For background; I played lots and lots of D&D 2e, 3.5e from early teens up to end of college then sporadically after that for a decade and have now come back to it. In the interim the OSR happened, 5e launched and the myriad of resources available online has exploded. In particular I notice the focus has shifted from 'this is how one must do it, if you are good/serious' to 'the DM is a player too / here is how to make life easier for yourself'. In the spirit of the latter I want to share the way I prep my sessions that I have refined over the past years and two campaigns.
Each prep session, I start with two sheets - the last session and a blank. Current flow for preparation goes:
1. starts with the 'when' layout and weather, including countdown to major events and recurring things happening
2. List outstanding hooks that can be used for the session; this looks scant because most are a tag back to a place where the encounter, plot hook, etc is detailed
3. Blocked out timeline for session - has evolved into Breakfast, morning, lunch, afternoon, dinner, evening, night as the 'action beats' through a day.
4. Detail onto any hook not yet fleshed out if it is small. Larger hooks might get their own page if I expect to reference back to it over multiple sessions
This is all the pre-session prep I will do from here it is during and after.
5. Log of actual play out of the session, with half-hour blocks as the finest level of detail
6. Immediate post session (players still at the table) expected actions for next session, leads on their mind, where they think they are going
7. Post session implications where I work out consequences of player actions, move the timeline along on anything happening in the background that may not have featured at the table.
Note, this is possible because my writing is small and I am happy with tiny script; your mileage may vary.
As noted above starting for a session I will note what parts of section 2 were not covered and port them forward to the new section 2. Where a hook was detailed out in a section 3, I will note which sheet (episode number) has the detail. Next, I go through 5-7 to cook up some new hooks and add them to the new section 2.
Other than this the main sheets kept are locations (dungeon complex, city districts) which are revisited time and again, a heirarchy of local power structures, a sheet of NPCs encountered and 'conspiracy pages' where the active factions are detailed out.
At the table this is then - stack of episode sheets with live hooks to one side, stack of lore sheets to the other side for deeper detail and the live episode sheet in front of me.
Anyone looking for more thinking on this I suggest to check out Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Sly Flourish where I pinched the idea of slimming down and simplifying my prep in the first place or there is now another post of this system in action.
This is completely fascinating - both the flow and the layout, would love to see more posts like this around the blogosphere.
ReplyDeleteIs there any chance we could see a clearer image of the notes? You might have obscured it on purpose though, which is totally fair!
...my hand writing is junk so I while I did crush the resolution on this to make it a generic example, I would need to type up a version for it to be legible for anyone else.
DeleteI will put that on the to-do stack.