How much work?

GMs and DMs, how much work and planning do you actually put into your session or campaign? How does it affect it as a result? Are you of the lazy sort, or more in depth in terms of planning? Pic related.

Depends on how long the campaign is going to be

If its like 3-5 sessions i don't write down more than 5 pages of notes

If its supposed to be a big campaign i go ham

I go overboard and build a whole setting.

I like to do some real foundation work for campaigns. I don't do a whole lot from session to session aside from idle daydreaming, but for world-building and all that I really enjoy fleshing out details where I can, populating the world with fun stuff to throw at the players later, building sandcastles for them to kick down, stuff like that.

I know people like to do the whole "off-the-cuff" GM thing these days, and for individual sessions that's pretty fine, but I really think a lot of people these days undervalue the long-term benefits of good world-building and really fleshing out the setting and populace.

If there's anything I learned during my years of GMing, it's that I shouldn't literally plan a campaign. When I prepare for the campaign, I simply look for a general tone, decent setup in which players can be involved, some interesting concepts I could use, and a vague vector in which campaign might develop, including possible end-point.

World-building-wise I don't do much. I create some entities, points of interest, give them some defining details, links to other POIs and entities, and flesh them out when necessary. I generally prefer subtle ambiguity and open-ended nature rather than encyclopedic meticulousness.

My session material is a two-four pages of notes about environment, driving forces and possible obstacles. I collect ideas and concepts the whole week and then just pour them in the document for an hour. This is enough for a 5-hour session. I have plenty of opportunities to improvise, while being confident in picturing the environment and not restricting the player's agency. Plus collecting ideas is a good subject to occupy my thoughts.

I simply found this way more entertaining for me. I love to improvise on a solid base, rather than putting every bush and brick by the hand. Determinism puts me off for some reason.

Points of interests are really the way to go

I sometimes write down things they could do at x location but thats it

I think up some story concept in the half-hour it takes to drive to my friends house. Usually just three things: the starting clue, the big fight, and the ending clue. Then during the actual game I introduce the first clue, and I let the players do whatever they want, eventually they trigger the big fight, and i let them find the next clue at the end.
The fun comes from what they decide to to and the reactions that happens because of it.

Usually spend about 2 hours a week deciding on what's going to happen based on last weeks actions and roughly decide any adversaries identities and their relative levels on my phone. Any smaller details I make up on the fly, but the system is crunch light, so I get away with it.

I plan things out in my head in loose, general terms while riding to (or from) work or while on break, then the day before I'll make some notes regarding specifics.

Kinda 0, kinda 2-3 hours per day.
0 because I just listen to random number generators and slap together a super simple story, no pregen required, 2-3 hours per day if we count the system making, book readin' and Veeky Forums lurking. Most of my story's "Orcs took hostages, save them + Giant encounter", and then I randomly generate 10ish encounters ranging from fights and traps to allies meet along the way.

I'm a lazy fuck but the games are okay, as far as playtesting's concerned.

I create an "endpoint" and then determine what is required for that endpoint to be reached. The endpoint is not the end of the campaign but rather the end of the quest or mission the players are going to be taken part of. As a result I'm usually planning a few endpoints ahead.

Once I have mentally laid out the endpoint comes the bulk of the actual work which is where I compile stat blocks, search for interesting mechanics and homebrew if needed to create interesting encounters that have to be experienced to reach the endpoint.

On actual game night comes the improve, because as they say "No plan survives contact with the players" all I have to really do is nudge them towards the endpoint. Essentially I don't plan for every roll that a man could make, I just improve based on logic and my understanding of the world.

Overall I would say I put 2-10 hours into the planning phase per weekly session, this is all thinking stuff so I do it during the many mindless tasks that my life is made off. 1-4 hours of paper work that goes into making my game play notes and statblocks.

and 5 or so hours of improve on game night.

I put as much work as the players give back during the session. Since my main group's top class I pamper them with plenty of things to do and lots of stuff prepared in advance.
You should always be prepared to do some improv though

Far too much for what it's worth. Mapping the entire existing world, planning almost all potential dialog, music, failsafes for when the players think they're off the rails, and at the very least two-to-three "personal" moments for each player during the campaign.

I've gone as far as making an entire supplement to pathfinder for in the event my players decided to try and kill the setting's Gods.

The absolute madman.

Out of curiosity, do you have a career?

Part-Time work just to get enough money to survive summer, after that Student Loans keep me afloat.

Everyone tells me I should look into paid GMing but it feels like such a stupid thing to me.

With that amount of prep, I'd consider it. Or at least look into monetizing it some other way.

O' the life of a student, how I miss its gobs of extra time.

I usually tend to get caught up in building the world around the players and realize almost too late that I haven't planned for all the small interactions their going to be doing while their still small-scale. For instance, my Ice and Fire game I just started I statted out and filled with characters all the Houses that surround them when they won't even be interacting with them for a few sessions. Also working on a few overarching plot lines that they may not even engage in, we'll see. I am, by far, a more narrative focused DM than mechanics and system one so I usually pull out things just for rule of cool factor if the players are rolling with it. Love seeing when they are all heavily engaged.

