I'm thinking about getting into Dark Heresy. I will be GM'ing for my group and I'm curious how much other GM's are spending, on average, for upcoming game sessions? Is Dark Heresy difficult to prepare for? Any feedback would be most appreciated!

Completely depends on how elaborate you want it. I spend countless hours thinking about storylines, prepping NPCs, but when I actually write it down it goes in a sort of short-hand and with lots of arrows and such. It's not something that you can do relatively quickly, writing adventures, I guess.

There are some ready-made adventures such as Edge of Darkness and the Haarlock Legacy, but familiarizing yourself with and finetuning these takes as much time as writing your own

However writing adventures is a large part of the hobby for me.

It depends on what kind of game you are going to be running, how fast or slow your players generally go about things, how well motivated you are and how good at improv you are. Creating a complex campaign with all sorts of "Wheels within wheels" type conspiracies and/or with lots of elaborate set-piece battles, you will be spending a great deal more time than a campaign with a more simple "the players go to this town and hunt down the witch" plots. However in any case it is generally better to be overprepared than under.

Once you have GM'ed for a group for a little while you will get a feel for how long you will need to work to get a good session together.

Hi,

it is not harder to prepare then anything else I encountered. You just need to get familiar with the talents and gizmos, but that´s bread and butter for every GM in any system, me thinks.

Besides "thinking of plots all the week", I normally spend about 2x 5hours on "hard on preperation. The day before the "event" and the morning/afternoon "before the event". Of course, before this I tended to spend some hours here and their to prepare this and that. Since this mixing with other things (fanwork, different group, enjoying myself while reading rulesbooks) it is hard to give this a hard number.

I tend to do a lot of prep-work simply because the level of detail I often need from source material simply isn't there and I tend to plan for contingencies. It used to be easier when they where under 6000xp, basically a lot of 1-shot and 3 game session games of investigation/extermination. Go somewhere, find someone, smash their **** apart and come home, most of those I could get away with 2-3hours of jotting it down and some long hours just thinking figuring out what NPCs would be doing in response to such molestations

All through the 6000 to 8000xp we did some the more traditionally "nasty" activities of the inquisition, sabotaging plans of huge heretical organisations you can't take down in a straight up fight, destabilising power bases, political agitation between imperial organisations/governments and the always popular, kill people and blame it on someone else... oh and some good old fashioned mass murder. That wasn't too bad, it was mostly up to the PC's 'where' and 'how' they would achieve their mission objectives, knowing full well that if they screwed up they'd get squashed like bugs, after I squashed a few of them like bugs that still hadn't quite figured out they where playing in the big kids end of the pool now, they have big guns set to phaser level "f*ck-off!" and use them in lame, cheap, nasty ways. At this level the enemies are extremely pro-active in destroying players, they come from big organisations with big budgets with lots of intelligence sources, so that does take a fair bit of work to get just right.

Current PC's that are now 'advanced' (8000+ xp) I give them a large, complicated problem and the little bastards to run around, explore, kill people and make friends and enemies. At this level, they're actually responsible for people, places and things. That is a lot of work, but I think it's essentially in-scope with their rank and equipment, so I've statted up the sandbox of a planet and given a broad, fairly wide scope of mission objectives. Done up some friendly/neutral NPCs, some enemy NPC's and some dirty NPC's I can throw in the mix just to take a huge steaming turd on their plans at any point I think they're getting away with stuff too easily. That has easily occupied about 10hrs a week here and there of my spare time, but we don't play very often so anything that does get played I try to make memorable.

As has been said, depends on the type of game. I like it open ended but with good descriptions and wheels within wheels plots, so about 5h per session, but 10-15 for the first game with a new group.

Well, besides thinking-up/shorthanding the campaign in general, I usually spend an afternoon prepping for a game session. If it's a pre-gen adventure I usually read through it one more time, making some short-hand notes of events and names, pagenumbers in books etc etc.

If it's a home brewn adventure, I usually spend a few hours writing down major plot events, NPC names, looking up or writing up adversaries/vehicles and usually i also spend a few hours prepping some handouts on the PC.

Since the group I play with are all veterans (we've been playing rpg's since we were 12 or so that a good 20 years now) I know it has become useless to write up a step-by-step event- or timeline. My players do not shy away of taking 'the smart approach' to any situation, easily derailing any obvious encounter or ambush. It can be really challenging to entice them to go to a certain location, or perform a certain risky endeavour without scaring them away or around it.

Hence I usually prepare a sort of sandbox environment and a 'general' timeline with possible encounters and major NPC's. Then I try to set it up to gently provide them with enough info, encounters, handouts so that they can puzzle together where they need to go and what to do.

With my Rogue Trader game, I take longer than average, given I'm one of the playtesters (which means reading through quite a lot of playtest rules, locations, etc), but before I started doing that, I usually took about 4-5 hours to fully organise a session (though I'm not sure why I ever bothered... my players tend to make a mockery of any plans I set up within the first hour of gaming! )

I prep with more ideas then hard stuff. I love the challenge of adapting on the fly to inventive decisions by my players. Last session I ran the Psyker decided the appropriate response to catching a street urchin picking her pocket was to shoot the little girl in the head. Granted this come about because of a failure on the players part to be paying full attention to the game. But it was priceless to see the players reactions as a crowd of very upset menials began encircling them with improvised weapons with every intention to beat them into a pulp.

I have been running Dark Heresy for about 3-4 months for my friends and we play from 9p.m. to 1a.m. (or later) every Friday or so. I usually have about a week to think up ideas, sketch maps, come up with baddies, and (my favorite part) treasure. I try to spend at least 2 hours every other night or at least 4 on weekends. I generally have fun coming with new and exciting ways to tease, torture, and maim my friends. Be sure to make extra time when rolling characters and spending xp because it can be a lengthy process.

A word of advice though, one thing you should not do is predict how things will go. You will never guess how your friends will react or act in certain situations or what they will do to each other for laughs or spite.

I... plan. A lot.

I spend time brain-storming ideas for a particular part of a campaign, work out characters, the voices the various NPC's have (I do lots of different accents), what specific set pieces (or moments of glory) I can add for the player characters. I'll do extensive maps in Excel littered with arrows and numbers and other symbols to indicate what happens when and where. I'll spend hours laying out tiles (D&D, DOOM, Space Hulk, Warhammer Quest, etc.) to get a layout that is both practical and fun.

And then - and only then - do I actually start writing the scenario. I'm up to 89000+ word on the current campaign, and we're only 3/5ths of the way through.

BYE