How do you DMs organize your sessions?

[MustacheManny]

I'm about to DM for a friend's birthday party, we've all played before and I probably know the most about the rules out of all my friends. I've been DM before, but don't feel like I have a great grasp on how to organize all my plans. By plans I mean maps, encounters, stat blocks, general story beats. How do you organize all your thoughts and plans? Thanks for the tips!

[Man_Over_Game]

I'm about to DM for a friend's birthday party, we've all played before and I probably know the most about the rules out of all my friends. I've been DM before, but don't feel like I have a great grasp on how to organize all my plans. By plans I mean maps, encounters, stat blocks, general story beats. How do you organize all your thoughts and plans? Thanks for the tips!

A computer really helps. An Excel spreadsheet with all of the information at a click of a button will save you a lot of hassle.

Mostly, though, I make up everything on the fly. I have a simplified map, some notes on NPCs and how they interact, but I don't bother with battle maps until they're relevant. Generally, with monsters, there's only about 4 things that you need to care about:

Health, damage, goals, and combat reason

Health and Damage: are very straightforward. They should be hitting about 70% of the time, dealing enough damage to deal about 30% of a character's health, depending on their level. If they're big, don't just increase their damage, increase their number of attacks. I make Bosses have a special reaction where they can use a single attack every time a player's turn ends. It works out really well. Don't worry about getting the math exactly right, not every fight has to be perfectly challenging.

(A good rule of thumb is that enemies have lots of health and accuracy, but low AC and damage, and players have little health, low AC and lots of damage. This is to allow players enough survivability to deal big numbers in damage without dying themselves, and give enemies enough survivability to last more than a few rounds. With enemies having high AC, it means that there's a lot of "gambling" involved for players to hit, but with enemies having high attack rolls and low damage, it means that players will be able to react to a consistent threat.)

Goals: are what the bad guy is actually trying to do. If that is no longer a possibility, consider changing their goals, or just running away completely.

Combat Reason: is a little more about game-design. What is that enemy providing in this battle? Is it by being a meat shield for the caster? Is it by casting Fog Cloud on the enemy archers, so they're forced to be in melee range? Every enemy needs to have some component that they're providing to the fight. If they don't, you'll know why your battle turned out lame after the fact. Just because you have an army of goblins randomly running around because they're trying to protect their home doesn't mean that it's going to be a terribly interesting fight. Even an army of goblins can be interesting if they're throwing rocks from a nearby cliff, hiding in the trees or bushes, or quietly sneaking behind your group to gank your mages. Ask yourself, how is this enemy making this fight more interesting?

Other than that, you don't really need a stat block. If you need to know what the Wisdom score is of a Harpy, just guess. 14. Bam. I have no idea if that's correct, but that's what sounds right, and that's what I'm using now. Write it down for that harpy (or harpies, if there's multiple) and move on.


When it comes to most enemies, you don't really need to plan out a series of special attacks or moves or whatever. Some of my best fights were just things I came up with on the fly, because my players didn't do what I expected them to. Most of the stats and special actions a monster has might not come in handy anyway. When is a Harpy's Strength of 9 ever going to be relevant, or it's ability to make sight-based perception checks with advantage? When you think it'd be cool if a skill or stat was relevant (like a Goblin trying to ambush the players), then they get that skill, but don't worry about it before hand.

You'll just make yourself go crazy trying to make everything perfect.

[MustacheManny]

You'll just make yourself go crazy trying to make everything perfect.
This is very helpful, thank you!

[Theodoxus]

Snip of perfection.

Holy crap, I could have written that verbatim.

While I really enjoy D&D "shows" like Critical Role et al, I do think they do a bit of disservice to first time (or low frequency, might be better) DMs who see the productions and think they have to meet that level of preparedness for their players to have fun.

About the only thing I'd add is to have a metaplot of some sort. Lately, I've tended to use AL single shots woven into an overarching story. They have sufficient skeletons to build intrigue around without me having to pull crap out of my butt too often. If the players wander into a different area than the current plot line, I just yank another story from their tier group and roll with that until they wander back to the original storyline - or ignore the first completely if the second (or third, etc) suites their fancy more.

[Man_Over_Game]

Holy crap, I could have written that verbatim.

While I really enjoy D&D "shows" like Critical Role et al, I do think they do a bit of disservice to first time (or low frequency, might be better) DMs who see the productions and think they have to meet that level of preparedness for their players to have fun.

About the only thing I'd add is to have a metaplot of some sort. Lately, I've tended to use AL single shots woven into an overarching story. They have sufficient skeletons to build intrigue around without me having to pull crap out of my butt too often. If the players wander into a different area than the current plot line, I just yank another story from their tier group and roll with that until they wander back to the original storyline - or ignore the first completely if the second (or third, etc) suites their fancy more.

That's actually quite funny. I was going to write a second post about coming up with an overall plot, but I decided to scrap it.

Yes. This. @Theodoxus hit it right on the head. The more general and wide the aspect is, the more it needs to be planned. Things like how each country interacts with each other, how cities act, where they generate their money or goals from, those are all things that are going to be relevant for your players.

