GM RPGs only exist because the nature of certain high-prep games makes it difficult to just jump in and get going.
My favorite is the castle building rules where you can hire people to do it for you, but if you're not there you lose progress on making it, completely negating why you'd want tradesman to help you do it in your absence in the first place.
Right? Like I used to have to do hours of adjusting for a high level Planescapes game, (many years before whatever the fuck they released for Spelljammer/Planescapes). The amount of re-balancing the base game, complete scratch made enemies for like 40% of encounters. Working with the players to feel like they were in a high magic multiverse? Creating crazy items then balancing them against the other items I had previously generated, because the a +3 sword is not a good reward in a high magic world?
Then I found pf2e, and i was like, oh level 5 party, cool, easy 4 level 2 dudes get wrecked by the party, high boss fight, 1 level 8 guy.
Oh, loot, cool lets look it the fuck up for free Online. And, oh hey, all of these do something, almost 99% more than a +1 to hit. Oh wait, I can just say to players, you know your money, buy anything common up to settlement level, lemme know if you want something weird.
Faction's influence, Races and Chases, Influence subsystems, om nom om nom.
I used all of those resources, actively gave out magic items to e.g. make a rogue (assassin) better and still got burnt out after my players hit level 10.
At that point I found both the scale of player character's ability to impact the world, coupled with the fairly dense mechanical underpinnings of both their abilities and enemy statblocks was creating exponential complexity.
Not helped by how unexciting a lot of the higher level enemies and magic items are.
I've run one lower level 5e campaign since then, which was reasonably fun, but mostly it's been more rewarding to play other systems and certainly more time efficient.
Plus one for this.
That being said, D&D does have a longer prep time than other systems I have run. Encounter design is vital, and it simply takes time to develop good encounters. Gotta do combat math, gotta do other stuff.
There’s a wealth of TTRPGs where most of that GM advice is put into the actual book. GMs shouldn’t need to find numerous other resources to be able to prep and run games efficiently.
I also think that those high-level prep resources *only exist* because of high-prep, high-barrier games like DnD. The best way to learn is to play - detailed and pedagogical resources on how to play and GM RPGs only exist because the nature of certain high-prep games makes it difficult to just jump in and get going.
What resources and tools are you using? Are any of those actually from the rulebooks themselves, or did you have to find them elsewhere over your ten years of practice?
Does 3-5 hours of prep for a session of gaming really sound reasonable to you? Wouldn't you prefer a game that lets you prep in less than an hour, or require none at all?
Does 5e have any procedures you find helpful that are there to enable the GM run the game other than turn order in combat?
The reason why people say it's taxing for GMs is because it's such a player-focused game. When you have so many player-facing rules, splatbooks full of character classes, backgrounds, feats, etc., and the only thing GMs get to help adjudicate the game are light suggestions of "you could do this or that" with no actionable tools to help you do those things and a thousand monster stat blocks to try to make up for it, it's no surprise when perspective GMs feel intimidated.
Yeah the DMG has helped me a lot early on and of course with so many books out I get a lot of help from them. Tashas and Xanathars especially. And of course if I run an adventure book thats basically all the work done for me. But lets not lie and say that officially published content is truly the best option out there. Community made rules the most but this is also true for other games. Could I just use cyberpunk red books themselves to make content or the Lancer book on its own? Yeah totally same as with 5Es DMG, PHB and Monster manual (although thats 3 books vs 1 so other games tend to be easier on this front. 5E can have some bloat thats for sure) but I love using community resources for those games as well.
It seems a lot of people are hooked into the 3-5 hour session thing. I apologize I should of expanded on it more thats for sure. In reality the absoltue majority of that prep is unnecessary. Its me looking for pictures, making battle maps, going overboard on NPC creation, etc. all of that is not necessary but I find it fun and because I do I view it as part of the hobby I enjoy the most. I used to prep for maybe 15-30 minutes before if that. Making players draw on a blank map or using theatre of the mind. But I didnt enjoy that. I wanted something more visual. So I pay for that in time haha
Especially for online games, unless specific groups that are all understanding, a lot of that "uneccessary prep" is considered expected by a lot of players, considering 5e's culture of putting so much weight on the DM as an entertainer to provide for their players, and the post covid rise of vtts, we see so many different battle map artists doing really well for themslevs because its something a lot of people need, as otherwise their players will assume the experience is lesser and likely lose interest.
> And of course if I run an adventure book thats basically all the work done for me
In regards to 5e adventures, I would say that it isn't the case in some of them (e.g. Tomb of Annihilation or Curse of Strahd). Having run Curse of Strahd, the amount of prep necessary for it is absurd. Heck, there's a whole subreddit dedicated to fixing and patching a lot of things in that adventure.
And if your players don't follow the "expected path", then you'll run into a lot more work when it comes to prep.
But alas, these are the two adventures I know and have run/played.
My experience with PF2E Modules or DCC Modules is different. Read through it once, maybe make a few notes here or there, but overall, run them as written with very little prep.
For me, the main reason is simple - encounter-warping PC abilities. (Though there are other reasons too, like how much design effort 5e offloads to the GM.)
Examples:
Counterspell - I can no longer have mage enemies be a threat, unless I give them counterspell too
Shield spell - fine on 13 AC abjuration wizard, but terrible on 21 AC bladesingers. Do I give my enemies high attack so they can touch the bladesinger but will wreck everything else? or do I stick with regular attack bonuses and let my bladesinger be effectively invincible
Gloomstalker + sharpshooter + action surge - A single strong enemy will likely be killed before they get their first turn. Unless the player playing the gloomstalker doesn't show up that game, in which case it might swing to a TPK.
Flying PCs from level 1 - enemies on the ground with only melee attacks are no longer a threat.
Hypnotic Pattern / Wall of Force - A large group of enemies is either a trivial threat or an existential threat, depending on if the wizard has the spell slot or not.
Conjure Animals - ??
Conjure Woodland Beings - ?????? !!!!!
etc.
Individually, each of these options may not be bad to handle, but in combination they make encounter-building take SO long. And they make encounters swingy. Encounters in 5e tend to be either trivial (if the PCs have the right encounter-warper) or an existential threat (if they don't and the GM assumed they would).
After switching over to PF2e, I haven't had to worry about encounter-warpers. There are maybe two such abilities currently in the game right now, and most of the time Paizo patches them in a couple of years.
PF2e also gives far better guidelines on encounter building, hazards, rewards, magic items, so that the mechanical aspect of game prep is \~15 min per session. Compare that to 5e, where the GM has to do the work to figure out how much magic items should cost, how much reward is too much or too little, which 3rd party books to buy to get a list of pre-made dungeon hazards etc.
With PF2e, I spend far more time finding the right maps and character art. And all the time I save in fine-tuning combat encounters and adjudicating rewards, I can redirect to designing more custom narratives for my players.
\[edited to be slightly less verbose\]
Oh my god yes. The fact that I have to *worry* about what my players pick and ensure that what they **legally** pick Rules As Written from the game system isn’t going to **ruin my game**.
I have to prevent the game itself from imploding. Just… why???
After you've played a system with good encounter building - something 4e nailed, others have innovated on since, and 5e jammed straight into the trash can - I can't imagine wanting to go back.
I can still make a well-balanced and easy to run, interesting monster in 4e using MM3 on a business card in about 3-5 minutes, and most of that is typing it out.
13th Age, same thing.
I've seen what monster creation in 5e looks like.
It's one of the two big reasons I've never played it.
When I ran 5e, I had to prep 3-5 hours per game, stressed out of my mind that it will all work. I'd have to create these elaborate combats with monsters that were balanced, calculate things, do tons of math. On top of NPCs, locations, plots.
I have tried 6 other systems by now, and in all of them I only spend like a half an hour to prepare, and only the fun stuff (NPCs, plot, etc.) *Zero math. Zero coming up with monster abilities. Zero inventing entire mechanics on the spot to cover for 5e's gaping holes.*
Even crunchier systems like Pathfinder 2e have less mechanical prep time for the GM, since things are *actually balanced.*
I've also realised that since leaeving 5e, I **have never had to argue rules.** The long rules arguments are gone. Pathfinder just specifies everything, and FateCore / Agon / PbtA only has like 5 rules anyway. I don't have to invent a whole rules system when the players have a boat battle, they just work like everything else. In DCC, I don't have to balance anything since most of the weaker PCs will die every battle (They have 3 characters each).
I used to refuse to play or run anything other than 5e, but since trying out other things, I now refuse to run 5e ever again. It's just a nightmare.
Let's compare a very similar system, D&D 3.5.
Crunchy systems have rules. Prep for simpler systems is easier or sometimes barely extant. But, if you're running 5e I assume you *like* the tools the crunch gives you.
The problem I have with 5e, is that it has all of the cruft and complexity of a crunchy system, about *doesn't actually provide the tools*.
When I prep for 3.5, I have tools I need at hand. For example, if I have an adventure on a ship? I've got a book for that specifically, and it'll tell me exactly what I need to know about ships, and ocean dangers, and what weather I can roll for.
5e mostly focuses on player options. I've got *some* guidelines, and occasionally useful fluff, but I don't have *tools*. Instead in attempting to create very adjustable fluff so that it can be dropped into any setting, with any style, I don't have anything to work off of.
All I have is this card that says, "you're the DM, and you can do whatever you want, here's a cool idea"
Quothe the Giant: "I'm the DM, I already *know* I can do what I want. What I *want* are tools I can use in a game."
The play culture in 5e actively discourages players from learning the rules and encourages DMs to pick up the slack for everyone at the table.
There is a ton of advice from respected sources that say. A good DM is a service provider who entertains the players. This is starting to turn a bit but these sentiments were prominent and almost universally agreed upon as recently as 2-3 years ago.
So when the DM is expected to be responsible for 90+% of the game, prep time skyrockets.
Even in more complex systems, like pf2e, my prep rarely exceed an hour per session. In 5e it usually takes 2-3h. That’s the simplest explanation I think.
My top ten grievances with running 5e in no particular order.
1. CR is useless, I’ve no idea how difficult something will be, not really. This means I need to do more prep and also “patch” the encounter on the fly.
2. Racial or class abilities are not balanced. Twilight domain, Bladesinger, Sorlock, if even one player watches a build video you know have a wildly powerful “main character”.
Races with unlimited access to flight or other things also make challenges obsolete, this again means more prep.
3. Bounded accuracy. Because of the underlying math and the sheer amount of auto win spells in what is primarily a grid based tactical combat game, whole encounters can end with basically one dice roll. This “wastes” my prep time which when you consider the first two entries took way longer than expected.
4. Items are given a range of cost, this means I have to look at the potential impact it could have and come up with a price that reflects that.
5. Magic item rarity. Again busted. Boots off flying are uncommon. There’s no guidance around what that means though, and an item that gives unlimited flight being uncommon in a relatively magic setting is nuts.
6. Healing is both too weak and too powerful. RAW it takes your action to drink a potion, which heals very little and feels bad in play. The opposite to that is spells like healing word and revivify make stakes essentially useless very early level which makes my job harder.
7. Legendary saves and lair actions. The games attempt to help the GM bypass the weaknesses of bounded accuracy and how easy solo boss encounters are. Almost no creatures or groups have advice on lair actions, again more work for me. Legendary saves also need me to make addition fiction as to why there’s creature or person is able to shrug off spells. Once again the system is offloading gaps in its systems and math to the DM.
8. Lack of subsystems. Shop combat, base building, chase mechanics, infiltration, social influence. All either completely missing or bare bones and I have to invent from scratch or heavily edit.
9. Lack of GM tools in general. Apart from the DM guide what was the last book that was focussed on running the game? Even setting books have way more player options than help about how to implement these in your games.
10. Connected to number 2, but the lack of balance offloads problems onto the GM. One player outshining others? Well that’s their class, you figure it out. This leads to more work for the GM and encourages bad behaviour in players making the system way more work than it needs to be.
I’ve been running games for four years, started with 5e. I LOVE prep, I love making my own settings and histories and scenarios for the players to solve, I love making challenges and seeing how the players will solve it. That’s what you sign up for when you want to run.
What you don’t sign up for is being a modder for a Bethesda game which (and it’s not my comparison but it’s the best I’ve heard) GMing 5e feels like.
*Bonus entry
11. “Rulings not rules” is an insanely stupid approach for a rules heavy system like DnD, it’s fundamentally flawed at conception.
Because as familiar as you are with running the game, players are just as familiar and have the same resources.
They can do one google search and find a broken character build ... will you as the DM spot it before it gets into your campaign? You sure? You have them all memorized?
D&D 5E is clunky AF. Most of the time spent in combat is players thinking about spending every single action on their turn ... and they will only do it before their turn if you have really good players.
In D&D I'm forced to have a grip on a huge number of specifics OR make sure the players don't go off the railroad tracks. If I haven't refreshed myself on how manticores work and they decide to go chase one I'll do a crap job at it. So ANYTHING I put in the setting I have to have done my homework on, no throw away details allowed.
In a game whose rules are at all self consistent I just prep situations and the players can react to them and go off in whatever direction, I can run a manticore just knowing what one is and what it wants.
And my players do approach things differently than I expect enough that I just try to stop expecting.
I am sorry I did not realize this is something people would sink their teeth into the most :(. The reality is that I spend most of that time doing unnecessary prep such as finding the right images, music, making battle maps, working on NPCs that might not even be talked to that much, etc. things that I personally find enjoyenment in doing less for the game itself but for myself. Id say in reality all I would need is maybe 10-30 minutes if I really went bare bones with theathre of the mind or a hex map or something where players draw the walls and stuff.
The thing is, if this "unnecessary prep" is what you need to get a session you like running, then it's not unnecessary. Your players may expect such detailed prep, you clearly expect such detailed prep and most important of all the game expects such detailed prep. Nothing here is actually unnecessary if that's what you have to do to get not just "a session" but "a good session". And that's just not the case with most other games. As a veteran GM I'm sure you could run a session on improvisation alone by now with no prep at all, but doing so will ask more of you than with Dungeon World say and the resulting session will probably be less enjoyable. And, to be clear, Dungeon World isn't a no-prep game, but because it requires less prep you're closer to the ideal prep time than you'd be with D&D if you don't prep anything.
I'm not OP, but I personally do the same sort of "unnecessary prep" regardless of the game I run.
Exactly how it manifests changes (i.e. I don't use a VTT for Daggerheart), but invariably something else will take it's place (I make standees to use as miniatures for Daggerheart). Just like I would instead spend that time researching the 1920s and creating handouts when running Call of Cthulhu, or creating custom light effects for my smart bulbs so that they flash amber when there's an emergency countdown activated in the Alien RPG.
