What is too much preparation?
I’m currently managing a full time job in addition to coordinating the activities for Role Play Experience. Balancing game and workshop preparation with other important commitments in my life takes a little bit of time management and schedule juggling. At the same time, I love creating games for my players, plus I want to provide the best experience for the teams I engage with. This takes preparation, aka my valuable time!
So, how much is too much prepartion? This is an important question I find I’ve been wrestling with time and again, and wonder if it’s something on the minds of other Games Masters, creatives and leaders out there.
I live for writing games and facilitating role-play experiences with teams of people - group story-telling, at its heart. Games Mastering is one of the great joys of my life, due to the level of creativity, collaboration, and satisfaction it provides every time I play or games master. Writing for game days is just as enjoyable, possibly even more! Preparing the backstories for characters the players will meet, setting up the scenarios for your players’ characters to interact with, and preparing for the “big reveal” in a storyline... getting into the flow of this makes my day when it comes to writing time.
Writing, like all creative enterprises, takes a few different types of time: the time to get into the flow of creation, just like warm-up exercises for the creative muscles; the time spent in the flow, when you have creative ideas seemingly pouring out of you; and time stepping out of the flow, when you break, look back and reflect on the creation, so you can begin editing and refining it for sharing. Stepping out is also good for the people close to me in my life, so that I’m not living off in a fantasy world for the rest of the day and can deal with the realities of life!
There’s a couple of challenges I’ve learned that need to be overcome to get into the flow, to stay in the flow, and to step out of the flow
Look at your commitments in life
Commit regular time to create. Commit regular time 60 minutes at the end of every day to write may sound like a good be effective
DO IT
Reflect, Revise, Repeat
I continue to find that when I don’t have a process for whatever creative activity I’m getting into, it’s easy to start it, try it for a few minutes, then get distracted by other “more important” aspects of my life. IF this happens to me over and over again with writing, So assigning
Habit forming is crucial getting don’t have a process for this,
