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What it says in the title.
List something/some things that take too long and are therefore tedious/annoying. Feel free to discuss previous examples if the thread as well, but make sure we know which thing you're talking about - if you have suggestions to make the thing less annoying, I'm sure we'd love to hear it.
1. Building Characters: Requires lots of cross-referencing, lots of the options are crap, and herolab costs a fortune and still doesn't have everything (I don't know anyone who uses it; it would cost me hundreds of dollars or hundreds of hours of my own work before I would consider it a good solution to building characters).
I (as someone who prefers to GM using humanoid opponents) find this particularly frustrating/tedious. I do make use of the NPC Codex and a few other collections of NPCs though, and they really help.
2. Designing Monsters: I feel like the rules are too fuzzy, and as a result, after I've built the monster I start looking for comparison points to existing monsters and adjusting things up or down. It's just annoyingly slow.
3. Designing Interesting Fights. From terrain, to which monsters/NPCs to use, to what tactics the enemies should use, to what loot to give out, I find this takes a really long time as GM Prep.
4. Looking up rules (if you're not using d20PFSRD (Better Layout) or Archives of Nethys (Covers More Pathfinder Stuff).
What have you guys got?
Building characters does take a long time, especially for new players, mainly because they don't have enough contextual knowledge to know which options are not useful. So they feel like they have to read through reams and reams of options available instead of narrowing it down to a few key choices).
Designing interesting / tactically variable fights is the kind of thing where it would be real handy to have examples in the GM's guide or elsewhere.
I would love to see a streamlined 1-page "how to construct an encounter" or "how to build a dungeon".
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Creating characters does take a long time, but for some reason I love it. Me and one of the other players in my group finally had to take an oath "no more tinkering" before our last game. This was because we were both becoming obsessed with our characters every detail.
Come to think of it, maybe I have a problem...
Combat.
Grappling.
Shopping.
Kingdom Building and Upkeep
@_@
I can make a character that quickly. I never do though, once the background and personality start to come together there's always so much tinkering to do :P
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What it says in the title.....
Interesting, because I don't find any of the things you've listed to be time-consuming (with the exception of monster design, which I don't really engage in). Of the items you listed, I find building NPCs to be the least time-consuming. However, unlike you, I use Hero Lab and it saves me a ton of time.
The thing that I spend most of my prep time on (when I run a published adventure) are read-through and mark-ups. I read the adventure first, then I go back through and mark-up different things with 5 colors of high-liter. I usually do a quick re-read for each high-liter color (background info, adversarial info/tactics, traps/environment info, skill checks, and treasure). The advantage to all that is that I'm usually very organized and well-versed in the adventure.
-Skeld
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It takes me about 20 minutes to make a character and about 40 to design one from 1 to 10ish. I don't consider that long to be honest. Maybe I'm in the minority
Having solid system mastery helps a ton when it comes to speeding up character design, since a lot of the time eaten up in character creation goes to looking through all the sourcebooks and going over your options. If you already know what most of your options are and which ones fit your character concept and mechanical needs, creation goes a lot faster. A new player can easily spend hours going over the lists of feats, skills, and class abilities, trying to decide what to pick.
I'm ringing in with #3.
I try not to "recycle" what terrain and things I've used before, and it just takes awhile to come up with new and interesting fight scenes.
Also, shopping. I still yearn for a solid system that doesn't hinge on PC wealth (whether it was actually given to them or not). If you could knock that out, then you could get to gaming faster
My wizard player's turns.
As a DM I often find myself having to do much research into mixing up a lot of classes. So I would add research to this list.
One one hand I gain a wealth of knowledge and will be able to deal with pretty much anything my players throw at me.
On the other I spend so much time reading up on things that end up not even mattering once combat gets started that I feel like I am wasting time which is a valuable resource in my personal life (he said without irony while posting on an internet forum).
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It takes me about 20 minutes to make a character and about 40 to design one from 1 to 10ish. I don't consider that long to be honest. Maybe I'm in the minorityHaving solid system mastery helps a ton when it comes to speeding up character design, since a lot of the time eaten up in character creation goes to looking through all the sourcebooks and going over your options. If you already know what most of your options are and which ones fit your character concept and mechanical needs, creation goes a lot faster. A new player can easily spend hours going over the lists of feats, skills, and class abilities, trying to decide what to pick.
This is extremely fair to say.... I guess it has been such a long time since I was a new player that how long it used to take me kind of slipped my mind when I originally commented.
I don't make a lot of PCs. I make a lot of NPCs though. Usually I just wing it. NPCs don't usually last in a fight against the PCs. I do the same thing w/designing monsters. Often I re-skin; just take an existing stat block and change/tweak a couple things, then give it a different description.
I stole an idea from this thread and recently made an encounter. The PCs thought they were facing off against 2 zombies in the woods. They hit one zombie w/a ranged attack while other melee types got into position with double moves. The zombie struck immediately convulsed and it's head ripped off. I then used a Beheaded and the zombie together as a single monster. It grappled the paladin and did some damage before being destroyed.