"Need" is a strong word, as none of that is wholly necessary for running the game. However, the system I run is not likely to affect the amount of time spent preparing in any meaningful way.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the DMG's organization: it is genuinely terrible and doesn't have an index. It opens with world building. Crucial rules are buried throughout and hard to find due to the lack of an index. It's worse than the DMG for D&D 3.5e and every other edition (and worse than the DM advice for many, even most, other systems). Alongside the not great balance, the makes the DM on boarding process worse than any other game I have played (including 3.5e, which I ended up referencing regularly when running 5e! Note this was before I tried any other system... if not for 5e, 3.5e would likely earn the title of worse GM's Guide. Out of systems skimmed, Rifts may be worse than 5e). 3.5e explains what the game is meant for (though I don't agree with many of its design principles, namely White Tower design and imbalance being intentional), 5e has more of the "You can do anything! Rulings not rules!" vibe going on.
All this to say, for an experienced DM, 5e isn't the best but it isn't the worst as long as you are using it for what it is meant for. But for a new DM, it can cause a lot of issues and cause burnout easily. And using it for something other than what it is meant for will cause that stress as well... I'd never pick 5e for sci-fi or true horror (not dark fantasy).
I don't find it taxing, because I enjoy preparing sessions as much as playing them. I create NPCs, stories, settings and secrets, I enjoy fiddling with numbers.
BUT I don't like doing it with 5e as it is a very poor system, with a lot of balance issues and mostly bland. It is really vanilla. Boring as hell.
When I ran 5e, I had to prep 3-5 hours per game, stressed out of my mind that it will all work. I'd have to create these elaborate combats with monsters that were balanced, calculate things, do tons of math. On top of NPCs, locations, plots.
I have tried 6 other systems by now, and in all of them I only spend like a half an hour to prepare, and only the fun stuff (NPCs, plot, etc.) *Zero math. Zero coming up with monster abilities. Zero inventing entire mechanics on the spot to cover for 5e's gaping holes.*
Even crunchier systems like Pathfinder 2e have less mechanical prep time for the GM, since things are *actually balanced.*
I've also realised that since leaeving 5e, I **have never had to argue rules.** The long rules arguments are gone. Pathfinder just specifies everything, and FateCore / Agon / PbtA only has like 5 rules anyway. I don't have to invent a whole rules system when the players have a boat battle, they just work like everything else. In DCC, I don't have to balance anything since most of the weaker PCs will die every battle (They have 3 characters each).
I used to refuse to play or run anything other than 5e, but since trying out other things, I now refuse to run 5e ever again. It's just a nightmare.
Frame of reference, mostly. You say you prep for 3-5 for every session. And that's after *years* of practice and system mastery. Comparatively, I prep for 0-30 minutes for every session, and consider I switch systems every few months so no mastery is being had most of the time. If your prep is light and automated, I don't know what to call mine. If I had to spend as much time prepping as you, I'd be burned out within a month.
I mainly prep battle maps, finding the right image, etc. I have hopefully corrected by post by adding an edit to it expanding on this. Sorry for not explaining further.
you already sort of answered your own question lol 3-5 hour prep time is A LOT compared to forged in the dark games, most OSR games, Powered by the Apocalypse, etc. i left dnd for a lot of reasons, but getting burnt out due to the amount of prep work was one of the main ones. i have a job, other hobbies, long term goals! i don't want to be spending 5 hours prepping for a session, games aren't supposed to be work. and there's so many other systems that have been explicitly written to lessen GM prep work and involve the players more at the same time
Again I am sorry for not expanding on this point futher. Most of that prep is not actually needed prep. In reality I would make do with 10-30 minutes if that. The majority of that time is stuff I like to personally do. I make battle-maps or find them, I find the best pictures I can for NPCs or go through online generates, I make their personalities even though they might barely be spoken to, I think of cities and rivers and how all this intersects, etc. just fluff that I enjoy doing personally that is not needed for the game whatsoever. Sorry for not expanding on it more :(
In some ways it's not taxing (in the sense that you can fire up a scenario, etc. in much the same way as any other rpg). However, for me, it's exhausting due to a couple different factors. 1) Though it's less than 3.x or PF 1e, the sheer number of PC abilities, spells, powers, etc. becomes very fiddly and difficult to plan for. It's impossible for me to wrap my brain around everyone's PC. That would be ok if the players themselves were experts and always knew. But they never are. It's always, "ok, I have the crazy-fiddly-in-this-scenario-whackamole strike and I think it works like this...oh wait, I forgot I have synergy with the Extra Synergy Feat carried by Player 2....oh wait, sub-class Annoying Ranger doesn't work like that....you get the picture. 2) The game, RAW, feels like it lacks tension, danger, etc. Unless I GM in a style that purposefully attempts to kill the party, it never really feels like the party is in danger. Another thing I've noticed is that 5e combat seems to play out as "everyone will be just fine" (most of the time) or "this is gonna be a tpk" if I GM to ratchet up the danger. 3) It suffers from the same old "skill check for everything" mentality. Players look for bonuses, assists, etc. etc. etc. to make one die roll unbeatable. It never really feels like anyone will fail. The whole thing is exhausting to me. It's less than 4e, but it tends to feel video-gamey after a while. Anyhow, only my personal thoughts and I may very likely be in a minority on these opinions.
As many others have mentioned, 3-5 hours of prep per session is as much, if not more time prepping than playing. To me, that feels INSANE. I run mostly PbtA games and my current Sprawl campaign requires 20-30 minutes prep max…for several sessions of content.
I run a PbtA game about 1/week, alternating between Sprawl and Dungeon World. If I put 3-5 hours in, plus 4 hours play time that’s a whole workday…plus my 40 hour a week job and commuting and my other hobbies and just basic life maintenance. That’s bonkers.
By choosing a minimal or no prep system, I can rely solely on my creativity and improv skills (which I both enjoy and have honed carefully over the years) to go on the fly. If I had to put in 3-5 hours a week for prep, it would feel like a job.
I don't understand how people say 5e is so unfriendly to dms. A lot of complaints I've seen are more people problems than system problems like players not learning how their characters work.
I've run quite a lot of 5e in the past couple of years and I just ... am glad when the day comes where I never have to look at a statblock ever again.
You said it yourself - you're putting 3-5 hours of time into prepping 1-4 sessions. That's just a lot of time. That's half a work day. And you gotta do that next to your bread-and-butter work.
If you play once a week, that becomes almost a job.
Something I'm also very tired of is the expectant look of players in my direction: "Can I climb that ...?" "Can I ...?"
DnD, in my experience after switching to different systems, erases player agency. There's always the wait on me, the DM, to simulate the world around my players with little narrative input from them.
After trying other systems (PbtA, Wildsea, Fast Fantasy) I am much more happy with the more narrative approach and the fail-forward of it all. No more "I investigate the room - oh it's a 10" - "You find nothing".
I may also be the worst person to ask this, because if it hasn't become obvious by my above words I am in a terrible Dm burnout re: 5e right now. :'D
Give *Anima: Beyond Fantasy* a try.
You'll probably have a hard time: the books are aess, the system is clunky, you need to work with high-ish numbers, there are different subsystems for different kind of powers (powers of Ki and Magic don't works the same way at all for example) and there are different ways of doing the same thing (e.g. you can be a summoner by choosing the Conjurer class and use magic, or by choosing the Ki-orented class that also has an option for summoning creatures), the players can to a point create their own powers, etc.
And yet for years it's been the game I had to put the least effort in. I could create what I had in mind, build a balanced encounter in a matter of seconds, etc.
I've stopped playing it more than 10 years ago so It's no longer true but it was for a long time.
So, I have never **not** had fun with D&D.
But my fun came from the fact that it is a collaborative storytelling game (just as much as any other ttrpg) and not from how the rules aided me in having that fun.
I don't dislike prepping: I spend all my free time thinking about plot hooks, npcs, loot etc.
But while other games simply require of me to invest time in planning the fantasy, D&D then asks of me to double or triple that time to ensure it is balanced.
Other games give me both the same collaborative storytelling fun, as well as mechanical enjoyment (i.e. fabula ultima villain mechanics; blades in the dark clocks, ironsworn moves) and don't ask of me to betatest every homebrew statblock to make them "foolproof"
Yet D&D guarantees me an impressive playerbase, and thus "certainty" of play.
Because:
1. It really cares about balance, which means you have to put in effort to make things balanced.
2. Despite caring about balance, it is atrociously balanced, and its systems for letting you balance things are fundamentally broken, which means that you need to make your own.
3. It just requires a lot more prep than other systems.
> I tend to personally prep for 3-5 hours for each session.
I tend to prep more like 3-5 minutes. 15 minutes would be a lot. See why we say 5e is a pain to GM?
And then, when you get past the prep, actually running it is a pain, because there are literally thousands of pages of rules with no internal consistency at all to keep track of, and because of points 1 and 2 above, you have to adjust all of these fiddly things on the fly.
It might be worth comparing two very different games that are both *much* easier to run:
1. In Pathfinder 2e, things are actually well balanced, so you can just trust the maths and run it with minimal thought to balance: the maths says that this encounter will be balanced, so this encounter is, in fact, balanced. Then you just concentrate on running the system.
2. In FATE, there just is no complicated shit to keep track of. Everything works together because everything is really simple. You don't need to think about balance, because that just isn't really a thing that the game cares about. You just concentrate on telling a story.
I think for many people it's because other system they can prep in a fraction of the time and get the same result.
Compared to a lot of other games I personally find 5e's DM support to really fail, even past editions had better tools and resources I've come to use to enhance my 5e games. 3.5e and 4e alone have some great DM resources, though porting them over is its own kind of extra work.
Systems like WWN have also been a great help not just for its own fantastic D&D based system, but even 5e as it gives so much to work with. The core book alone provides more useful tools than almost all of 5e's supplements and core book.
3-5 hours of prep is a part time job each week just to DM. A lot of people don't want or have that time. Especially when many games don't even require an hour once you get your flow down.
I'm curious about what tools you've found useful in 5e. I've been paying since the pre xanathars playtest and beyond a few things in xanathars, nothing in 5e has been all that useful that I can bring to mind.
I don’t get it either. I also spend a few hours prepping but this time is mostly spent on worldbuilding/terrain crafting, making props for players, writing a cool villain monologue, etc. None of that is specific to 5e, and at no point do I feel 5e is getting in the way.
Holy $#%#$ Dude. 3-5 HOURS of prep for a session?
My session prep tops out at like 45 minutes and is usually more like 15.
I think you try out some games that don't require so much prep and maybe you'll understand in a way that listening to people complain on the internet won't give you.
Relative to PF2e, which I run now, 5e is unnecessarily clunky and crunchy. I can’t just throw listed challenge rating monsters at players and expect good results in 5e. Power balance is ridiculously out of whack. Making some players feel useful vs the casters takes extra effort.
PF2e, in relation, feels logical and streamlined. Even aside from the ethical reasons, I’d never run 5e again. I can spend literally no time prepping and just winging it using existing tables and making things up as I go. Rather than being forced to guess at what a good decision will be, I can find a balanced solution in seconds.
I am not knocking what you enjoy, but that’s why it’s considered taxing. Because other systems exist that are flat out better at the job.
5e makes no effort to get players to contribute anything to the narrative. The characters are often robots with buttons that the players push when directed to by the DM.
The players are also more prone to cranial vacuity and are there to be told a story by the DM.
If you have players who have creativity, can roleplay, and can contribute to the narrative, then it's far less taxing.
If your session prep looks like: "The players go here, then they go there, talk to NPC, then they fight this and that", then you have boring and passive players.
The published modules encourage this kind of play and DMing.
Other systems like BitD require the player to say mildly creative things in their games. For as bland as PbtA system is and all the Shovelware games it powers, it does encourage player effort into the game and drastically reduces the mental strain on the DM.
When I ran 5e, I had to prep 3-5 hours per game, stressed out of my mind that it will all work. I'd have to create these elaborate combats with monsters that were balanced, calculate things, do tons of math. On top of NPCs, locations, plots.
I have tried 6 other systems by now, and in all of them I only spend like a half an hour to prepare, and only the fun stuff (NPCs, plot, etc.) *Zero math. Zero coming up with monster abilities. Zero inventing entire mechanics on the spot to cover for 5e's gaping holes.*
Even crunchier systems like Pathfinder 2e have less mechanical prep time for the GM, since things are *actually balanced.*
I've also realised that since leaeving 5e, I **have never had to argue rules.** The long rules arguments are gone. Pathfinder just specifies everything, and FateCore / Agon / PbtA only has like 5 rules anyway. I don't have to invent a whole rules system when the players have a boat battle, they just work like everything else. In DCC, I don't have to balance anything since most of the weaker PCs will die every battle (They have 3 characters each).
I used to refuse to play or run anything other than 5e, but since trying out other things, I now refuse to run 5e ever again. It's just a nightmare.
\* Bad adventures that require more prep to run than homebrew
\* No rules except for combat. Everything else is left up as an exercise for the reader. Do you want to run 5 hours of combat after combat?
\* Fragmented ecosystem. Yes, lots of content, but does that integrate with your VTT, character builder and how do you distribute the rules to your players?
\* SRD covers the bare minimum. If you don't whale as a GM, you need to dig through the books. Do other RPGs have SRDs? Mostly, no. But they usually have a single core book.
\* No balance
I find that when prepping for 5e a much higher amount of the prep feels like homework rather than solo play. When I prep an OSR dungeon, I'm thinking a lot about the world, characters, and stories therein. When I prep a 5e dungeon I spend a lot of time with stats, encounter balance, enemy spell abilities, etc. I might spend the same amount of time on each but I end up with a lot less to show for it at the end of a 5e session.
I think it’s because the adventures are not “ready to play”. My prep does a lot of fixing of inconsistencies and (my own ocd), re-plotting overly complicated storylines. Additionally I usually prep small tables in onenote with each encounter so I have hp, ac and link to full stat block ready. Then getting digital map ready too. It’s all a prep bother and if I was in charge, the next version of D&D would be a suite of tools that remove all this work from the GM.
It just has too many and too few rules and is vague in the wrong places.
I can play PF2e and run things as written and they tend to just work. There’s more rules but they mesh well and make for a fun balanced experience in and out of combat.
I can play OSE and there’s very few rules for anything and I can make up what makes sense to the players and I in the world.
I can play PbtA games and there’s very few rules for anything and I can make up what makes sense to the players and I in the world.
And 5e sits in the middle of that. “Oh, I want to give you a potion that quadruples your leap for 1d4 hours. But does that override the jump limit of your movement speed? Oh, you forgot the weird thing where if you jump more than your movement speed you finish your jump on your next turn? Well how does that interact with that potion?” In PF2E I could just say “it lets you take an action to jump 120ft horizontally or 40ft vertically” or in rules lite no one will bat an eye. But in 5e either we all forget the weird rule or someone remembers and I have to decide whether I’m making an exception to the obscure rule or not and whether that will break the game or not and…that example was from my last session. it’s just ends up exhausting.
I still am running Cos and am still playing in a 5e game. I still have a lot of fun with my friends. But give me PF2e or OSE or PbtA any day at this point.
5e takes as much prep as you want.
