Image provided by
FreeImages.com/Renaude Hatsedakis

I’ve worked on it up to the last minute and beyond, but the final installment of the Tavern Generator still isn’t ready. I’ve solved the problems that confronted me last week, though, so it’s now full speed ahead on wrapping it up, hopefully this time next week! In the meantime, here’s another quick little fill-in article – hopefully short won’t exclude profound…

Blair, co-GM of the Adventurer’s Club campaign, and I were talking last week – we usually spend an hour or two just being social before getting down to plotting how deeply we can get the PCs into hot water without broiling them. As usual, I had bookmarked a few internet articles and posts that I thought he would find interest or amusing (I have a 99% success rate at choosing these, at least with him) and one of these sparked a conversation about Hollywood budgets.

Hollywood budgets

The proximate spark for this conversation was an article on the [US] Summer Season’s winners and losers at the cinema box office and a report that Avengers: Infinity War would reportedly have a .

Some revel in the big budgets

Some producers have proven adept at harnessing big budgets to create a massive spectacular that doesn’t allow the effects to overwhelm the delivery of story, and by modern Hollywood scale, for two movies, that’s actually a pretty lean budget.

Most major movies these days have budgets of more than $400 million, as was shown by the first article I linked to. Age Of Ultron, the most recent offering in the Avengers franchise, had a production cost of $250 million, and that’s practically a shoestring – despite the overall cost being estimated at $1320 million. Most of the difference comes in the form of the cinemas’ share of the box office receipts, estimated at some $770 million, and that only happens when the movie makes money hand-over-fist; it’s the type of problem every Hollywood studio likes to have!

Not everyone can cope

Others seem less able to cope, one way or another. Michael Bay and the Transformers franchise have often been castigated for letting the effects overwhelm the story – a complaint that has cropped up repeatedly ever since Star Trek The Motion Picture, which cost a staggering 46 million US dollars at the time. Staggering because the original budget was $8 million and that was doubled after movies such as Close Encounters and Star Wars were believed to have changed audience expectations.

The Transformers franchise can more fairly be said to replace plot with action, in my opinion, but the fact remains that some producers seem to lose their way when confronted with telephone number budgets and all the things that can be done with that sort of money, becoming self-indulgent – or perhaps, effects-indulgent – to the point where the stories get lost.

Some people do better when forced to get creative

It’s also true that some producers and directors do better when the budget is tight and they are forced to get creative, and focus on the story that they are delivering. Blair commented that one of the biggest mistakes Hollywood had ever made was to give Warren Beatty a big cheque!

Wrath Of Khan, the second Star Trek movie, cost a lot less than the first and delivered a far better product. Star Treks III and IV had Leonard Nimoy at the helm, cost less still, and were also far more successful that the original Star Trek had been – and, for the most part, the reduction in budget didn’t really show on-screen.

‘Twas Ever Thus

To a certain extent, this has always been the case, of course. It used to be the case that those adept at delivering big results from small budgets either emerged from, or found their niche in, Television. These days, it can be hard to remember how jaw-dropping the special effects on Babylon-5 were at the time – the standards have changed so much – and the production team on Stargate SG-1 regularly worked miracles on minuscule budgets.

These days, those lines have become a lot more blurred, and the dominant cost of production is far and away in cast. Special Effects budgets – allowing for inflation – haven’t really increased all that much; the technology has simply advanced to the point where they can do more with a certain dollar budget than they could have done in the past.

To every creator, an optimum budget

What I’ve related thus far is a slightly-annotated version of our conversation at the time. We reached the conclusion that for each individual, there was a sweet spot in terms of budget. Exceeding this sweet spot opens the door to self-indulgence and effects for the sake of effects; falling below that means that they have to struggle to execute their delivery of the story to a satisfactory standard.