As far as dialogue and and general "player freedom control" I am more of a fly by the handle DM constantly trying to adapt to what they want to do at the time and who they want to interact with. It can be challenging anticipating conversations in advance, that's why with most important NPC's I have a small list of general characteristics and traits which help me get a good idea of what their dispositions are and how they'll react to certain topics.

This game I'm doing now is the most planning I've done for one, probably have invested about 10-12 hours of planning before the first session, written out 10 pages of backstory, and 5 pages of notes for the first few sessions. Damn Ice and Fire universe has a lot of fun small stuff that I can't wait to engage them with like the politics, intrigues, House, and Warfare systems. It's going to get pretty crazy.

I feel like it's worth drawing a distinction between world-building and actual campaign planning.

World-building, I have ten-page documents on each of the races discussing their various physiological traits, adaptations, and predispositions. Twenty-page documents on nations. And so on.

When it comes to the actual campaign, however, I just come up with like ten plot-relevant NPCs and write three paragraphs about each one. After each session, I add entries for any new NPCs the party has encountered, and add a update paragraph to every existing entry, even if the relevant character did not appear in the session.

This plus 3 or 4 pages of setting and lore let me run my take on lost mines of Phandelver.

I've got a couple of pages on how the setting tech works, the history that led to the current setting. Then for each 'chapter' of the campaign I've got the relevant history, some character motivations and a few maps.

I like to get my system figured out in advanced if possible
But I'm an improver
Can't count on characters to do anything you want

>pick a pre made scenario and eventually tweak it a bit by adding some scene and fun npc's
>print /make some pre gen character
>run it

I'm running one shot for beginner for a while, I just prepare what I need, Barbarians of Lemuria isn't a very demanding system
However, I'm soon going to switch to a new horror ttrpg, I'm going to use pre gen to but I'm going to add some props to spice things up

If I were to run a campaign however, I would prepare a bit more, maps, music and a more detailed encounter, but I have yet to find a regular group

It's hard to quantify how much "work" goes into my GMing. I'm literally always running "gm.exe" in the background of my life. Books I read, TV shows I watch, songs I hear, they all get ran through this filter that's constantly plucking through them for "oh that's some cool imagery", "that would make a neat scenario with a fresh coat of paint", "I really like that character."

Like, I don't spend more than a couple of hours on any given session, and often much less, but depending on how you look at it GMing is like, a full-time job. Or a lifestyle. I don't know.

I put in a ton of work because even though I'm good at improv I don't want any logical inconsistencies or contradictions in my setting. It's just my perfectionist nature because I know my players most likely wouldn't notice or care.

But I realized recently I may be going too far just this once. I'm busy setting up a campaign that spans multiple cities, but mostly surrounds just the one of them. The cities that are featured in the campaign kinda grew against one another and at the same time separately so they've got similar, but different governments. All but three of them are pretty set in stone and I've done a good bit of work, but I realized as I was detailing the political structure of this final city that the players would literally never see this because this city is in ruins during the campaign and part of the mystery of the campaign is figuring out who did it, why they did it, and what their end game is. I was developing characters and a form of government for a city that literally didn't need it.

I will say that proper planning and notes will play dividends big time.

I have been doing no such thing seeing as life is super busy and whatnot.

Half an hour every week with bigger multi hour stints every month or so to build frameworks.

Totally dependant on what you are running and who you are running it for. Usually you should flesh out a few locations both for encounters and for an overworld. Know what type of stuff would be there, bit try not to get any more in depth than that at first. Maybe draw a map of the world and let the players pick a starting point, then choose one of your locations and have it be somewhere in the proximity of the point the players picked. As they explore the world keep writing in new places and people. Star up monsters beforehand and then drop them into places where they belong. The two worst things a dm can do is never stat things up at all, nothing is worse as a player than realizing you might as well just ask the dm what happens during a fight, or pregenerate each encounter and just hope things go as they planned.

I invest in good worldbuilding + house rules, then the game sort of runs itself. All the prep I do is
>go about my normal life
>whenever I get a good idea for my campaign, write them down
>roughly an hour before the session starts, check campaign log for 10 minutes
>check the ideas I wrote down for 20-30 minutes, think of new ideas
>roll up a few challenging encounters / maps for 20 minutes

Oh, that looks sexy. I've tried doing character/faction maps like that some times, but my laziness tends to make them simple and lame, to a point where they are not needed.

At least 2-3 hours a day (play weekly), try to have at least 3 possible paths to completion, try to have at least 2 skill based rolls based on every character's background. NPCs are given backgrounds and acted out by myself based on their individual experiences. Countries are planned out as far as their imports, exports, staple foods, social norms, etc.
>How does it affect it as a result?
They always do the murderhobo path, regardless of whether or not it was an actual option

I don't even know why I try.

>They always do the murderhobo path, regardless of whether or not it was an actual option
I would advise running a little campaign, that will subvert their murderhobo tendencies. Maybe something extremely gonzo or with emphasis on low lethality. You never know, they might actually like it.
My current party consists mostly of typical D&D players, but I'm running a gonzo campaign, and because of that players act more gentle towards the environment. I said early to them, that combat should be the last resort. In two session campaign will be over, and there were only a handful of violent encounters of which only two were resolved with the use of map and miniatures, despite the fact, that there were a lot of opportunities for them.
I believe it's the matter of the way you communicate with the players. You can also simply open a dialogue with the party if you want for them to act more subtle.