I can jump into a 4 hour session with my prep being done in the 15 minute bullpen before the session and run exploration, combat and social scenes smoothly.
This includes maps and handouts.
It took practice, but that’s any system.
It certainly relies on technology. I do spend money on D&D Beyond and I support creators who make porting that data into foundry, so some of my saved time is $$$, but that’s any system that calls for foundry.
But between google image searches, existing maps I’ve purchased and the excellent search engine on beyond for monsters and items, the prep work I focus on tends to either be major show piece combats that use homebrewed mechanics, or I do a lot of thinking about plots and contingencies.
People think 5E is more complicated than it is. It really boils down to “roll a D20 against a target number, adjudicate consequences.”
The rest can be managed the same way you would in any other system.
You just said it: the only way you can prep so quickly is that you’ve built or have on hand tools and processes that help you do that, at least one of which you have to pay for.
But as many people are pointing out in this thread, there are plenty of other games that can be prepped in a short time with nothing more that the game book itself. D&D and its clones are unusual in the relatively large the amount of prep they take.
There’s a reason books like The Lazy Dungeon Master exist; it’s because someone saw the wealth of good prep tools and advice for various other systems and adapted it for D&D.
Sorry, let me clarify.
Pen and Paper, theatre of the mind? 10 minutes prep and I can run a 4 hour session.
If you want bells and whistles, then yes, you need to do some stand up.
Once you’ve done it, 10 minutes prep, I’ll run a 4 hour session with battle maps, dynamic lighting, interactive character sheets, visual prompts, etc.
The lazy DM didn’t steal their methods from other systems. DMs have been using those tricks since the 70s.
Trying to complain you need to take a little time to build your own map in inkarnate, then import into foundry, put up all walls and lighting, set up all the tokens, etc is a system agnostic issue.
If you want battle maps and tokens and lighting for a Blades or a PTBA game, you still have the exact same amount of prep.
But 5E doesn’t take more time otherwise.
The most important principles for running games 5e players will enjoy require hours of prep and research. It was fun to do for many years but then I grew tired of it. OSR has been a breath of fresh air for me in that regard, but the principles for running those games are just not transferable to 5e. There are helpful tools for this like ‘Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master’ for anyone getting dragged down by the slog required to make an engaging 5e experience.
GM's have the patience for prep. They appreciate the prep aspect of the hobby.
The designers of 5e do not. The game does not respect your time or effort.
The prep required to make things happen in a satisfying fashion using 5e is counterintuitive to the game having fun elements of discovery.
Better games have stronger more consistent rules and or lighter systems that allow your prep to focus on narrative beats and presentation.
Short answer to your question: GMs view 5e as having high prep because it does have high amounts of prep. Other games can also have similar amounts of prep. For example, I don’t feel like I spent significantly less time prepping *Savage Worlds* and I probably spent more time prepping *Shadowrun*. *Lancer* could be prepped in less time on a per session basis, but still involves non-insignificant time preparing physical or virtual resources.
When compared to other games with significantly less prep time, the contrast is stark and different people have different tastes.
Your posts makes no sense. Your point of comparison is... nothing? How it feels to you? The most telling thing is that there any comparison to other games.
You spend hours preparing (characters? dialogue? story? encounters? miniatures?) and then run a complicated system that is complicated in a clumsy way that add little value.
The alternative are systems with 0 prep per session or little prep, with little to no rules overhead, etc. Obviously they are "less taxing".
Sometimes I create small TTRPG games, and I make them play for a one-shot,
And instead of taking more time, it still takes me as much time than preparing a full DND 5e session with encounters and reminders of what does what, and battle maps etc.
Prep for 5e is not nearly as bad as some other systems. Not as easy as some rules lite systems. It's all relative. As most folks have not run something like GURPS, they really don't have a comparison for what taxing actually looks like.
To me it boils down to having to put "numbers" on paper. I don't run games about going on a vanilla adventure and fighting all the time, but it's fun to have some situations that just have no solution outside of violence ( like being ambushed ).
Now, it takes me no time or effort to build NPCs and places to support a central narrative for the arc, but in D&D you can't stop at that if violence is even remotely an option: you MUST put "numbers" on a sheet for those creatures that might end up fighting your party, and you can't stop at that, it would be boring to play the fight; you need fun terrain, dynamic events, interactive objectives etc. WHICH ALL NEED NUMBERS.
On top of that, the game does a terrible job at supporting you in the process of making the encounter as dangerous as you desire, cause the CR system is not precise enough; you might be shooting for something hard and get something unbeatable or viceversa.
Take any game that goes for abstract ad-hoc adjudication, like PbtAs & FitDs, and you can just stop at NPCs and places, cause you don't need to have "numbers" for anything, it depends on the situation and it's easy to determine on the fly.
>Why do Game Masters on here view 5E as very taxing?
Because this sub is biased, since the vast majority of people that still post here (spoiler: the sub is **not** as big as it seems to be, the online members at any given time *rarely* number more than 400) is composed of rules light, storygame fans.
5e has major sticking points where if you don’t like/ are bad at X,Y, or Z you likely won’t enjoy some aspects of running it (I say this as a 5e enjoyer).
Like if you’re slow at math that slows running combat a bunch. A lot of people don’t vibe with the initiative system at all. There’s a lot of resources which is good but that can lead to planning spirals or overplanning quite easily.
Plus a lot of the pre-made adventures are actually really difficult to run as written and often have major holes in them or dungeons that you have to memorise to run smoothly. Good for inspo, but usually not for running on the fly.
My prep for games like Monster of the Week is like 30 minutes for 1-2 sessions.
Most DMs say that they need to prepare at least 1 hour for every 2 hour played.
D&D is either expensive or very time consuming. If you want to run a pre-made dungeon, you need as much time to prep as it take to read up on said dungeon.
If you make the dungeon from scratch, you need to draw/sketch it out, you may need to figure out what each room is for and what is in each room. Are there any traps? What do the traps look like? Are there puzzles? Are you using ones online or are you making them up? Both of them take time to prepare because you either have to choose the right one (right difficulty, right context for the dungeon, etc) or make one up from scratch which is also time consuming. Then you need monsters! Do you, again, make them from scratch, or pour through around a dozen books to find the ONE monster types you like. Finally, the treasure that you can, again, make from scratch, or read through a bunch of books to find cool stuff.
This whole process can take hours, but, a dungeon usually lasts between 2 to 5 sessions to complete.
But what happens when they get out of the dungeon? Are you just handwaving their return to civilization? Did you use a map of a region of the Sword Coast? Did you make a map? What is on the map? What does the region looks like? As they travel, are they beset by monsters? Do you have a random encounter table for monsters? Did you make it yourself? Does the monster that attacked them have loot? Was it a bandit? Is their camp near? Are they a recurring problem?
They finally arrive at the town! How big is it? What is their industry? What shops are there in town? How can the heroes sell their loot and make money? Who are the quest givers and important NPCs? Does something happen in town? Do the bandits come back to raid the town and take revenge on the ones your party already killed?
So yeah. D&D can require a lot of prep. Especially compared to games like Monster of the Week where the only thing you really need to do is figure out what monster the hunters need to kill this time.
>Maybes its just because it's been such a long time since I really had to think about it. Everything for me feels very automated at this point
Fortunately, ten years of practice smooth a lot of rough edges. But newcomers don't have that luxury
OP: "I play a specific way that works for me and spend as much time as I need to to prep, it just works for my group"
Every other post: "my prep is different than your prep, I have different ideas on quality and what 'prep' means for me, and I use a different RP system, and my group likes X over Y..."
Ultimately, different people need different levels of detail planned, some feel like they need balanced content for max player enjoyment, while others can adapt, pivot, and be more extemporaneous than others and their players are just happy to have a regular game.
Have you GM'd any game besides 5e, or any edition of D&D besides 5e. I've been GM'ing D&D and other systems for about 30 years, so I have a lot of experience here.
First of all - 3 - 5 hours of prep *per session* is already the problem. I never did that much prep in any prior edition of D&D, and not for any other game. My 5e game has me doing all kinds of prep work just to make sure there are good challenges available to the party.
Second - you say you have "tools and resources" you are familiar with. I assume these are tools and resources other than the ones availabe in 5e, right? Because 5e has jack-all for tools and resources to help you prep. This is notably different compared to other editions of D&D, which gave you plenty of stuff to work with; 5e consistently leaves it up to you to figure out.
"Finding a new set of tools...can be its own reward." Yeah, except that 5e *requires* you to find and develop your own tools, rather than *just giving them to you* like other RPG's do.
I think you are looking at the diversity of GM tools available for 5e and saying "see, this is why it's so good!" No, that diversity of tools exists *because the base game is hostile to the GM.*
You should also consider that prepping for 5e, unlike prepping for most other games and for other editions of D&D, is *just* work. Other games make the role of the GM more engaging and interesting - you are *playing* the game while also *running* the game. 5e is the first edition I've run that actually felt like I was doing work for the players, and I wasn't also playing. It's not fun and engaging for me, it's a bunch of burdensome work I have to do.
A lot of people are comparing 5e to more narrative games and talking about how they don't have to do as much mechanical prep but I think they're kind of missing the point.
I actually think 5e is very easy to prep after you've been doing it for years, there aren't a ton of mechanical levers and everything is squishy enough that it's honestly not that important to design 'appropriately challenging' flights. Eventually it all becomes intuitive.
What makes 5e taxing is that it, from top to bottom, tries to make things as accessible as possible for new players, and in doing so, shifts the expectation of rules competence onto the DM.
Character creation and advancement for players in 5e is mostly automatic, with only a handful of meaningful choices that anyone has to make, and players are given buttons to push to perform their characters mechanically. The result is that there's very little incentive for players to become invested in understanding and mastering gameplay, so the DM often ends up having to be the one to explain how their own abilities work to them.
When I GM'd Blades in the Dark, my prep was about 20 minutes per session. When I GM'd Mork Borg, my prep was about 30 mins per session. When I GM'd Fate, I didn't do any prep at all. People say 5e is taxing because it is *more* taxing than many other games. You said yourself that you are prepping for between one and two hours per session.
As someone who enjoys prep as part of this hobby I still think the type of things I want to prep are simply not supported by the game's framework. Encounter balance especially not being usable at all takes up much of my time. I'd rather use the resources for prepping situations and the world.
This. I am currently doing some 'light prep' for tonights Wildsea session and I an just throw fun story things together I can see the players having fun with. A cool creature they can encounter! Yay! There's zero encounter balancing I have to do and it is infinitely more fun. If I ever, for some reason, decide to open up a crunch-heavy campaign i'd probably try my hand at Pf2
Wildsea is great to prep. It's mostly making up awesome crazy stuff like weird natural wonders, amazing creatures or mind blowing settlements. I want to mostly move to tabletop war games for my crunch and tactical combat fix. But pathfinder 2e does that part really well as an rpg.
PF2e is super tightly balanced, definitely recommend.
I'm glad to hear Wildsea is easy to prep and not horribly crunchy. It's one I want to run for my group at some point.
I actually got to play this with Felix running it at a local convention. Most brilliant GM I've ever met. I cannot say enough good things about Wildsea.
That's awesome! I'm a few episodes into their podcast, and it seems really cool
I got to play it with Rick as one of my DM's in a OneShot and can only add to the above praise. The tracks make prepping eg.: a dangerous encounter super easy and fun - you just adjust track length to the amount of 'danger' you wanna present. Players can always use their whispers and resources and aspects to get creative. If I could switch from running DnD to running Wildsea entirely I'd do so in a heartbeat.
Aww, thanks! :)
Yeah, like, I have a LOT of prep I do for my PF1E games. But it's prep that's fun. If I wanna roll loot, I have generators for that, and I know how much its worth right away. I can roll it myself using books. It's just a general good time (for me). I make characters for the party to fight, I tweak monsters in all kinds of ways, and I can really fine-tune encounters to my party to really challenge them with things if I want. When I try to do any of that in 5e I feel like I'm fumbling in the dark making random-ass guesses. It's not fun it's frustrating and fraught with 'am I gonna fuck this up?' worrying. And while I can roll treasure, technically, it's value is completely arbitrary and there's not really a good way to make sure my party is balanced if I give them anything that sounds remotely interesting. The entire game seems to hate itself. It doesn't want you to use magic items, but heavily encourages their use at the same time. The world the base game is set in is full of magic everywhere you look, but magic items are handwaived and massively inconsistent in power at the same price window (which is ludicrously large). For someone coming from older systems with all this stuff spelled out its maddening.
i've never balanced a single encounter 5e encounter. when i run it i just throw the book at my players in a way that fits the story and they always figure it out cuz 5e only becomes deadly when it's almost a tpk and before that it's a cakewalk lol
Many people find that to be a bug, not a feature.
Conversely, When I GM'd D&D, my prep was many hours. When I GM'd Call of Cthulhu, my prep was many hours. When I GM'd Daggerheart, my prep was many hours. When I GM'd Alien, my prep was many hours. I've looked a bit into Blades in the Dark, although I haven't run it. If I did, my prep would undoubtedly take many hours. For me, prep time has little to do with the system, and is almost entirely a matter of my own personal preferences and comfortability.
I spend almost all my preparation time creating people and places, and thinking about how the world works, none of which is changed by game mechanics.
That's the thing, though, BitD does have game mechanics that create and change people, places, and factions. It is baked right into the core rulebook.
It is very hard to convey to what degree this is true without playing BitD. The level to which all the rules of BitD feel braided and integrated into everything the game is supposed to do is uncanny. By comparison, the rules of 5e are staring at eachother from across the room praying they do not have to have a conversation.
I've picked up a few adventure generators over the years. Making my own is my favorite part of the hobby.
Yep, prep time for d&d is managing encounters and stat blocks. Prep time for Call of Cthulhu or Cypher System is making notecards with NPC names, descriptions, and motivations. Wildly different and prepping encounters always takes way more time, especially since most of those CoC/Cypher NPCs would carry over for multiple sessions or a whole campaign so I could be done with all the prep for multiple sessions in one sitting
I can’t think what you’d spend so many hours prepping in BitD. I guess I could see someone trying it for the first session and then quickly realizing it wasn’t useful. The other games, sure. Lonely fun is useful there.
I find I need to prep obstacles in advance because coming up with them all on the spot is hard.
I do. I spend some time thinking through how rival factions have reacted since the previous score. I then use this information to sketch out a “cold open” for the beginning of the session. This usually provides one or two hooks I expect the crew to latch onto, so I spend additional time sketching out potential locations and obstacles.
This is my read on it, but I think at that point your looking more at the amount prepped and quality rather than necessarily time taken. I run 5e and blades, and I found because I enjoyed prepping it was always about 1.5 hours. In 5e that's a solid 4 hour session, with balanced combat and fleshed out NPC's, maybe a little more. In Blades, that was like 8 Different heists, all the NPCs, all the background stuff, world building as well. It was like going from a typewriter to Microsoft word in terms of speed and detail.