Time Is Money: the RPG Relevance

It was only as the conversation moved on to other things that I realized that the same would be true for all creative endeavors – including Game Prep for an RPG. Give a GM too much time to prep, and they will spend it on gilding the lily and locking themselves into a plotline; too little time, and there will be an inevitable compromise on the quality that will show as cracks here and there. The personalities of NPCs might be less developed than they should be; there might be maps and props that are necessary for the players to get a clear picture of what’s going on that are not available; there can be holes in the plot, and explanations that don’t make sense, and descriptive narrative that fumbles its way around creating a mental image without ever quite being clear, and that require clarification as the game proceeds.

The more prep time you have, the less flexibility you have, and the less on-the-spur-of-the-moment creativity you have to use to fill in the gaps. Not enough prep time, and you gain flexibility (at the price of direction) and are far more heavily reliant on those creative instincts to overcome and wallpaper over the shortfall.

A functional perspective

A lot of the advice that gets offered on game prep focuses on the how, and especially on the question of efficiency, on doing more with a limited time budget. Occasionally, you will get an article that assumes unlimited prep time, with results that sound great in theory but that you can never put into practical use. A few recognize that time management and prioritization are even more important aspects of game prep. And I’m including, in both categories, the advice offered to date here at Campaign Mastery, and advice that will undoubtedly be delivered in the future.

But focusing on efficiency, on getting more done in a limited time budget, may be missing half the point. Enabling a GM to do more with his prep time may carry him past his personal optimum point and into the realm of self-indulgence – or it might not be enough to get him all the way to that optimum point.

The neglected question of game prep is knowing when to stop.

Finding your optimum

Already a not-simple question, it only becomes more so when you consider the number of variables that have to be taken into consideration.

• First, every adventure is different; some require more prep than others. The secret here is to do what they do with their effects budgets on TV series – ensure that the total over a given period of time (a season) is practical, and then divvy it up. To gain the necessary prep time for a complicated adventure, you may need a low-prep adventure or two before it. Most of the advice that I have offered has taken this approach, often without drawing attention to the principle – such as the “Just-In-Time” principle embodied in the prep schedule described in the New Beginnings series.
• Second, every GM is different. Some require more prep than others as a general overall statement.
• Third, every Genre is different, and some need more prep than others. In general, technology and research are the big ticket items when it comes to greater prep – so genres like Sci-Fi tend to be relatively high-demand, genres like Fantasy tend to be lower, and genres like Pulp and Superheroes straddle the fence, sometimes high-prep and sometimes low.
• Fourth, each GM will have different needs in terms of the different elements of prep. Some may be wizards at inventing and delivering personalities on-the-fly, but struggle without a carefully prepared map; others may be able to improv a map but need to put greater effort into their plots or narrative; and so on.
• Fifth, every adventure is different (again) in terms of the relative demands for different types of prep.

That means that each GM’s optimum will not only vary from adventure to adventure, but is actually a cumulative expression of a number of smaller optimums. There is no perfect optimum for any given GM, it will continuously vary from adventure to adventure within a Comfort Zone.

That’s the best guideline that I can offer. The perfect amount of prep is whatever is required for the GM to feel comfortable and confident in his ability to deliver the adventure to the players.

The advantage of such a fuzzy standard is that it also scales to apply to all the sub-activities collectively referred to as Prep.

The Lesson for Beginners

Beginners tend to either drastically over-prepare or drastically under-prepare, often plunging wildly from one extreme to another, and even doing both at the same time (under-preparing characterizations and over-prepping maps, for example). With increased experience, GMs generally grow more confident in their ability to cobble something together on-the-fly, even if they do so by taking something they’ve found elsewhere and filing off the serial numbers.

From time to time, I hear justifications offered in terms of preparing for the PCs to wander off-script, and needing prep to cover the many possibilities. This is really making work for yourself unnecessarily.

The true value of any game prep is it’s absolute usefulness IF it is used in-game multiplied by the likelihood that it will be needed. That’s not really helpful – so instead, let’s define game prep as being sufficient time to achieve a satisfactory standard of usefulness for whatever is being prepared.