If you decide this city makes most of its money based on special stones it sells to mages, that gives a lot of opportunities for adventurers. Maybe there's a trade route that needs protecting. Maybe the stones attract monsters, or just thieves. Maybe the stones are turning people into monsters. Maybe the mines have been infested, or there's been a cave in, or both. Most of this stuff will come very naturally, so it's better to plan the information that takes longer to plan, like how the local city mines magic stones for money.

Let your player's decisions and paths determine the specifics, you focus on the (relatively local) world.

[Descole]

One trick is to use a relationship map (recommend having it digitally, Kumu.io works great for me). The map is simply your characters names / important things connected by arrows labelled with how these things relate. Makes keeping track of an increasingly sprawling adventure much easier.

[DerficusRex]

Great advice from Man_Over_Game and Theodoxus.

If you're looking for specific tools for notes / organisation, I think you'll find it varies quite a bit from person to person depending on what they're comfortable with and what kind of environment the game is being run in. That said, I can tell you what I like and point you at some other things I didn't find as useful personally but have been recommended by others.

My setup in brief (game sessions are run in person in a living room):

I run things from a laptop with a secondary monitor attached
a DokuWiki instance for notes and some player handouts
Maps (when used) have the player view displayed on a TV using either Roll20 or MapTool
https://improved-initiative.com for combat tracking
Portable backgammon boards as rolling trays :)


I find DokuWiki really nice, but a large part of that stems from being comfortable setting up websites and servers and wanting something I can adjust to do what I want. Excel spreadsheets, plain text files in a directory, or printed/handwritten notes are all just fine.

There are GM-focused wiki services if you like the idea of using a wiki you can give your players access to but don't want to set up and maintain it yourself. https://www.obsidianportal.com and https://www.worldanvil.com come to mind. Obsidian Portal has a free trial period, but I think it requires a paid subscription if you want to continue using it. World Anvil does have a free tier that you can continue to use, and if you're interested in custom worldbuilding it has a lot of tooling (and an active community) focused in that area. I looked at them both, but ultimately tweaking my own DokuWiki worked better for what I wanted.

I did see a neat suggestion from someone who uses MapTool heavily: he puts a DM-visible info token in each of the rooms on his map so he can click on it and pop up a box with the flavour text and notes relevant to that room. edit: Here's his video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc_X_rrSmqM). He has a bunch of other good MapTool tutorials as well; this one is #9 in a series. MapTool itself can be found at https://www.rptools.net/

I like improved-initiative particularly because you can set it to automatically prompt for concentration checks and specify durations for status effects that will expire. It has a library populated with SRD-available monsters, and you can either add your own statblocks, or quick-add combatants on the fly if you want to just give a name, HP, AC and initiative.

[Malifice]

I'm about to DM for a friend's birthday party, we've all played before and I probably know the most about the rules out of all my friends. I've been DM before, but don't feel like I have a great grasp on how to organize all my plans. By plans I mean maps, encounters, stat blocks, general story beats. How do you organize all your thoughts and plans? Thanks for the tips!

I generally start with a rough outline of the adventure (hook, theme, doom clock/ time limit for success/ failure to police the Adventuring day). Then I move to encounters.

Something like (an example) 'Against the Pale Master':

Outline: 'A bunch of Orcs are terrorising the lands led by a mysterious demonic overlord'
Hook: 'The Orc army attacks town while the PCs are resting, taking several important NPCs prisoner, and threatening the town. The PCs are offered a reward for their safe return'
Time limit/ Adventuring day constraints: 'The Orcs are returning the captives to a nearby ruin where they are encampled to hand over to their Demon overlord [an albino Glabrezu named the 'Pale Master'] in order to complete a ritual. The NPCs are scheduled to be sacrificed the next full moon - tomorow night!'

Encounters:

1) PCs in town and fully rested. Raiding party of Orcs, Eye of Gruumsh, and Tannaruks (albino Orc half demons - the Sons of the Pale Master) attack the town looting and pillaging. PCs must deal with several waves while saving NPCs in town.

2) PCs (or the town guard) capture an Orog prisoner. PCs can use skills or magic (intimidate/ dominate person/ history etc) on the Prisoner to learn the Orcs are a tribe of demon worshippers, they are based in a nearby ruin, and they took the prisoners to 'the Pale Master' a creature they are all terrified of - to sacrifice them at midnight tomorrow. If the PCs fail to learn this info the Towns Clerics learn it via magic, but this takes more time and the PCs lose one short rest opportunity later on in the adventure.

3) PCs head to ruin. Possible random encounter.

4) PCs deal with several encounters [im thinking orcs, tannaruks, orogs, a Mage reskinned as an Orc Mage, demons, a mercenary giant, a Champion NPC reskinned as an 'Orc champion' etc] in the ruins, with 2-3 locations strategically placed by the DM that enable a short rest - deduct one short rest if the PCs did not learn the information out themsevles and the towns clerics had to find it out for them.

5) PCs finally confront the 'Pale Master' - a Glabrezu with 2 Legendary actions and Legendary resistances (allowing a cantrip to be cast as a legendary action, or a 40' teleport as 2 legendary actions). BBEG type solo encounter. He monologues a lot.

5) Rewards/ Penalty for failure. If the ritual is completed, the NPCs souls are destroyed and a Goristro is released and the whole area is reduced to rubble in weeks by the Orcs and the Demons. If the PCs succeed, they are rewarded richly and the Orcs disband without their demonic leader.