I’ve been interested for a while in sharing a bit of my process for when I plan D&D sessions with my friends. I often comment half-seriously that I make most of it up as I go, and I’d still say that’s mostly true, and now maybe you’ll see what I mean. I therefore present humbly some samples of my prep notes below:

Probably there’s not a whole lot here in the way of useful notes for someone that wanted to replicate any of my sessions, because I didn’t write these notes with the intention of anyone but myself reading them. I do sometimes find myself writing as if someone was going to read it, only because it helps me clarify and flesh out ideas for myself.

A single session of DMing, when fully planned out, ends up being about a page and a half to two pages of notes in my composition book. I used to take notes in Google Drive for a while in my Minos campaign. You can check out what that looked like here, from when we were using Pathfinder, or here, from after we switched to 5th Edition. I shudder to re-read any of these notes, especially the latter, because there are probably plenty of really crappy ideas in there. I’m sure plenty of experienced (and maybe jaded) D&D players would look on these notes with horrible disdain, because there’s no shortage of clichés and contrivances, but I wasn’t trying to impress anyone.

My friend Erik and I have started trying our hand at writing adventures together that others could pick up and play. This is a whole new beast, and will necessarily require much more documentation per session of play than what I’ve posted here. I look forward to that change of pace.