Anyone else put off writing their campaign until it's almost too late? Lmao I'm constantly writing right up to the beginning of our sessions! Sometimes I'm still writing as everyone is joining the call. It's such a bad habit but ADHD doesn't let me write until the pressure piles up. Just curious if there's any other dungeon masters here and what your writing schedule is like (probably not as bad as mine lmaooo)

I run pre-written campaigns rather than writing my own (I'm great at writing for a single character! not great at making adventure happen without help.) but I'm also an ADHD haver and tend to do most of my session prep right before the session as well! I do try to give myself at least an hour to eat a snack and be away from my computer before we start, but I think it actually helps me to plan on doing some of it in the hours leading up to the session because that way it's fresh in my memory and I'm less likely to forget things. Picking background music in particular is helpful since it walks me through all the possible scenes that could happen during that session, whereas just rereading my notes is boring and goes in one ear and out the other so to speak.

I built my world back in the late 70's and have been adding details to it ever since. (My maps overflow two 4 drawer file cabinets in the attic now). My gamers had a tendency to somehow always do something I had never expected, so I gave up trying to plan for every scenario ages ago and adopted a pretty fluid story outline with a lot of room for randomness. Sadly work, and health issues as I get older, have left me little time and energy to host all-night table top adventures anymore. I do miss the fun and mayhem though.

I occasionally leave things to the last minute, but I usually have most of the adventure figured out and written down before we start rolling dice. I think being organized and prepared has helped me a lot as a GM/DM. I'm also good at flying by the seat of my pants as they say and improvising when I have to or need to. Sometimes your players just do unexpected things though or ignore the dangling plot hook that you put in front of them altogether... I have several side quests and such that my players haven't followed, which I could pull out at any time if I really wanted to so those two weeks that I spent working on the campaign don't exactly go to waste either.

I think the mark of a good GM/DM is their ability to be flexible and fluid.