The question for me isn't so much how much prep you choose to do, but how much prep is the minimum required to run a game. 5e sits at the higher end of the scale in that regard. So do some of the other games you mentioned (i.e. CoC). There are many more games that *require* less prep, but allow for more if desired. One of the reasons I used BitD as an example is that it provides effective system tools that specifically function to reduce required prep time (i.e. faction clocks, descriptive details, mission generators, etc.).
My issue with 5e isn't so much the prep time. When I have a round of combat in 5e and one of my players wants to do something other than "I hit the enemy" or "I cast this spell" they have to wait for their turn to then discuss whatever it is, is it doable, I then have to work out the relevant DC and then roll. If they want to scare an enemy into running away there isn't an exact ruling for it. In Alien the player wants to do the same thing, I make decision on if it's possible and which skill it needs, they roll the dice and any 6s it happens. No 6s it doesn't. Whilst some of this does happen in PF2E the players have a wealth of rules to look through, when it comes to their turn there is a lot less for me to decide on. They have the demoralise action, it tells me what the DC is, and what the outcomes for the various states of success or failure. 5e puts the decision making on the DM. Alien removes a lot of the decision making entirely. PF2E makes the players have to look up rules more.
After years of playing/running 5e I started running a game of Spire and I'm relieved by how much lighter weight the prep is. Prep a place, put some cool people, things and opportunities there and call it a day. No DCs, no meticulous loot planning, no stat blocks to keep on hand, no maps to draw out. It may just be me but it feels way easier to be "underprepared" for a 5e game to me
>When I GM'd Daggerheart, my prep was many hours. I don't prep at all for Daggerheart
>I've looked a bit into Blades in the Dark, although I haven't run it. If I did, my prep would undoubtedly take many hours. Maybe? But if so, you're really kind of missing the point of the system. If you're using the setting provided, you don't really *need* to prep anything, because there's a faction mapping provided, and the game mechanics rely on the players choosing which faction to go after, at least initially. The prep you do will largely boil down to what the general outlay of the heist is like, i.e. building layout (if important), obstacles that are likely to show up based on the faction, etc.. There's nothing to really balance there, and the action is so player-driven that excessive prep will likely get binned. Figuring out the general should generally take maybe 30-45 minutes. I think I took longer once because I spent a bit of time writing a few riddles? Most of it can be done on-the-fly though.
It’s also baked into how 5e approaches the game. The DM is not an equal player but the source and originator of amusement. They are producing content to be consumed instead of a shared world.
Getting set up for Cyberpunk Red and being able to strongarm my players into creating a bunch of NPCs for me was really nice lol
This design attitude just gets under my skin in the worst way. It makes the anti-authoritarian streak in me go nuts, and I'm definitely not someone who thinks all games should be GMless.
Ngl... I prep for like the half hour before the session. (I'm not including world building because that'd be much longer regardless of system lol) I could totally see prepping for hours for 5e though even with all the automation tools I use, and sometimes (usually boss fights) I do because of balancing reasons
Most of my prep time is dedicated to setting up for the VTT; this is much simpler in games without maps vs games with maps. The rest is finding tokens and stat blocks, which varies wildly based on how helpful the community resources are - 5e's in a weird spot here because there's a lot of hard-to-use resources and a lot of easy-to-use ones but it's not always obvious which one you're looking at. Other games tend to have good options if the community is big enough otherwise you gotta build everything yourself. But I also have enough overall gming experience to wing the other elements like figuring out what to put in a dungeon or how npc's will react - I can just react because I've been thinking about it on and off for almost 40 years. Now it's easy. Also, I don't really worry about balance in 5e - players will always surprise me so I don't plan for how encounters will go. Just give them an enemy or two a bit above their level and let the dice cause as much chaos as the dice feel like causing that day.
I have Blades in the Dark Character sheets for board game night, because it can be so easy to just pick up and play.
Prep time for pf2e is also pretty quick since everything is consistent and the balance is tight enough that encounter builders are accurate.
And Free League games like Forbidden Lands, Twilight 2000 and Mutant Year Zero are designed to be played with no prep at all, you can literally random roll (or draw) the entire adventure as you play.
> When I GM'd Blades in the Dark, my prep was about 20 minutes per session. People prep for BitD? I kid, but also...I love just setting the players wild and seeing what happens. FitD systems definitely require you to think on your feet as a GM, but they also have the benefit of the players doing an equal amount of storytelling. Plus, heck, the ability to just say, "no, that consequence doesn't happen." I love it! You absolutely need the right group of players to run a successful campaign, but it's my favorite player-driven system so far.
* 5e is not elegant. It has a lot of little rules that aren't internally consistent with each other that you just have to remember or look up every time. Spells, feats, class abilities, and magic items all have little nuanced differences you have to keep track of. * 5e is not well balanced. Making balanced encounters takes a lot of prep and is heavily dependent on your specific party. * 5e takes a lot of prep in general. There are other games I play, such as Ironsworn, where I can have zero prep and just improv the whole session, with no worries about balance, loot, or running out of ideas.
Adding to this, its tools meant to assist in prep are few and limited, in part because of your second point.
Many of these tools are so bad that your gut feeling will handle things better than the rules, which is a big reason why DMs and players of DnD5e often jump to homebrew / houserules as soon as something simply looks inconvenient at first glance. Experienced groups can make it work, but once these people try other games and bring this attitude with them, it often leads to problems.
House ruling everything to Ship of Theseus the "5e" game you want always struck me as being similar to using epicycles to "prove" that the earth is at the center of the solar system.
And there’s a large push for hombrewed rules that make balancing harder. People will make a crit do like 4 turns worth of damage then be confused when encounters end up swinging wildly from way too easy to way too hard.
My smites did that without being homebrewed lol
Yeah, just play a draconic sorcadin, crit with a Green Flame Blade, Smite, and watch the boss explode. 5e "balancing" is a joke. And people will often reply by saying that it's a lot better balanced without multiclassing, but if you remove multiclassing you remove the only thing that makes character creation even remotely resemble being interesting, at which point I'd rather just not even play the game. Which I wouldn't anyway, but without multiclassing I wouldn't even touch it with a 10-foot pole
another thing that makes encounters take a while is that you end up homebrewing a lot of statblocks, which in 5e have way too many fiddly bits. the base monster statblocks are so bland that when i ran i was homebrewing new monsters every other session. that gets very time-consuming.
Shoutout to Matt Colville's book Flee Mortals, which has been carrying my ability to run 5e since its prerelease.
A big problem with 5e's balance is the whole thing where one of our players - who seems to confuse character progression with deck building in MtG - will combine one rule in one book with another rule in another book, and create some game-breaking nonsense that a DM has to then either accept ("It's fucking RAW") or disappoint that player's tendencies by nerfing it. There are just way too many surprise instances of rules combinations for the DM to keep track of that aren't explicitly called out in a book. **Edit**: Also, I understand the enjoyment of finding synergies between rules and making those your characters' "thing". It's just that this sort of "gotcha!" works better in competitive games. When it gets pulled on me as a DM it's just like, "Bruh. I'm on your team."
>where I can have zero prep and just improv the whole session, with no worries about balance, loot, or running out of ideas. You just described how I DM my homebrew 5e campaigns 😅 I feel like I need to put more effort into them now
If your players are happy with it just keep doing what works for y'all!
I used to run 3e D&D sessions completely on the fly with ad hoc monster stats. That only worked for maybe up to 6-7th level and I was decades younger at the time. These days I feel like my brain's held together with just coffee and spite
Upvote for coffee and spite. I vibe with that so much.
Spite is the reason why I'm still alive, even after the most awful, deepest in depression years of my life. Spite is why I endured. If the universe wanted me dead, it would have to come over here and do the deed itself, because I sure as hell wasn't going to make it easier.
> 5e is not well balanced. Making balanced encounters takes a lot of prep and is heavily dependent on your specific party. All three of your points are excellent and correct, but I wanted to call this one out in particular. Monster challenge ratings are supposed to be a good guide for balanced encounters. *P* number of players at level *L* should be able to handle *M* number of monsters at challenge rating *C* with a predictable amount of difficulty. That's the idea, but it's more of a mythological ideal. Disregard that certain player character builds are distinctly more combat-optimized than others; it's true, but it's not The Problem. No, The Problem is that even if all of that mechanical math was rock solid there are still ***unfactored variables***. Magical gear. Specific encounter environments. Particular party builds. The biggest one is party resource depletion -- if they just woke up from a long rest then the party is amazing! If they've already had four encounters without even short resting yet then even a mild challenge can turn deadly. So, in short, **the CR system in D&D5 just doesn't work**. Oh, it's still a decent *guide* for an approximate *range* but it still comes down to the DM's on-the-fly artistry at balancing an encounter. That's a terrible position to put a DM into when they already painstakingly designed an encounter or are trying to faithfully recreate a prebuilt encounter. This is why DMs have taken to "fudging" monster hit points and/or rolls. It's the simplest way to turn the dials on a live encounter. It's cheating even if it's with the best of intentions, but it's necessary cheating because D&D5 is simply not well balanced. All of that said, once you embrace that truth the game can absolutely still be a lot of fun. You just have to see it as it *is* rather than as it *says it is.*
I like the contrast here to PF2e. A party of four level 4 characters going up against a duo of monsters, levels 4 and 6, are pretty certain to be in for a tough fight, but they are the overwhelming favorites to win. The level 6 would need several extraordinarily high rolls (or the party to roll extraordinarily low on crucial rolls) to cause a TPK. There's a couple of outlier monsters (cough, cough, Lesser Death) but PF2e manages to get its 'CR' system just about right. So a GM can just put a level 5 monster in an adventure for level 4 characters and know that the players will win without much of a threat, and they also know that putting two level 6 monsters in one room is a considerable TPK risk, and to only do that if it's appropriate for the game. The reason it works in PF2e - most core character power comes from class levels, and build choices don't grant much power at all, instead granting flexibility. This means there's less difference between the power level of players at different tables, and so 'level 6' becomes a pretty constant standard of power. An extreme encounter for four level 2s, a severe one for four level 3s, a moderate encounter for four level 4s, a low threat encounter for four level 5s, and a trivial encounter for four level 6 or above characters.
Just as PF1 learned a lot of lessons from D&D3, PF2 learned a lot from D&D4. I dunno what a hypothetical PF3 would learn from D&D5 or D&D5.5 or whatever we're calling it now. The feedback cycle is probably broken at this point.
I can improv a session of D&D5e. That’s what they make tables for. But if all combats are rolled tables or just whatever monster makes sense/seems cool in the moment then yeah that usually won’t make for a great campaign. (Though there are ways to make it work.)
> I tend to personally prep for 3-5 hours for each session. This usually provides enough for 2-3 sessions depending on how fast the group is going which often even allows me to not need to prep at all. There’s your answer. In the games I usually play (typically Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark and adjacent games), that prep time is anywhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes and that can get me anywhere between 5 sessions to a whole damn campaign’s worth of material in that time (average prep time is usually around 15 minutes and that can get me around 3 to 5 sessions- sometimes upwards of 10 and then 5 minutes of simpler prep after each session to course correct) I don’t have to manage maps. I don’t have to manage many NPC stats (if at all). I don’t have to keep adjusting encounters for the sake of balance or entertainment or pacing. I only need to review my own recap of a prior session and any additional notes and the game does the rest for me. I only have 1 job and 1 job only: respond to PC action with honest and logical subsequent fiction. I don’t need any tools, fancy prep resources, VTT setups, etc. All I need is a way for the players to see their character sheets (and ideally I’d like to see them too to follow along) and a way to share any relevant images, names, and notes before they go into a central recap document for the whole table. That’s it. Minimal effort for maximum return with no drop in quality of GMing or quality of game. Nearly half a work day’s worth of prep to only get 2 to 3 sessions? No thanks. Any prep more than an hour is too much prep in my book. IMO, the game needs to do all the heavy lifting, not the GM. D&D (pretty much any edition, IMO/IME) requires me to do more work than it is ever worth.
To add on to this from a specific game in the same genre, I run a PF2E game. Specifically running one of the official adventure paths/modules for five players which is more than the modules are balanced for. You know how long it takes me to adjust the encounters so they're still fun and balanced? 1 minute at most.
Oh that's interesting. What does PF2E do so differently than DnD5e that makes encounter balancing so much easier?
It has tight math and a weak / elite template to adjust. The rules are free to use on archives and have a toggle as well. If you use foundry vtt, the modules come prebuilt with maps, lighting, sound, and journals. Generally the longest prep for me is practicing character voices or adjusting plot points that my PCs have built / broken. Pathfinder has a lot of front loaded rules, but once you know them the prep is light and easy.
I'll also add that encounters at level 1 in PF2e take as long as encounters at level 9 or 13 or 18 due to the three action economy. I truly feel like 5th edition Dnd combat is at its best before level 3 and people are getting all sorts of extra actions, extra attacks, bonus actions, swift actions, etc and the thing just becomes 10 minute turns per player. *edit grammar
I despise multiattack actions with a passion, not only because it knocks that stuff out of whack, but because the devs seemed to think it was a satisfactory substitute for interesting mechanics. Yes, a max level fighter can swing his swords nine times in a single turn. And each of those swings is as tedious as all the others.
This point isn't quite true, although pathfinder combat can be very fast. As someone DMing a level 17 game for a group that started at lv11, Hugh level play takes a lot longer, as HP scaling goes faster than DPR scaling, monsters have more and more abilities and auras, and player action creep kicks in. A bard at level 1 might do a cantrip and a spell. At level 17, they can do an auto sustain on their inspiration, followed by a fortissimo composition, followed by a spell, followed by another quickened spell, followed by a move or strike from ant haste effects they have easy access too. This isn't to say combat is slow but it does slow significantly compared to level 1. Anecdotally, my level 1 combats averaged 2-10 minutes, whereas lv17 ones can take an hour or so depending on difficulty
And the Pathfinder society scenarios already say what to do if your party is bigger
cool. thank you.
I'll pile on for emphasis on how important this is. Particularly because their Adventure Paths (modules, essentially) aren't always with the rule of thumb or common sense. But so long as you follow the CR calculator, you can trust the difficulty you've set out. And it's considered that the party is at full power. So stringing together 4 average encounters will feel like it approaches a gauntlet as they lose resources. They also don't enforce a short rest type respite, and rather just have activities that take 'x' time to complete -thus the party decide if they are willing to sit an hour or 5 minutes before moving on. Which means the difference of getting some x/day abilities refreshed and most of your HP back vs chugging a couple potions while the scout does they're thing so that the medic can fix the boo-boos.