Honestly designing fights usually takes between 1-10 minutes per fight while the actual design and re-skinning of the monsters/NPCs might take up to another 10-20 minutes. What makes it really hard for me is connections.
My party is APL 1. I have 3 striker types, one "leader" type and one tank (stealing these roles from 4e). This means I've got 3 guys good at singular attacks dealing mass damage, 1 guy that can absorb agro without taking much damage and one guy that can buff and support the troops. They're all melee combat focused while a couple have ranged backup. There's also a lot of skills/spells focused on dungeoneering.
This tells me that an easy fight is a couple powerful melee villains. An avg fight would be a mix of ranged and melee types with lots of weak creatures. A difficult fight would be a couple bruisers supported by a lot of small, weak ranged opponents and perhaps some battlefield control thrown in for good measure.
So...
Entry: 2 troglodytes reskinned as large kobolds; give them a couple alternate race traits from kobolds for defense against fire (the primary energy weapon of the PCs). These guys guard a way into a dungeon.
Trick/Trap or Non-Combat challenge: a female humanoid victim of alchemical oozes affected by positive energy lies comatose on the floor; for 40' around her are dozens of small traps like needles and grappling/choking ropes. PCs have to find a way to navigate the traps to get close enough to disperse the slime before it drains her to death. If they just attack the slime from short range they run the risk of killing the victim.
Setback: a quintet of kobolds: 2 ranged bowyers, 3 melee spearmen. Even at Warrior 1 give them some decent armor so that they've got high AC. This fight while only CR 2 should be a hard fight if the kobolds use tactics, cover and stealth. The scene then should take place in an area where there's a lot of fallen rubble or pillars or debris for the kobolds to use to their advantage.
Final fight: A kobold alchemist 2 with a couple mutants (troglodytes) supported by ranged bowyers uses his bombs and potions distributed prior to the fight to support his troops. The alchemist tries his best to shut down charging lanes, do area damage, and keep the PCs off balance.
Reveal: treasure
Only problem? HOW do I write an engaging, interesting story that weaves all of that together? The backstory has to fit into the homebrew world I'm making, connect with the overall plot and theme in SOME way, and the individual rooms have to connect meaningfully. The whole thing also has to be interesting enough so that my players aren't yawning at the end. Finally this interest level has to be tailored since 2 of my players are wargamer types, another is way into RP over all else, and the last 2 are a general mix between these 2 extremes.
TLDR: bottom line the numbers of the game are easy/fast for me. It's the plot, pacing and RP of the game that slows me down.
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Summoning often makes games take FOREVER; especially if the summoner does not have all of their papers together.
Writing a campaign from scratch takes an insane amount of time (days/weeks); I always think Paizo does a good enough job where I don't have to take the time for that; but admire those who do everything for themselves :).
Drawing maps for mini's. The flip-mats are awesome for this, but are only good for relatively small areas (though I'm most amused at the thought of an Undermountain flip mat).
-TimD
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I have been doing for such a long time, my only issues usually is trying to come up with interesting puzzles, you don't want them to be too hard because then, it takes most of the session time and nothing get done. I spend a lot of time thinking of how cool and distinctive my monster would look in an encounter. Pathfinder ap doesn't help with that, they make their monsters look so cool with jewelry or even something as simple as cool dresses (Axiomites guards in shattered stars).
My players gave me a round of applause when they fought an advanced wyvern. Why? The wyverns loot was literally on the dragon back. The loot was simply all kind of weapons that have been plunged into his back and stuck there for many years.
(1) Planning an encounter from an AP. It takes longer and longer at higher levels, looking up feats / spells / domain powers / class abilities / monster abilities from multiple books just to plan for one enemy who might die in the first round anyway.
(2) Magus spellstrike / spellcombat combo (full attack with an extra attack and concentration check and spell effects). Although a summoning specialist is probably worse.
Start with the backstory, then generate encounters from that. It works much easier.
The thing I hat is that building high-level encounters takes much more time than building low-level ones, but the combats actually take less time as everyone novas. Damage scales too much faster than hit points..
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This is extremely fair to say.... I guess it has been such a long time since I was a new player that how long it used to take me kind of slipped my mind when I originally commented.It takes me about 20 minutes to make a character and about 40 to design one from 1 to 10ish. I don't consider that long to be honest. Maybe I'm in the minorityHaving solid system mastery helps a ton when it comes to speeding up character design, since a lot of the time eaten up in character creation goes to looking through all the sourcebooks and going over your options. If you already know what most of your options are and which ones fit your character concept and mechanical needs, creation goes a lot faster. A new player can easily spend hours going over the lists of feats, skills, and class abilities, trying to decide what to pick.
I've been playing since 3.0, so I'm not *new* to the system by any stretch, and when I see a crappy option I can tell almost immediately, but there are still a ton of options when I go to build NPCs, from a ton of different sources. And since they're NPCs, and I might actually TAKE some of those sub-par options for them, they usually take me longer to build than PC Characters.