Mass combat and whole-dungeon thinking
Mr Mike Shea , perhaps better known as Sly Flourish, has a wonderful blog and, indeed, a wonderful pen name. SF follows the philosophy of "The Lazy Dungeon Master". This philosophy can be put into a simple equation: If the quality of your game = the quality of your prep x the time spent prepping, you can up the quality of your game by upping the quality of your prep, here meaning its efficiency. If you can work out how to condense four hours of planning into just one hour by focussing on the right prep, then you can instead do two hours of prep, thus earning two hours of quality time to yourself and magically doubling the quality of your game into the bargain. I explain this only because I think more people ought to know about Mr Flourish and his insights. The actual reason I bring up Sly and the way of the lazy DM is because of a recent post on his blog about running big battles in D&D. This seems to be an eternal question - there certainly seems to be at least one th...