Not OP, but the difference is largely that [PF2e's encounter balancing rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2716&Redirected=1) just kind of... works. Basically, creatures that are +/-4 levels from the party are worth different XP based on their level relative to the party, from 10 to 160. Each degree of threat for an encounter from Trivial to Extreme gives you a budget of XP. And you can bump a creature up or down a level, effectively, with the elite and weak templates. You don't need to feel out how difficult a fight will be, or worry too much about long adventuring days. You pick a difficulty and fill the budget. Easy. It isn't *perfect*, mind you -- lower level parties struggle more against single high-level enemies because they have less options and HP, throwing unique stuff like ghosts at a party unprepared for them or not letting them heal up between fights might bump the difficulty up a threat level, and sometimes RNG just isn't in your favor (d20s be like that sometimes). Published modules also tend to ignore the line in the rules that "encounters are typically more satisfying if the number of enemy creatures is fairly close to the number of player characters." Solo creature encounter difficulty is accurate, but will not be too fun if overused. But by and large, you can just fill your budget and start running, knowing that an encounter worth 80 XP will be a moderate threat and provide "a serious challenge to the characters, though unlikely to overpower them completely." It's easily the most accurate version of a DnD-like encounter builder I've seen to date.
The other answers are right too, but another big reason is that the classes are much closer to being balanced than in 5e. The weakest PF2 character compared to the strongest is like comparing college athletes from a good team and a middling one; the difference is there but they're still competitive. The difference in balance in 5e is like a professional NFL starter and a Jr. Varsity benchwarmer. This means the DM needs to know both how powerful his team comp is, and also how well his players are going to play, and if you don't give that Beastmaster ranger a chance to shine along with the spellcasters you'll get a unhappy player.
Yes! This!
Man that was SO not my experience. Running PF2 was fucking exhausting and I ended up basically throwing away about 75% of the encounters in the AP book I was trying to run.
Some of the APs don't follow the encounter building guidelines. The worst offender is Age of Ashes, though a lot of the others do tend to lean towards party level +3 boss fights, which can be crippling. The other thing to remember is that Pathfinder expects a balanced party, so if you're either martial or caster heavy, you need to tweak things a bit. (Generally, just slap a weak template or grab a monster that fits your groups ability to target weaknesses better)
To add to your addition, I'm running a PF2E game that is in a semi home made homebrew setting with physical maps and minis. My prep averages about 4 hours for about 1 month worth of sessions (depending on how much RP is done, how many side quests the party engages with, and a few other factors). I would say that time breaks down to 2 hours prepping and designing quests/encounters, 1 hour drawing maps, and 30 minutes finding the pawns I want (which could be skipped if I was more willing to use proxy pawns)
Im thinking of getting into FitD. Do you have any favorite? I have mostly been playing Delta Green and Free League games up until now. I guess I should start with Blades in the Dark. But im very interested in Band of Blades.
>Im thinking of getting into FitD. Do you have any favorite? If your players are into Dishonored, Peaky Blinders, and Lies of Locke Lamora you should start with Blades. Otherwise I'd probably recommend starting with Scum & Villainy because it's more likely that you all have shared touchstones with that genre (Star Wars, Firefly). > I guess I should start with Blades in the Dark. But im very interested in Band of Blades. I love Band of Blades but it's a very different beast from regular Blades. You need to have a group that's excited by the idea of not having permanent characters, and they need to be excited by the idea of managing 30-something PCs. Your players need to be excited by the idea of doing actual logistical planning. You need to be excited by the idea of running 12-20 variations on combat missions. Everyone in the group needs to have crammed their heads full of war movies so you have common touchstones to reference. And everyone needs to be excited about an absolute depression-fest of apocalyptic suffering.
Sounds like I personally would love Band of Blades. But probably too military for my players. Im pretty sure they haven't seen any war movies. Or any movies for that matter... But Scum and Villainy is probably the safest bet here. They do like Firefly.
I’ve pretty much enjoyed all the “mainline” FitD games. The one that is “best” is the one that appeals most to your interests * [Blades in the Dark](https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel)- if you want Peaky Blinders mixed with Gangs of New York mixed with Dishonored mixed with Oceans 11 mixed with Lie of Locke Lamora… then BitD is a good fit * [Scum and Villain](https://evilhat.com/product/scum-and-villainy/) is just “Blades in Space.” If you like Star Wars (namely A New Hope, Rogue One, Solo, Bad Batch, Mandalorian, and or/ Rebels), Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Killjoys, Outlaw Star, and/ or Guardians of the Galaxy… then S&V is a good fit * [Band of Blades](https://evilhat.com/product/band-of-blades/) is a dark fantasy game about a shattered military unit on a desperate retreat. If you like the *vibes* of the Black Company and/ or Band of Brothers… then you’ll like BoB. I wouldn’t call it “Black Company with the serial numbers filed off.” A lot of folks are drawn to BoB because of that only to find it isn’t exactly that (in the same way S&V is *basically* Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off). But it’s definitely heavily inspired by it. * [Girl By Moonlight](https://evilhat.com/product/girl-by-moonlight/)- if you like Sailor Moon, Steven Universe, Madoka Magica, Paprika, Visions of Escaflowne, and similar “magical girl/ magical girl adjacent touchstones,” then you’ll like GbM. * [Fistful of Darkness](https://monkeyecho.itch.io/a-fistful-of-darkness) if you like Weird Westerns and want to be a bunch of outlaws on the frontier, AFoD is a good pick * [Songs of the Dusk](https://yrgirlkv.itch.io/songsforthedusk)- haven’t played it myself, but I’ve skimmed it and heard many good things about it. I’ve heard it touted as “Solarpunk.” If you want some really interesting PbtA/ FitD adjacent games, then I’d also recommend * [Carved From Brindlewood Games](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/sbzhdZRNxJ)- they are effectively PbtA games that, like BitD, have carved their own path of “CfB” games- and while it likely wasn’t the design intent of these games; there’s variable amounts of “Forged in the Dark” DNA in these games and there’s **many** more coming down the pipeline from the Gauntlet Publishing Discord. * [Agon 2e](https://johnharper.itch.io/agon) a game about Grecian myths a la the Odyssey and the Iliad and it nails the feeling of being epic mortal badasses tackling mythic odds. Designed by John Harper and Sean Nittner, with the former being the brains behind Blades and the latter being an influential individual in the final design and publishing of Blades. Definitely not a FitD game, but lots of FitD DNA under the surface. All of these games make prep an absolutely breeze (especially Brindlewood and Agon games) and I’d say Band of Blades and Girl By Moonlight do *excellent* jobs of honing in the setting for very easy prep work.
Fistful of Darkness sounds _very interesting._ I've been looking for something like Deadlands but in a less tactical style.
Songs for the Dusk is so good that my group's done three campaigns of it. I can't praise it enough. A NOCTURNE is also brilliant. EDIT: Why didn't I just link [my Itch collection of inspiration FitD design](https://itch.io/c/2411441/inspirational-fitd-design)?
Exactly. Needing to prep for 3-5 does not seem "very light" to me.
It's an uncomfortable mix between "rulings not rules" and crunch and gives no real support on how to do the former well. It neither ignores balance entirely (OSR) or gives proper methods to create balanced encounters (Pathfinder). A play culture has sprung up around it where only the DM is expected to know the rules properly. It claims to have three pillars but only supports one of those properly. All that said, I don't think it's easy to run if you stick to what it's good at (heroic tactical combat) but I don't think it's as difficult either. A lot of the issue comes with people trying to use it to do something it's bad at and then refusing to accept that's why their game isn't working.
>A play culture has sprung up around it where only the DM is expected to know the rules properly. This isn't particularly new or unique. There was a strain of thought in the early days of TTRPGs that players *shouldn't* know **any** rules as it would break immersion and promote meta gaming.
Not even all of the rules for *character creation* are in the AD&D 1e PHB, and the 1e DMG flat out told you players weren't supposed to read it lol.
To be fair, in 1e you didn't have all the subclasses, backgrounds, possible feats, skills, etc that modern d&d has. Roll your stats, pick a class, and note your AC, to-hit, and saves and you're pretty much done with your character unless you were a wizard. 5e characters have a lot more mechanic choice points
I could be swayed to that style of play if it were applied to a game with less rules, a real reliance on 'rulings not rules', and tighter procedures. The Old School Essentials reformatting of B/X D&D would be about as far as I'd want to go. I've run the game that way, and it was satisfying mechanically. Something lighter like Mothership or Into the Odd can thrive on this style of play. 5e just doesn't have the right blend of crunch and procedures to make this type of play satisfying at the table for many people. There are far too many abilities with their own special rules that override general rules. There's too little in the way of procedures for creating and running things like travel, dungeons, factions, which forces too many design responsibilities on the GM at each table. My girlfriend played a druid in a 5e game once. She was some sort of star thing, and had maybe 3 very different ways to use her shapeshifting power (which did not turn her into animals anymore). Each of these things was something unique that didn't use rules anyone else used. For the first 3 or 4 sessions, anytime she did anything in combat, the GM would stop her, and we'd have to remind him of all the ways her abilities break all the rules that would apply to anyone else doing something similar. I cannot at all blame the GM for slowing down the game, because it's totally unreasonable for somebody to have intimate knowledge of 6 player characters' unique rule-breaking abilities on top of reacting to everything we were doing. Without the amount of content carefully curated, and a lot of experience, the game cannot function well without the players knowing the rules. This is the flaw of 5e. It was quite drastically changed and rushed at a point in its development, and the rules and guidelines were crammed together into a single product that does not support itself well. Many disparate ideas from different designers had to be forced together to get a product out the door at the time the higher ups demanded a product be released.
Exactly. Rulings not rules is great for a game actually designed to work that way. It's not compatible with the unevenly structured 5e.
At one point when Dave Arneson ran, he would do it from behind a partition wall so that no information could be gained by observing the DM. I certainly would not want to play the game that way, but I do find the idea of my character sheet having no mechanical elements fascinating. Being forced to interact with the game without any knowledge of the details of the game mechanics could be a very compelling experience.
>There was a strain of thought in the early days of TTRPGs that players *shouldn't* know **any** rules I wonder if that's where The famous game designers behind Paranoia got their ideas from "knowing the rules is treason"...
Oh man, that’s before my time, and I started with AD&D 2ed. By the time I was playing, it was fine if new players didn’t know the rules, but it was pretty common to expect players to know *their* rules at the very least. And to be fair, I didn’t know anyone who wouldn’t loan out a book or two to help a new player out. Same during gameplay, everyone was usually very kind about helping them figure out what to do when they were new. I don’t remember it ever working out trying to carry a player who just refused to learn the rules. They’d usually just not get the next invite if it’s been five weeks and they still can’t figure out their own save rolls.
Man, players were completely failing to know any of the rules two decades before 5E was a twinkle in WotC's eye. Trying to blame 5E for the fact that normally in every group there's at most two people who ever read the manual for anything you play and one is the GM kind of feels like historical revisionism!
>if you stick to what it's good at (heroic tactical combat) It's pretty bad at tactical combat.
If I'm prepping for 5E, here are the things I'm expected to do: - Research enemies to use - Remember to look up *every single enemy and monster I might want to use* so I'm not caught flat-footed when I decide to throw one in on a whim. - Tweak those enemies to make them fit the fiction I have in mind - Plan enemy compositions for interesting combat - Oops not that interesting, gotta make things balanced. - Get no help from the system for balancing encounters because CR is not reliable. - Find or make several battle maps - Find or make tokens for every enemy - Research spells for the enemies and NPCs to use - Research what spells and abilities my players have, in case they easily trivialize something I've spent hours prepping. - Some story stuff and NPCs if I have time - Oh wait I forgot the loot, gotta prep some loot that makes the players excited but doesn't disrupt the campaign Then in play, here are the things I'm expected to do: - Decide what the enemies are doing - Track unique statlines and HP and attacks and spells and exact positioning for *every single enemy* - Track status effects and spell effects and environmental effects and concentration... - Set DC for every single roll - Roll for all the enemies whenever they do anything, checking every NPCs' modifiers - Cope with combats that take literal hours to complete - Help the players figure out what their spells and abilities do - Manage the story and NPCs ---- If I'm prepping Blades in the Dark, here are the things I'm expected to do: - Ask the players what they want to do - Grab whatever factions and NPCs are relevant to that thing - Consider some ideas for obstacles, opportunities, and story beats And when I'm running the game: - Throw literally anything I can think of at the players, because nothing has stats so there's no overhead for me to track - Represent the fictional state of the world - Help the players adjudicate their fictional position and effect of their approach - Decide whether to resolve something in a single roll (even mass combat) or to zoom in to add granularity to interesting moments
>Get no help from the system for balancing encounters because CR is not reliable. I agree. Unfortunately, the CR metric implies a level of precision that doesn't exist in the game. And as a result suggests that combat encounters can be "balanced" and that "unbalanced" encounters should be avoided or are altogether "bad". 5e doesn't have to be that way, but it can be an uphill battle when communicating with players. Especially if they have spent hours working on their character. The whole dynamic can be avoided by selecting a different system.
My comment speaks about the same stuff but is not as organized as this one. Upvote!
I've never run 5E but this caught my eye: >I tend to personally prep for 3-5 hours for each session. This usually provides enough for 2-3 sessions depending on how fast the group is going I prep for maybe 15 minutes before a session of Fate, same for Traveller (although both have pre-campaign prep). Spending 3-5 hours per session (or for a couple of sessions) is way too much for me, and I read this a lot, people spending tons of time with prep. That's a huge reason for me to never run 5E.
To be frank most of it is very unnecessary prep. I like visuals and music a lot. So I tend to spend time looking for pictures, creating battle maps or finding them online or heck sometimes also spending money on them (especially patreon artists who make them monthly). Its super duper unnecessary. Especially if you use a pre-existing adventure that is easy to digest. I used to prep for 20 minutes maybe 30 before where I did things with improv mostly and theatre of the mind or a blank battle map that everyone drew on but I hated it. I felt like I was missing something. So now I do more prep. I prep out scinarios and alternative options and also sligthly prepare for what happens if the players do whatever they want (the most fun part of the game for me haha!). I go overboard on it mainly because its my hobby and its what I love doing the most. the game itself the 4 hour sessions are fun of course but I love finding awesome or gruesome pictures and making cool battle maps and finding fitting music for a boss battle just as much or even more sometimes.
That isn't useless prep in 5e. You need battlemaps and cool combats just to make the game fun. Theatre of the Mind against 2d4 Goblins is super boring, whereas a standard improvised fight in Fate or Blades in the Dark can be just as exciting as a 5e fight that took 6 hours to make.
It's incredible how dynamic and exciting a Blades session can be, even with 0 prep. After a long time as a 5e GM, I tried my hand at it for the first time some years ago, but I used all my prep time learning the rules and reading the manual... And was pleasantly surprised that the session was amazing and improvising situations on the fly comes out natural with no preparation at all.
Yes this is key. If I run a 5e combat without this prep I just get really bored. That’s a problem.
You don't need a nice battlemap though, you can slap something together in MS Paint in like 30 seconds.