So, you’ve got a choice: you can spend 5 hours prepping maps that have a 5% chance of being needed, or can spend 2 hours prepping characters with an 80% likelihood of use and 3 hours doing something else. Compare the true values: 5 hrs x 5% = 15 minutes of value. 2 hrs x 80% = 96 minutes of value. Conclusion: do the characters – for an hour and a half. Then spend 15 minutes on doing some rough sketches for the maps.

Prioritize. Do the prep that is 100% going to be needed first. Then the prep that’s 90% likely to be needed, then 85%, and so on. The percentage tells you how many corners to cut.

Complicating This Analysis

You knew that looked too simple, didn’t you?

Some prep is not only going to be useful immediately, or eventually, but beyond. It has a lingering residual value. A map that’s a one-off is not all that useful. A map that will be used every second session or so for the next 20 game sessions is a different story. Doing that map early represents an investment in the campaign, and one that will yield rewards well into the future.

The real likelihood of something being needed is actually the total of a number of values: the likelihood that it will be needed next adventure, plus the likelihood that it will be needed in the adventure after that divided by two, plus the likelihood that it will be needed in the adventure after that, divided by three, plus the likelihood in the adventure after that, divided by four, and so on.

L (tot) = L1/1 + L2/2 + L3/3 + L4/4 + ….

That gives the proportion of value that you get from devoting time to that particular project right now.

It also provides scope for a little fuzziness in your thinking. If you aren’t sure how likely it is that you’ll need something next adventure, but are 100% sure that you will need it sometime in the next three, divide that 100% in three for the value this time around, double that for the likelihood that you’ll need it in the next two, and set the third at the full 100%, and then apply the formula: L (tot) = 33.3/1 + 66.6/2 + 100/3 = 100%. So, spend 1/3 the total time required to complete it for this adventure right now, and another 1/3 next time, and finish it off in prep for the third adventure – but don’t sweat it if you go a little over time-budget. Any extra time spent now will get repaid in additional time off (or time available for other purposes) down the track.

A Further Complication

The final complication that needs to be articulated is a psychological one. Investing in future prep needs now helps shape your thinking about those future prep needs, effectively yielding “interest” on your investment. A map helps clarify the relationship between the subject and its surroundings, and that can help in forming narrative. An inspiring image not only helps create the narrative, but sparks the imagination in directions that make coming up with plot that leads to that narrative easier – so spending time searching for such an image helps every other aspect of game prep.

By way of example: The Adventurer’s Club

We take full advantage of this phenomenon in our game prep for the Adventurer’s Club campaign, in three ways.

1. Archive and store inspiring images and content as we come across it, then examine that archive for relevant content as soon as we have a rough idea of the adventure.
2. As we work on more specific content for the adventure, search for additional images, maps, etc, as soon as the plotting makes them become relevant.
3. Once each section of plotting is complete, look over the work done and the resources collected, and fill in any gaps.

The adventure that we’re plotting at the moment is a case in point (I’m going to have to be careful what I reveal, our players read Campaign Mastery). After coming up with the broad general plot, inspiration was drawn from an old photograph that I had found and archived of New York after a blizzard (the plot is set in January, in New York City). As we worked, maps were generated and additional images found – the interior of an up-market hotel, a prison, images of Forest Hills in the 1930s, a boat, a couple of theaters, a hospital, a crime boss, and our villain. After the day’s plotting, I realized that there was a high likelihood that one or more PCs might visit Mayor La Guardia’s office – so I went out and found a suitable image of that. Each of these images not only helped clarify what was taking place and where, but provided the context and foundation for working out what would happen next.

There are additional images that I could dig up. The New York Harbor-master’s Office is an image that we have used before (I actually created it from two or three other images combined together) – I could dig that out of the archives and re-use it, because we have at least one scene taking place there. I could go hunting for an underground car-park. A church basement might be handy to have. We’ve already used an image of the church, I could find that and copy it forward. But these aren’t necessary – they simply clarify and expand on what is happening. So I’ll worry about that after the final must-do items on our list are dealt with. Hmmm, maybe an image or two of a [redacted] as well…