September 2017

As part of his latest post, Alexis challenges DMs to estimate how long they have spent working to become a DM. Below I do the calculations to estimate for myself how long I've spent actively DMing and working on the game.

I ran a bit on and off from 13 to 15 but none of it really stuck, so I won't count all that.

I'll start from 16 and my first group of serious players. At first I was running a group of 8 to 12, often one session Saturday and one Sunday with some players attending both games. I'll say each running was 5 hours, that's 10 hours per weekend for ... about 4 months, so 160 hours. Let's say prep work took half that amount of time spread out of the rest of the week, so multiply by 1.5 and we get 240 hours.

Forgive me for the lack of updates in the last two months. I've been preoccupied with finding work, my game has been on hiatus since June or so, and furthermore, because I was feeling a lack of direction in my projects, I gave myself permission to stop thinking about D&D entirely for as long as I needed to get my groove back.

A week or so ago, after a break of about forty days, I started working on D&D projects again. As my game will be starting up again soon, with a party partially or entirely composed of all-new players, I decided it was finally time to set my game in the real world.