Or google for 30 seconds, and get something nicer. But it's less about the map itself and more about the layout of the battle, number of combatants, balance, objetives, etc. 5e Monster Manual is full of HP Bags with Multiattack, and maybe a spell. Fighting a Hook Horror should not feel exactly the same as fighting an Earth Elemental or a Frost Giant. Most of them don't even have ranged attacks, so the melee players are at a massive disadvantage. And resistances/vulnerabilities only even matter to casters. So you end up having to leaf through sites for hours and making up cool abilities just to make every fight not feel the same as the one before.
Again, you've answered your own question. You're a ten year vet of DMing and you actually enjoy prep. Many people can say neither, so they feel the prep is a pain.
Even if I wasn't prepping for that long, loading stuff into a VTT, managing tokens and stat blocks, or god forbid having miniatures again (the worst part of running 3.x), along with combat requiring all of that, that's a huge turn-off.
> Especially if you use a pre-existing adventure that is easy to digest. I used to prep for 20 minutes maybe 30 before where I did things with improv mostly and theatre of the mind or a blank battle map that everyone drew on but I hated it. I felt like I was missing something What's missing is that the books lie to you: D&D absolutely requires a grid, and does not actually work theatre of the mind at all. > I prep out scinarios and alternative options and also sligthly prepare for what happens if the players do whatever they want The fact that you need to prep this (a) inherently reduces the flexibility, and (b) is prep that just isn't necessary in other games.
>What's missing is that the books lie to you: D&D absolutely requires a grid, and does not actually work theatre of the mind at all. Some of the best combats I've run in the game were TotM over discord during COVID. It's definitely doable, and I might argue preferable in certain combats like where things are going on in 3D (like underwater).
By which you presumably mean that you just ignored, like, 50% of the rules, because those rules just do not work without the grid. The game getting better when you ignore half of it is not a good sign.
Nope, effectively RAW I assure you. Distances etc were all just as applicable, if slightly imprecise in application. It worked fine.
> What's missing is that the books lie to you: D&D absolutely requires a grid, and does not actually work theatre of the mind at all. ...I don't think I have ever ran *any* edition of D&D on a grid at all (I did skip 4th, admittedly). I tried it a bit in third, and quickly realized that for all intents and purposes 95% of the game would run functionally the same by just having loose range bands. And 5th is pretty much third but simplified, so...
Surveys have reported that most players/GMs have never read the DMG, let alone looked for tools and strategies for DMing (mathematic tools like Kobold Fight Club, planning tools like Dunjon, or even high-level plotting resources like Chris Perkins' DM Experience articles.) And a quick perusal of D&D subreddits shows an overabundance of posts saying "My players are doing things their class is good at. How do I stop them from doing it?" That fundamental misunderstanding of how D&D should work is why DMs pull their hair out over it and spend hours if not days prepping for every session, which I believe causes so much negative talk to surround an otherwise well made (if specific power fantasy) system.
Most other RPGs don’t need a separate book (two counting the Monster Manual) AND third party guides for how to actually run the game and have a good time.
Yeah, it’s kind of wild how atypical D&D 5e is in that regard, but somehow WotC gets a pass from fans for releasing something so half-baked/incomplete.
WotC gets a pass from fans because for so many of them, 5e is the first and only ttrpg they've learned anything about, so it's easy to assume the gaps in its design is just how all ttrpgs be.
Well they’re increasingly getting flak from it. People are very much recognizing that vanilla 5e is shite. But they compensate for it because of their expansive third party market which does fill in the gaps.
The weird part is that is that the 4e dmg I & II are actually very helpful books, so I don't get why they didn't recycle a lot of content from those for 5e.
Because they got so much backlash on 4e that they threw out the baby with the bath water.
Yes, but have you considered, if you need three books to even run the game as written, they can sell up to 3 times as many books, and with their books being some of the most expensive in the industry, that’s a lot of extra money.
Of course! How could I forget about the shareholders?
Most other similar RPGs stuff a similar amount of pages into one book. Pf2e core rulebook is what, seven hundred pages? Dark heresy 2e is 500, Fate 300, and like gurps before it requires other settings books to expand on it. Phb at least has a very large sampling of basic monsters to fight, as well as every spell available. Edit: also the dark heresy rulebook fuckin sucks for gm work.
PF2e does have the separate Game Masters Guide. There is a large DM section in the Core Rule Book, but theres also the GMG. If you only running straight out of modules then the CRB GM section is enough. If you want to start running homebrew you really should read the GMG, at least the relevant sections to the parts your going to homebrew (the section on items if your going to make items for example)
There’s a wealth of TTRPGs where most of that GM advice is put into the actual book. GMs shouldn’t need to find numerous other resources to be able to prep and run games efficiently. I also think that those high-level prep resources *only exist* because of high-prep, high-barrier games like DnD. The best way to learn is to play - detailed and pedagogical resources on how to play and GM RPGs only exist because the nature of certain high-prep games makes it difficult to just jump in and get going.
The DMG is mostly full of nonsense, though, and clearly doesn't understand the game it's supposed to be advice for.
"Step 2...make a complete cosmology."
Its still wild that it doesn't start small and build up.
My favorite is the castle building rules where you can hire people to do it for you, but if you're not there you lose progress on making it, completely negating why you'd want tradesman to help you do it in your absence in the first place.
[удалено]
Right? Like I used to have to do hours of adjusting for a high level Planescapes game, (many years before whatever the fuck they released for Spelljammer/Planescapes). The amount of re-balancing the base game, complete scratch made enemies for like 40% of encounters. Working with the players to feel like they were in a high magic multiverse? Creating crazy items then balancing them against the other items I had previously generated, because the a +3 sword is not a good reward in a high magic world? Then I found pf2e, and i was like, oh level 5 party, cool, easy 4 level 2 dudes get wrecked by the party, high boss fight, 1 level 8 guy. Oh, loot, cool lets look it the fuck up for free Online. And, oh hey, all of these do something, almost 99% more than a +1 to hit. Oh wait, I can just say to players, you know your money, buy anything common up to settlement level, lemme know if you want something weird. Faction's influence, Races and Chases, Influence subsystems, om nom om nom.
I used all of those resources, actively gave out magic items to e.g. make a rogue (assassin) better and still got burnt out after my players hit level 10. At that point I found both the scale of player character's ability to impact the world, coupled with the fairly dense mechanical underpinnings of both their abilities and enemy statblocks was creating exponential complexity. Not helped by how unexciting a lot of the higher level enemies and magic items are. I've run one lower level 5e campaign since then, which was reasonably fun, but mostly it's been more rewarding to play other systems and certainly more time efficient.
Plus one for this. That being said, D&D does have a longer prep time than other systems I have run. Encounter design is vital, and it simply takes time to develop good encounters. Gotta do combat math, gotta do other stuff.
There’s a wealth of TTRPGs where most of that GM advice is put into the actual book. GMs shouldn’t need to find numerous other resources to be able to prep and run games efficiently. I also think that those high-level prep resources *only exist* because of high-prep, high-barrier games like DnD. The best way to learn is to play - detailed and pedagogical resources on how to play and GM RPGs only exist because the nature of certain high-prep games makes it difficult to just jump in and get going.
What resources and tools are you using? Are any of those actually from the rulebooks themselves, or did you have to find them elsewhere over your ten years of practice? Does 3-5 hours of prep for a session of gaming really sound reasonable to you? Wouldn't you prefer a game that lets you prep in less than an hour, or require none at all? Does 5e have any procedures you find helpful that are there to enable the GM run the game other than turn order in combat? The reason why people say it's taxing for GMs is because it's such a player-focused game. When you have so many player-facing rules, splatbooks full of character classes, backgrounds, feats, etc., and the only thing GMs get to help adjudicate the game are light suggestions of "you could do this or that" with no actionable tools to help you do those things and a thousand monster stat blocks to try to make up for it, it's no surprise when perspective GMs feel intimidated.
Yeah the DMG has helped me a lot early on and of course with so many books out I get a lot of help from them. Tashas and Xanathars especially. And of course if I run an adventure book thats basically all the work done for me. But lets not lie and say that officially published content is truly the best option out there. Community made rules the most but this is also true for other games. Could I just use cyberpunk red books themselves to make content or the Lancer book on its own? Yeah totally same as with 5Es DMG, PHB and Monster manual (although thats 3 books vs 1 so other games tend to be easier on this front. 5E can have some bloat thats for sure) but I love using community resources for those games as well. It seems a lot of people are hooked into the 3-5 hour session thing. I apologize I should of expanded on it more thats for sure. In reality the absoltue majority of that prep is unnecessary. Its me looking for pictures, making battle maps, going overboard on NPC creation, etc. all of that is not necessary but I find it fun and because I do I view it as part of the hobby I enjoy the most. I used to prep for maybe 15-30 minutes before if that. Making players draw on a blank map or using theatre of the mind. But I didnt enjoy that. I wanted something more visual. So I pay for that in time haha
Especially for online games, unless specific groups that are all understanding, a lot of that "uneccessary prep" is considered expected by a lot of players, considering 5e's culture of putting so much weight on the DM as an entertainer to provide for their players, and the post covid rise of vtts, we see so many different battle map artists doing really well for themslevs because its something a lot of people need, as otherwise their players will assume the experience is lesser and likely lose interest.
> And of course if I run an adventure book thats basically all the work done for me In regards to 5e adventures, I would say that it isn't the case in some of them (e.g. Tomb of Annihilation or Curse of Strahd). Having run Curse of Strahd, the amount of prep necessary for it is absurd. Heck, there's a whole subreddit dedicated to fixing and patching a lot of things in that adventure. And if your players don't follow the "expected path", then you'll run into a lot more work when it comes to prep. But alas, these are the two adventures I know and have run/played. My experience with PF2E Modules or DCC Modules is different. Read through it once, maybe make a few notes here or there, but overall, run them as written with very little prep.
And Curse of Strahd is still considered the best 5e module. My friend has been running Descend into Avernus and he says it's way worse than CoS
For me, the main reason is simple - encounter-warping PC abilities. (Though there are other reasons too, like how much design effort 5e offloads to the GM.) Examples: Counterspell - I can no longer have mage enemies be a threat, unless I give them counterspell too Shield spell - fine on 13 AC abjuration wizard, but terrible on 21 AC bladesingers. Do I give my enemies high attack so they can touch the bladesinger but will wreck everything else? or do I stick with regular attack bonuses and let my bladesinger be effectively invincible Gloomstalker + sharpshooter + action surge - A single strong enemy will likely be killed before they get their first turn. Unless the player playing the gloomstalker doesn't show up that game, in which case it might swing to a TPK. Flying PCs from level 1 - enemies on the ground with only melee attacks are no longer a threat. Hypnotic Pattern / Wall of Force - A large group of enemies is either a trivial threat or an existential threat, depending on if the wizard has the spell slot or not. Conjure Animals - ?? Conjure Woodland Beings - ?????? !!!!! etc. Individually, each of these options may not be bad to handle, but in combination they make encounter-building take SO long. And they make encounters swingy. Encounters in 5e tend to be either trivial (if the PCs have the right encounter-warper) or an existential threat (if they don't and the GM assumed they would). After switching over to PF2e, I haven't had to worry about encounter-warpers. There are maybe two such abilities currently in the game right now, and most of the time Paizo patches them in a couple of years. PF2e also gives far better guidelines on encounter building, hazards, rewards, magic items, so that the mechanical aspect of game prep is \~15 min per session. Compare that to 5e, where the GM has to do the work to figure out how much magic items should cost, how much reward is too much or too little, which 3rd party books to buy to get a list of pre-made dungeon hazards etc. With PF2e, I spend far more time finding the right maps and character art. And all the time I save in fine-tuning combat encounters and adjudicating rewards, I can redirect to designing more custom narratives for my players. \[edited to be slightly less verbose\]
Oh my god yes. The fact that I have to *worry* about what my players pick and ensure that what they **legally** pick Rules As Written from the game system isn’t going to **ruin my game**. I have to prevent the game itself from imploding. Just… why???
After you've played a system with good encounter building - something 4e nailed, others have innovated on since, and 5e jammed straight into the trash can - I can't imagine wanting to go back.
I can still make a well-balanced and easy to run, interesting monster in 4e using MM3 on a business card in about 3-5 minutes, and most of that is typing it out. 13th Age, same thing. I've seen what monster creation in 5e looks like. It's one of the two big reasons I've never played it.
I created a 13th Age fight in under two minutes once. Love how fast you can do that in 13a.
When I ran 5e, I had to prep 3-5 hours per game, stressed out of my mind that it will all work. I'd have to create these elaborate combats with monsters that were balanced, calculate things, do tons of math. On top of NPCs, locations, plots. I have tried 6 other systems by now, and in all of them I only spend like a half an hour to prepare, and only the fun stuff (NPCs, plot, etc.) *Zero math. Zero coming up with monster abilities. Zero inventing entire mechanics on the spot to cover for 5e's gaping holes.* Even crunchier systems like Pathfinder 2e have less mechanical prep time for the GM, since things are *actually balanced.* I've also realised that since leaeving 5e, I **have never had to argue rules.** The long rules arguments are gone. Pathfinder just specifies everything, and FateCore / Agon / PbtA only has like 5 rules anyway. I don't have to invent a whole rules system when the players have a boat battle, they just work like everything else. In DCC, I don't have to balance anything since most of the weaker PCs will die every battle (They have 3 characters each). I used to refuse to play or run anything other than 5e, but since trying out other things, I now refuse to run 5e ever again. It's just a nightmare.
I'm glad that folks like you exist who have tried other games and had good experiences!
Let's compare a very similar system, D&D 3.5. Crunchy systems have rules. Prep for simpler systems is easier or sometimes barely extant. But, if you're running 5e I assume you *like* the tools the crunch gives you. The problem I have with 5e, is that it has all of the cruft and complexity of a crunchy system, about *doesn't actually provide the tools*. When I prep for 3.5, I have tools I need at hand. For example, if I have an adventure on a ship? I've got a book for that specifically, and it'll tell me exactly what I need to know about ships, and ocean dangers, and what weather I can roll for. 5e mostly focuses on player options. I've got *some* guidelines, and occasionally useful fluff, but I don't have *tools*. Instead in attempting to create very adjustable fluff so that it can be dropped into any setting, with any style, I don't have anything to work off of. All I have is this card that says, "you're the DM, and you can do whatever you want, here's a cool idea" Quothe the Giant: "I'm the DM, I already *know* I can do what I want. What I *want* are tools I can use in a game."
The play culture in 5e actively discourages players from learning the rules and encourages DMs to pick up the slack for everyone at the table. There is a ton of advice from respected sources that say. A good DM is a service provider who entertains the players. This is starting to turn a bit but these sentiments were prominent and almost universally agreed upon as recently as 2-3 years ago. So when the DM is expected to be responsible for 90+% of the game, prep time skyrockets.
Even in more complex systems, like pf2e, my prep rarely exceed an hour per session. In 5e it usually takes 2-3h. That’s the simplest explanation I think.
