How to Prepare for your next Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder Session

Dirty Twenty
6 min readMar 3, 2022

I have been working on creating my own Dungeon Master’s / Game Master’s notebook slash planning system (a story we shall tell another day), and it’s forced me to evaluate how I approach planning a session, and in fact how I approach planning and writing everything that I do.

I thought that I would share some of my thoughts experiences and ideas, and maybe you’ll find some use in them, and perhaps it will spur ideas that you can bring to your own table.

The Lazy DM’s Workbook by Michael Shea

I have to say that I’m a huge fan of The Lazy DM’s Workbook. It’s written for 5e, but the ideas are the same. I purchased the PDF, and I love the fact that there are worksheets you can use to plan a session. The worksheets are my favorite part. I actually recently printed out 25 copies to use for my own planning.

The bad news is that a week after I printed out 25, I decided to design my own system, making these 25 useless now.

Sly Flourish’s Session Worksheet

As you can see from the illustration, this system uses a system of prompts to get you to think about the upcoming session. There’s a space for players, you need to write about what the strong start to the session is, what scenes and locations, and npcs the players might encounter as well as what monsters and treasure they might encounter.

The most interesting thing about this setup is that the largest portion of the worksheet is dedicated to this section entitled, “What secrets and clues might they uncover? And every time you plan a session you’re supposed to come up with ten things in this section that players can discover that pertain to either the story arcs you’re creating. I enjoy this idea, but I feel that it is suboptimal when planning out good story arcs.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker

This feels like a non sequitur, but Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park fame. There’s a Youtube video of them talking about writing and I found it incredibly thought provoking. Distilled down, they say that if the words linking their story beats are “and then” its bad. What we need to aim for is “therefore” or “but.”

Things don’t happen in sequence just because. When something happens, the next beat should happen as a direct result of the first beat, therefore, or but. There’s a fantastic comment on the video that lays this out.

Casa Bonita

Kyle has a birthday party which is scheduled to take place at Casa Bonita, Cartman’s favorite restaurant.

But, because Cartman constantly rips into Kyle, Cartman isn’t invited and Butters is invited instead.

Therefore, Cartman devises a plan in order to go to Casa Bonita instead of Butters, tricking Kyle into thinking he’s changed and kidnapping Butters.

But, the town becomes worried and everyone starts to look for Butters.

We can see clearly here that all of these beats fit together and form a logical flow of events. I wanted to incorporate this into my own session prep worksheet.

Prototype Session Planning Worksheet, Front

And so I’ve come up with this two page prototype that has the things I want. I lead off by having a section to recap the key points of the last session. Mainly to help me remember and synthesize what happened last time and have that information there so I don’t have to go look for the last sheet.

We then take some time to write down and think about or brainstorm about what the consequences of the next session are. What possible events that this may have triggered, and what the various factions in your world’s response to it may be.

The opening scene section remains essentially the same allowing us to write about where we start. Sly Flourish advocates for a strong start, but I find that this isn’t possible most of the time. Most of the time I end up picking up where we left off after last session. A good example is my last session ended up right at the end of a combat encounter. The opening scene of my next session will not necessarily be that exciting. I don’t think that it’s always possible to begin every session with a big opener. That leads to scope creep, and sometimes you need downs to make the ups seem bigger.

The Locations, NPCs, Monsters, and Magic Items sections are essentially a place to list things so I can remember to prep scenes and pull monsters later. This leads us into one of the more important sections, Key Story Beats / Encounters. In my mind this is where we need to catalog out the plotlines that that our party has access to and the gates or events that they would need to make it to in order to open them up.

Secrets and clues are the little tidbits left around the world that would guide the players to the key story beats. I think that it perhaps would go without saying that a number of these need to be blatantly obvious. I’ll give you an example. Session before last, the players in my Strength of Thousands campaign found themselves almostg vanquished by an encounter that had them battling a few giant silverfish and a giant swarm of silverfish. Therefore, one of the teachers at the school suggested that they go talk to a professor who specialized in combat who was running a fighting tournament to teach students. This fighting tournament for the underclassmen is the next key story beat for my campaign.

Prototype Session Planning Worksheet, Back

The second page, or back half of my session planning worksheet (isn’t duplex printing wonderful) is a lot less unstructgured. The left half of the page allows me to write about concurrent global and local events that are happening.

Though the players have agency and the ability to effect what is happening in the world, they aren’t the only ones living in it. I think it’s important to map out and think about what other factions are also living in the world and what their moves are. I separated this into local and global for one big reason — there is potential that the players may stumble upon and interrupt what local factions are doing. And they may aid them, and they may hinder them. A good reminder that factions in the world are not always antagonists, but perhaps for now share the same interests as the party.

We then leave a quarter of the page for any additional notes and finally a section for contingency plans because as Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

I laid this out in a sequence that might be one that I use in order, but it’s likely that you’ll be bouncing from section to section as most things in a TTRPG session should be interconnected in some shape or form.

So use a pencil. Or a Pilot FriXion Erasable Pen. I love the freaking things.

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