How to Plan a D&D / TTRPG Game Session
Preparing for your Tabletop RPG session can be quite daunting even for game masters that have run weekly games. Whether you have been learning a new system and are just trying to find your feet, or you want to improve your planning for future sessions coming up, giving yourself a task list to follow of some simple steps to remember can always help when you’re stuck for ideas.
Writing Week: Plotting the 10 major scenes of your story
So I heard you have this amazing idea for a world and story, what are you waiting for? Ah yes right, the actual writing bit. It can be the bane of some people’s existence and to others a mild bump in the road. Sometimes that comes down to how you plan, but don’t worry you don’t need to know exactly what you are doing at every millisecond of your character’s lives. The best way to have an idea from beginning to end is to think of the 10 major scenes you want to happen.
Writing Week: A little PDF helper
Sometimes writing is a breeze and a pleasure, and sometimes I find myself completely overwhelmed by the ocean of thoughts swirling around in my head.
I have always struggled with keeping my head in one place. Easily distracted, it often takes an awful lot of effort to just focus on one thing for a long period of time. It makes the task of writing sometimes quite difficult, especially if it is a chore and not for my own personal enjoyment. It’s like trying to keep something floating in one singular place and not let it be carried off by the current in one direction or another, after a while you find you’re a lot more tired than you should be.
D&D Week: Where is my Inventory?
In and out we came from fights before finally coming up to the spellcaster at our latest village stop. By level 11 I had so many items in my bags it was an ache to scour through all my belongings to find the tiny scribble of ‘bane thistle’ that I could have used in the fight to deter some of those hits. Frustratingly, I didn’t have my own character sheet design at that point so I was still using the standard and really struggled. Even now as a GM I struggle with monitoring inventory, or the idea that the players aren’t just carrying a bag of holding on their shoulders at ALL TIMES in the adventure.
Something needed to be done to help ease up this visualisation frustration I was having. So today I have one.
Writing Week: Where do I start with Worldbuilding?
Whether it’s for writing or for planning your next homebrew, the most daunting part of the process can often be coming up with the world that your story is set in, and how to make that world feel like it has come to life instead of being ‘basic fantasy medieval town’.
Today we are going to take some time to talk about the baby steps of world-building. Once we have our initial building blocks you will soon come to see how this can easily snowball into a much bigger thriving environment where everything affects each other.
For this, we have also included a small worksheet you can download and use for your own world-building if you want!
D&D Week: Combat Confusion
Combat. Its either every player’s dream or nightmare. I remember first picking up the game with a rudimentary knowledge of how tabletop role-playing games worked. I’d played a couple of smaller systems previously and so I figured that naturally, the rules would gradually come to me as I learnt from the book. However, like most new players I hadn’t actually invested in the book yet, and on top of that, I had difficulty taking in the absolute tidal wave of knowledge that I could find…