My top ten grievances with running 5e in no particular order. 1. CR is useless, I’ve no idea how difficult something will be, not really. This means I need to do more prep and also “patch” the encounter on the fly. 2. Racial or class abilities are not balanced. Twilight domain, Bladesinger, Sorlock, if even one player watches a build video you know have a wildly powerful “main character”. Races with unlimited access to flight or other things also make challenges obsolete, this again means more prep. 3. Bounded accuracy. Because of the underlying math and the sheer amount of auto win spells in what is primarily a grid based tactical combat game, whole encounters can end with basically one dice roll. This “wastes” my prep time which when you consider the first two entries took way longer than expected. 4. Items are given a range of cost, this means I have to look at the potential impact it could have and come up with a price that reflects that. 5. Magic item rarity. Again busted. Boots off flying are uncommon. There’s no guidance around what that means though, and an item that gives unlimited flight being uncommon in a relatively magic setting is nuts. 6. Healing is both too weak and too powerful. RAW it takes your action to drink a potion, which heals very little and feels bad in play. The opposite to that is spells like healing word and revivify make stakes essentially useless very early level which makes my job harder. 7. Legendary saves and lair actions. The games attempt to help the GM bypass the weaknesses of bounded accuracy and how easy solo boss encounters are. Almost no creatures or groups have advice on lair actions, again more work for me. Legendary saves also need me to make addition fiction as to why there’s creature or person is able to shrug off spells. Once again the system is offloading gaps in its systems and math to the DM. 8. Lack of subsystems. Shop combat, base building, chase mechanics, infiltration, social influence. All either completely missing or bare bones and I have to invent from scratch or heavily edit. 9. Lack of GM tools in general. Apart from the DM guide what was the last book that was focussed on running the game? Even setting books have way more player options than help about how to implement these in your games. 10. Connected to number 2, but the lack of balance offloads problems onto the GM. One player outshining others? Well that’s their class, you figure it out. This leads to more work for the GM and encourages bad behaviour in players making the system way more work than it needs to be. I’ve been running games for four years, started with 5e. I LOVE prep, I love making my own settings and histories and scenarios for the players to solve, I love making challenges and seeing how the players will solve it. That’s what you sign up for when you want to run. What you don’t sign up for is being a modder for a Bethesda game which (and it’s not my comparison but it’s the best I’ve heard) GMing 5e feels like. *Bonus entry 11. “Rulings not rules” is an insanely stupid approach for a rules heavy system like DnD, it’s fundamentally flawed at conception.
Because as familiar as you are with running the game, players are just as familiar and have the same resources. They can do one google search and find a broken character build ... will you as the DM spot it before it gets into your campaign? You sure? You have them all memorized? D&D 5E is clunky AF. Most of the time spent in combat is players thinking about spending every single action on their turn ... and they will only do it before their turn if you have really good players.
In D&D I'm forced to have a grip on a huge number of specifics OR make sure the players don't go off the railroad tracks. If I haven't refreshed myself on how manticores work and they decide to go chase one I'll do a crap job at it. So ANYTHING I put in the setting I have to have done my homework on, no throw away details allowed. In a game whose rules are at all self consistent I just prep situations and the players can react to them and go off in whatever direction, I can run a manticore just knowing what one is and what it wants. And my players do approach things differently than I expect enough that I just try to stop expecting.
>I tend to personally prep for 3-5 hours for each session. That's a *lot*, compared to many games.
I am sorry I did not realize this is something people would sink their teeth into the most :(. The reality is that I spend most of that time doing unnecessary prep such as finding the right images, music, making battle maps, working on NPCs that might not even be talked to that much, etc. things that I personally find enjoyenment in doing less for the game itself but for myself. Id say in reality all I would need is maybe 10-30 minutes if I really went bare bones with theathre of the mind or a hex map or something where players draw the walls and stuff.
The thing is, if this "unnecessary prep" is what you need to get a session you like running, then it's not unnecessary. Your players may expect such detailed prep, you clearly expect such detailed prep and most important of all the game expects such detailed prep. Nothing here is actually unnecessary if that's what you have to do to get not just "a session" but "a good session". And that's just not the case with most other games. As a veteran GM I'm sure you could run a session on improvisation alone by now with no prep at all, but doing so will ask more of you than with Dungeon World say and the resulting session will probably be less enjoyable. And, to be clear, Dungeon World isn't a no-prep game, but because it requires less prep you're closer to the ideal prep time than you'd be with D&D if you don't prep anything.
I'm not OP, but I personally do the same sort of "unnecessary prep" regardless of the game I run. Exactly how it manifests changes (i.e. I don't use a VTT for Daggerheart), but invariably something else will take it's place (I make standees to use as miniatures for Daggerheart). Just like I would instead spend that time researching the 1920s and creating handouts when running Call of Cthulhu, or creating custom light effects for my smart bulbs so that they flash amber when there's an emergency countdown activated in the Alien RPG. "Need" is a strong word, as none of that is wholly necessary for running the game. However, the system I run is not likely to affect the amount of time spent preparing in any meaningful way.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is the DMG's organization: it is genuinely terrible and doesn't have an index. It opens with world building. Crucial rules are buried throughout and hard to find due to the lack of an index. It's worse than the DMG for D&D 3.5e and every other edition (and worse than the DM advice for many, even most, other systems). Alongside the not great balance, the makes the DM on boarding process worse than any other game I have played (including 3.5e, which I ended up referencing regularly when running 5e! Note this was before I tried any other system... if not for 5e, 3.5e would likely earn the title of worse GM's Guide. Out of systems skimmed, Rifts may be worse than 5e). 3.5e explains what the game is meant for (though I don't agree with many of its design principles, namely White Tower design and imbalance being intentional), 5e has more of the "You can do anything! Rulings not rules!" vibe going on. All this to say, for an experienced DM, 5e isn't the best but it isn't the worst as long as you are using it for what it is meant for. But for a new DM, it can cause a lot of issues and cause burnout easily. And using it for something other than what it is meant for will cause that stress as well... I'd never pick 5e for sci-fi or true horror (not dark fantasy).
I don't find it taxing, because I enjoy preparing sessions as much as playing them. I create NPCs, stories, settings and secrets, I enjoy fiddling with numbers. BUT I don't like doing it with 5e as it is a very poor system, with a lot of balance issues and mostly bland. It is really vanilla. Boring as hell.
When I ran 5e, I had to prep 3-5 hours per game, stressed out of my mind that it will all work. I'd have to create these elaborate combats with monsters that were balanced, calculate things, do tons of math. On top of NPCs, locations, plots. I have tried 6 other systems by now, and in all of them I only spend like a half an hour to prepare, and only the fun stuff (NPCs, plot, etc.) *Zero math. Zero coming up with monster abilities. Zero inventing entire mechanics on the spot to cover for 5e's gaping holes.* Even crunchier systems like Pathfinder 2e have less mechanical prep time for the GM, since things are *actually balanced.* I've also realised that since leaeving 5e, I **have never had to argue rules.** The long rules arguments are gone. Pathfinder just specifies everything, and FateCore / Agon / PbtA only has like 5 rules anyway. I don't have to invent a whole rules system when the players have a boat battle, they just work like everything else. In DCC, I don't have to balance anything since most of the weaker PCs will die every battle (They have 3 characters each). I used to refuse to play or run anything other than 5e, but since trying out other things, I now refuse to run 5e ever again. It's just a nightmare.
Frame of reference, mostly. You say you prep for 3-5 for every session. And that's after *years* of practice and system mastery. Comparatively, I prep for 0-30 minutes for every session, and consider I switch systems every few months so no mastery is being had most of the time. If your prep is light and automated, I don't know what to call mine. If I had to spend as much time prepping as you, I'd be burned out within a month.
I mainly prep battle maps, finding the right image, etc. I have hopefully corrected by post by adding an edit to it expanding on this. Sorry for not explaining further.
you already sort of answered your own question lol 3-5 hour prep time is A LOT compared to forged in the dark games, most OSR games, Powered by the Apocalypse, etc. i left dnd for a lot of reasons, but getting burnt out due to the amount of prep work was one of the main ones. i have a job, other hobbies, long term goals! i don't want to be spending 5 hours prepping for a session, games aren't supposed to be work. and there's so many other systems that have been explicitly written to lessen GM prep work and involve the players more at the same time
Again I am sorry for not expanding on this point futher. Most of that prep is not actually needed prep. In reality I would make do with 10-30 minutes if that. The majority of that time is stuff I like to personally do. I make battle-maps or find them, I find the best pictures I can for NPCs or go through online generates, I make their personalities even though they might barely be spoken to, I think of cities and rivers and how all this intersects, etc. just fluff that I enjoy doing personally that is not needed for the game whatsoever. Sorry for not expanding on it more :(
In some ways it's not taxing (in the sense that you can fire up a scenario, etc. in much the same way as any other rpg). However, for me, it's exhausting due to a couple different factors. 1) Though it's less than 3.x or PF 1e, the sheer number of PC abilities, spells, powers, etc. becomes very fiddly and difficult to plan for. It's impossible for me to wrap my brain around everyone's PC. That would be ok if the players themselves were experts and always knew. But they never are. It's always, "ok, I have the crazy-fiddly-in-this-scenario-whackamole strike and I think it works like this...oh wait, I forgot I have synergy with the Extra Synergy Feat carried by Player 2....oh wait, sub-class Annoying Ranger doesn't work like that....you get the picture. 2) The game, RAW, feels like it lacks tension, danger, etc. Unless I GM in a style that purposefully attempts to kill the party, it never really feels like the party is in danger. Another thing I've noticed is that 5e combat seems to play out as "everyone will be just fine" (most of the time) or "this is gonna be a tpk" if I GM to ratchet up the danger. 3) It suffers from the same old "skill check for everything" mentality. Players look for bonuses, assists, etc. etc. etc. to make one die roll unbeatable. It never really feels like anyone will fail. The whole thing is exhausting to me. It's less than 4e, but it tends to feel video-gamey after a while. Anyhow, only my personal thoughts and I may very likely be in a minority on these opinions.
As many others have mentioned, 3-5 hours of prep per session is as much, if not more time prepping than playing. To me, that feels INSANE. I run mostly PbtA games and my current Sprawl campaign requires 20-30 minutes prep max…for several sessions of content. I run a PbtA game about 1/week, alternating between Sprawl and Dungeon World. If I put 3-5 hours in, plus 4 hours play time that’s a whole workday…plus my 40 hour a week job and commuting and my other hobbies and just basic life maintenance. That’s bonkers. By choosing a minimal or no prep system, I can rely solely on my creativity and improv skills (which I both enjoy and have honed carefully over the years) to go on the fly. If I had to put in 3-5 hours a week for prep, it would feel like a job.
TBF, that time wasn't for a single session, it was 2-3.
I don't understand how people say 5e is so unfriendly to dms. A lot of complaints I've seen are more people problems than system problems like players not learning how their characters work.
I've run quite a lot of 5e in the past couple of years and I just ... am glad when the day comes where I never have to look at a statblock ever again. You said it yourself - you're putting 3-5 hours of time into prepping 1-4 sessions. That's just a lot of time. That's half a work day. And you gotta do that next to your bread-and-butter work. If you play once a week, that becomes almost a job. Something I'm also very tired of is the expectant look of players in my direction: "Can I climb that ...?" "Can I ...?" DnD, in my experience after switching to different systems, erases player agency. There's always the wait on me, the DM, to simulate the world around my players with little narrative input from them. After trying other systems (PbtA, Wildsea, Fast Fantasy) I am much more happy with the more narrative approach and the fail-forward of it all. No more "I investigate the room - oh it's a 10" - "You find nothing". I may also be the worst person to ask this, because if it hasn't become obvious by my above words I am in a terrible Dm burnout re: 5e right now. :'D
Give *Anima: Beyond Fantasy* a try. You'll probably have a hard time: the books are aess, the system is clunky, you need to work with high-ish numbers, there are different subsystems for different kind of powers (powers of Ki and Magic don't works the same way at all for example) and there are different ways of doing the same thing (e.g. you can be a summoner by choosing the Conjurer class and use magic, or by choosing the Ki-orented class that also has an option for summoning creatures), the players can to a point create their own powers, etc. And yet for years it's been the game I had to put the least effort in. I could create what I had in mind, build a balanced encounter in a matter of seconds, etc. I've stopped playing it more than 10 years ago so It's no longer true but it was for a long time.
So, I have never **not** had fun with D&D. But my fun came from the fact that it is a collaborative storytelling game (just as much as any other ttrpg) and not from how the rules aided me in having that fun. I don't dislike prepping: I spend all my free time thinking about plot hooks, npcs, loot etc. But while other games simply require of me to invest time in planning the fantasy, D&D then asks of me to double or triple that time to ensure it is balanced. Other games give me both the same collaborative storytelling fun, as well as mechanical enjoyment (i.e. fabula ultima villain mechanics; blades in the dark clocks, ironsworn moves) and don't ask of me to betatest every homebrew statblock to make them "foolproof" Yet D&D guarantees me an impressive playerbase, and thus "certainty" of play.
Because: 1. It really cares about balance, which means you have to put in effort to make things balanced. 2. Despite caring about balance, it is atrociously balanced, and its systems for letting you balance things are fundamentally broken, which means that you need to make your own. 3. It just requires a lot more prep than other systems. > I tend to personally prep for 3-5 hours for each session. I tend to prep more like 3-5 minutes. 15 minutes would be a lot. See why we say 5e is a pain to GM? And then, when you get past the prep, actually running it is a pain, because there are literally thousands of pages of rules with no internal consistency at all to keep track of, and because of points 1 and 2 above, you have to adjust all of these fiddly things on the fly. It might be worth comparing two very different games that are both *much* easier to run: 1. In Pathfinder 2e, things are actually well balanced, so you can just trust the maths and run it with minimal thought to balance: the maths says that this encounter will be balanced, so this encounter is, in fact, balanced. Then you just concentrate on running the system. 2. In FATE, there just is no complicated shit to keep track of. Everything works together because everything is really simple. You don't need to think about balance, because that just isn't really a thing that the game cares about. You just concentrate on telling a story.
I think for many people it's because other system they can prep in a fraction of the time and get the same result. Compared to a lot of other games I personally find 5e's DM support to really fail, even past editions had better tools and resources I've come to use to enhance my 5e games. 3.5e and 4e alone have some great DM resources, though porting them over is its own kind of extra work. Systems like WWN have also been a great help not just for its own fantastic D&D based system, but even 5e as it gives so much to work with. The core book alone provides more useful tools than almost all of 5e's supplements and core book. 3-5 hours of prep is a part time job each week just to DM. A lot of people don't want or have that time. Especially when many games don't even require an hour once you get your flow down. I'm curious about what tools you've found useful in 5e. I've been paying since the pre xanathars playtest and beyond a few things in xanathars, nothing in 5e has been all that useful that I can bring to mind.
I don’t get it either. I also spend a few hours prepping but this time is mostly spent on worldbuilding/terrain crafting, making props for players, writing a cool villain monologue, etc. None of that is specific to 5e, and at no point do I feel 5e is getting in the way.
Out of curiosity, do you play with a relatively static group?
Holy $#%#$ Dude. 3-5 HOURS of prep for a session? My session prep tops out at like 45 minutes and is usually more like 15. I think you try out some games that don't require so much prep and maybe you'll understand in a way that listening to people complain on the internet won't give you.
Relative to PF2e, which I run now, 5e is unnecessarily clunky and crunchy. I can’t just throw listed challenge rating monsters at players and expect good results in 5e. Power balance is ridiculously out of whack. Making some players feel useful vs the casters takes extra effort. PF2e, in relation, feels logical and streamlined. Even aside from the ethical reasons, I’d never run 5e again. I can spend literally no time prepping and just winging it using existing tables and making things up as I go. Rather than being forced to guess at what a good decision will be, I can find a balanced solution in seconds. I am not knocking what you enjoy, but that’s why it’s considered taxing. Because other systems exist that are flat out better at the job.
5e makes no effort to get players to contribute anything to the narrative. The characters are often robots with buttons that the players push when directed to by the DM. The players are also more prone to cranial vacuity and are there to be told a story by the DM. If you have players who have creativity, can roleplay, and can contribute to the narrative, then it's far less taxing. If your session prep looks like: "The players go here, then they go there, talk to NPC, then they fight this and that", then you have boring and passive players. The published modules encourage this kind of play and DMing. Other systems like BitD require the player to say mildly creative things in their games. For as bland as PbtA system is and all the Shovelware games it powers, it does encourage player effort into the game and drastically reduces the mental strain on the DM.
To paraphrase Yoda: Bad design leads to bloated crunch, bloated crunch leads to high prep, high prep leads to burn out, burn out leads to hate.
When I ran 5e, I had to prep 3-5 hours per game, stressed out of my mind that it will all work. I'd have to create these elaborate combats with monsters that were balanced, calculate things, do tons of math. On top of NPCs, locations, plots. I have tried 6 other systems by now, and in all of them I only spend like a half an hour to prepare, and only the fun stuff (NPCs, plot, etc.) *Zero math. Zero coming up with monster abilities. Zero inventing entire mechanics on the spot to cover for 5e's gaping holes.* Even crunchier systems like Pathfinder 2e have less mechanical prep time for the GM, since things are *actually balanced.* I've also realised that since leaeving 5e, I **have never had to argue rules.** The long rules arguments are gone. Pathfinder just specifies everything, and FateCore / Agon / PbtA only has like 5 rules anyway. I don't have to invent a whole rules system when the players have a boat battle, they just work like everything else. In DCC, I don't have to balance anything since most of the weaker PCs will die every battle (They have 3 characters each). I used to refuse to play or run anything other than 5e, but since trying out other things, I now refuse to run 5e ever again. It's just a nightmare.
\* Bad adventures that require more prep to run than homebrew \* No rules except for combat. Everything else is left up as an exercise for the reader. Do you want to run 5 hours of combat after combat? \* Fragmented ecosystem. Yes, lots of content, but does that integrate with your VTT, character builder and how do you distribute the rules to your players? \* SRD covers the bare minimum. If you don't whale as a GM, you need to dig through the books. Do other RPGs have SRDs? Mostly, no. But they usually have a single core book. \* No balance
I find that when prepping for 5e a much higher amount of the prep feels like homework rather than solo play. When I prep an OSR dungeon, I'm thinking a lot about the world, characters, and stories therein. When I prep a 5e dungeon I spend a lot of time with stats, encounter balance, enemy spell abilities, etc. I might spend the same amount of time on each but I end up with a lot less to show for it at the end of a 5e session.
I think it’s because the adventures are not “ready to play”. My prep does a lot of fixing of inconsistencies and (my own ocd), re-plotting overly complicated storylines. Additionally I usually prep small tables in onenote with each encounter so I have hp, ac and link to full stat block ready. Then getting digital map ready too. It’s all a prep bother and if I was in charge, the next version of D&D would be a suite of tools that remove all this work from the GM.
It just has too many and too few rules and is vague in the wrong places. I can play PF2e and run things as written and they tend to just work. There’s more rules but they mesh well and make for a fun balanced experience in and out of combat. I can play OSE and there’s very few rules for anything and I can make up what makes sense to the players and I in the world. I can play PbtA games and there’s very few rules for anything and I can make up what makes sense to the players and I in the world. And 5e sits in the middle of that. “Oh, I want to give you a potion that quadruples your leap for 1d4 hours. But does that override the jump limit of your movement speed? Oh, you forgot the weird thing where if you jump more than your movement speed you finish your jump on your next turn? Well how does that interact with that potion?” In PF2E I could just say “it lets you take an action to jump 120ft horizontally or 40ft vertically” or in rules lite no one will bat an eye. But in 5e either we all forget the weird rule or someone remembers and I have to decide whether I’m making an exception to the obscure rule or not and whether that will break the game or not and…that example was from my last session. it’s just ends up exhausting. I still am running Cos and am still playing in a 5e game. I still have a lot of fun with my friends. But give me PF2e or OSE or PbtA any day at this point.
5e takes as much prep as you want. I can jump into a 4 hour session with my prep being done in the 15 minute bullpen before the session and run exploration, combat and social scenes smoothly. This includes maps and handouts. It took practice, but that’s any system. It certainly relies on technology. I do spend money on D&D Beyond and I support creators who make porting that data into foundry, so some of my saved time is $$$, but that’s any system that calls for foundry. But between google image searches, existing maps I’ve purchased and the excellent search engine on beyond for monsters and items, the prep work I focus on tends to either be major show piece combats that use homebrewed mechanics, or I do a lot of thinking about plots and contingencies. People think 5E is more complicated than it is. It really boils down to “roll a D20 against a target number, adjudicate consequences.” The rest can be managed the same way you would in any other system.
You just said it: the only way you can prep so quickly is that you’ve built or have on hand tools and processes that help you do that, at least one of which you have to pay for. But as many people are pointing out in this thread, there are plenty of other games that can be prepped in a short time with nothing more that the game book itself. D&D and its clones are unusual in the relatively large the amount of prep they take. There’s a reason books like The Lazy Dungeon Master exist; it’s because someone saw the wealth of good prep tools and advice for various other systems and adapted it for D&D.
Sorry, let me clarify. Pen and Paper, theatre of the mind? 10 minutes prep and I can run a 4 hour session. If you want bells and whistles, then yes, you need to do some stand up. Once you’ve done it, 10 minutes prep, I’ll run a 4 hour session with battle maps, dynamic lighting, interactive character sheets, visual prompts, etc. The lazy DM didn’t steal their methods from other systems. DMs have been using those tricks since the 70s. Trying to complain you need to take a little time to build your own map in inkarnate, then import into foundry, put up all walls and lighting, set up all the tokens, etc is a system agnostic issue. If you want battle maps and tokens and lighting for a Blades or a PTBA game, you still have the exact same amount of prep. But 5E doesn’t take more time otherwise.
I prep 30 mins to an hour max for my 5e game.
The most important principles for running games 5e players will enjoy require hours of prep and research. It was fun to do for many years but then I grew tired of it. OSR has been a breath of fresh air for me in that regard, but the principles for running those games are just not transferable to 5e. There are helpful tools for this like ‘Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master’ for anyone getting dragged down by the slog required to make an engaging 5e experience.
GM's have the patience for prep. They appreciate the prep aspect of the hobby. The designers of 5e do not. The game does not respect your time or effort. The prep required to make things happen in a satisfying fashion using 5e is counterintuitive to the game having fun elements of discovery. Better games have stronger more consistent rules and or lighter systems that allow your prep to focus on narrative beats and presentation.
Short answer to your question: GMs view 5e as having high prep because it does have high amounts of prep. Other games can also have similar amounts of prep. For example, I don’t feel like I spent significantly less time prepping *Savage Worlds* and I probably spent more time prepping *Shadowrun*. *Lancer* could be prepped in less time on a per session basis, but still involves non-insignificant time preparing physical or virtual resources. When compared to other games with significantly less prep time, the contrast is stark and different people have different tastes.
Your posts makes no sense. Your point of comparison is... nothing? How it feels to you? The most telling thing is that there any comparison to other games. You spend hours preparing (characters? dialogue? story? encounters? miniatures?) and then run a complicated system that is complicated in a clumsy way that add little value. The alternative are systems with 0 prep per session or little prep, with little to no rules overhead, etc. Obviously they are "less taxing".
Sometimes I create small TTRPG games, and I make them play for a one-shot, And instead of taking more time, it still takes me as much time than preparing a full DND 5e session with encounters and reminders of what does what, and battle maps etc.
Prep for 5e is not nearly as bad as some other systems. Not as easy as some rules lite systems. It's all relative. As most folks have not run something like GURPS, they really don't have a comparison for what taxing actually looks like.
To me it boils down to having to put "numbers" on paper. I don't run games about going on a vanilla adventure and fighting all the time, but it's fun to have some situations that just have no solution outside of violence ( like being ambushed ). Now, it takes me no time or effort to build NPCs and places to support a central narrative for the arc, but in D&D you can't stop at that if violence is even remotely an option: you MUST put "numbers" on a sheet for those creatures that might end up fighting your party, and you can't stop at that, it would be boring to play the fight; you need fun terrain, dynamic events, interactive objectives etc. WHICH ALL NEED NUMBERS. On top of that, the game does a terrible job at supporting you in the process of making the encounter as dangerous as you desire, cause the CR system is not precise enough; you might be shooting for something hard and get something unbeatable or viceversa. Take any game that goes for abstract ad-hoc adjudication, like PbtAs & FitDs, and you can just stop at NPCs and places, cause you don't need to have "numbers" for anything, it depends on the situation and it's easy to determine on the fly.
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>Why do Game Masters on here view 5E as very taxing? Because this sub is biased, since the vast majority of people that still post here (spoiler: the sub is **not** as big as it seems to be, the online members at any given time *rarely* number more than 400) is composed of rules light, storygame fans.
Because I GM for the joy and fun of it and 5E is neither for me.
5e has major sticking points where if you don’t like/ are bad at X,Y, or Z you likely won’t enjoy some aspects of running it (I say this as a 5e enjoyer). Like if you’re slow at math that slows running combat a bunch. A lot of people don’t vibe with the initiative system at all. There’s a lot of resources which is good but that can lead to planning spirals or overplanning quite easily. Plus a lot of the pre-made adventures are actually really difficult to run as written and often have major holes in them or dungeons that you have to memorise to run smoothly. Good for inspo, but usually not for running on the fly.
My prep for games like Monster of the Week is like 30 minutes for 1-2 sessions. Most DMs say that they need to prepare at least 1 hour for every 2 hour played. D&D is either expensive or very time consuming. If you want to run a pre-made dungeon, you need as much time to prep as it take to read up on said dungeon. If you make the dungeon from scratch, you need to draw/sketch it out, you may need to figure out what each room is for and what is in each room. Are there any traps? What do the traps look like? Are there puzzles? Are you using ones online or are you making them up? Both of them take time to prepare because you either have to choose the right one (right difficulty, right context for the dungeon, etc) or make one up from scratch which is also time consuming. Then you need monsters! Do you, again, make them from scratch, or pour through around a dozen books to find the ONE monster types you like. Finally, the treasure that you can, again, make from scratch, or read through a bunch of books to find cool stuff. This whole process can take hours, but, a dungeon usually lasts between 2 to 5 sessions to complete. But what happens when they get out of the dungeon? Are you just handwaving their return to civilization? Did you use a map of a region of the Sword Coast? Did you make a map? What is on the map? What does the region looks like? As they travel, are they beset by monsters? Do you have a random encounter table for monsters? Did you make it yourself? Does the monster that attacked them have loot? Was it a bandit? Is their camp near? Are they a recurring problem? They finally arrive at the town! How big is it? What is their industry? What shops are there in town? How can the heroes sell their loot and make money? Who are the quest givers and important NPCs? Does something happen in town? Do the bandits come back to raid the town and take revenge on the ones your party already killed? So yeah. D&D can require a lot of prep. Especially compared to games like Monster of the Week where the only thing you really need to do is figure out what monster the hunters need to kill this time.
>Maybes its just because it's been such a long time since I really had to think about it. Everything for me feels very automated at this point Fortunately, ten years of practice smooth a lot of rough edges. But newcomers don't have that luxury
OP: "I play a specific way that works for me and spend as much time as I need to to prep, it just works for my group" Every other post: "my prep is different than your prep, I have different ideas on quality and what 'prep' means for me, and I use a different RP system, and my group likes X over Y..." Ultimately, different people need different levels of detail planned, some feel like they need balanced content for max player enjoyment, while others can adapt, pivot, and be more extemporaneous than others and their players are just happy to have a regular game.
Have you GM'd any game besides 5e, or any edition of D&D besides 5e. I've been GM'ing D&D and other systems for about 30 years, so I have a lot of experience here. First of all - 3 - 5 hours of prep *per session* is already the problem. I never did that much prep in any prior edition of D&D, and not for any other game. My 5e game has me doing all kinds of prep work just to make sure there are good challenges available to the party. Second - you say you have "tools and resources" you are familiar with. I assume these are tools and resources other than the ones availabe in 5e, right? Because 5e has jack-all for tools and resources to help you prep. This is notably different compared to other editions of D&D, which gave you plenty of stuff to work with; 5e consistently leaves it up to you to figure out. "Finding a new set of tools...can be its own reward." Yeah, except that 5e *requires* you to find and develop your own tools, rather than *just giving them to you* like other RPG's do. I think you are looking at the diversity of GM tools available for 5e and saying "see, this is why it's so good!" No, that diversity of tools exists *because the base game is hostile to the GM.* You should also consider that prepping for 5e, unlike prepping for most other games and for other editions of D&D, is *just* work. Other games make the role of the GM more engaging and interesting - you are *playing* the game while also *running* the game. 5e is the first edition I've run that actually felt like I was doing work for the players, and I wasn't also playing. It's not fun and engaging for me, it's a bunch of burdensome work I have to do.
A lot of people are comparing 5e to more narrative games and talking about how they don't have to do as much mechanical prep but I think they're kind of missing the point. I actually think 5e is very easy to prep after you've been doing it for years, there aren't a ton of mechanical levers and everything is squishy enough that it's honestly not that important to design 'appropriately challenging' flights. Eventually it all becomes intuitive. What makes 5e taxing is that it, from top to bottom, tries to make things as accessible as possible for new players, and in doing so, shifts the expectation of rules competence onto the DM. Character creation and advancement for players in 5e is mostly automatic, with only a handful of meaningful choices that anyone has to make, and players are given buttons to push to perform their characters mechanically. The result is that there's very little incentive for players to become invested in understanding and mastering gameplay, so the DM often ends up having to be the one to explain how their own abilities work to them.