Session Planning

By: Jared Biti

In this article, I plan to go over how I, personally, do my session planning. I will be pulling from my personal experience in planning and adapting to players in the game I run on alternating Fridays.

I will start with how… well… I start. I go back over my notes from the last session or sessions. I look through any notes I made since the last session, and I start fleshing out my plans for the game. Here’s an example that I recently had to do with my Friday game. 

This game is based on a published adventure, which is an unusual thing for me. I took what was supposed to be a first-level to second-level D&D 5e adventure and bloomed it out to a campaign that should take the PCs to the sixth level. The basis of the adventure is largely investigation, so most of my notes at this point are just what information is available and where it can be found. I am mostly a reactive GM, so I keep a lot of that loose and just flow with my players and the direction they want to go.

With that, I also take feedback from them, whether they want more combat, or “can we level up and go kill something?” So I planned a boss fight that was supposed to be a big and hard fight for them at level one. Well, they took a while getting there, so I went ahead and let them level up to level two. Now I have to remake that boss fight for a level three leveling. So I have to rework my notes. 

With their expressed desire to have more combat, I decided that after this level up, they will be in for a prolonged “touch and go” type of combat. Let me set the scene, then show you how I came to this decision. 

So, they are in a marketplace that is protected by a regional spirit, Thera, whose influence is being weakened. This has caused an imbalance in the marketplace. There are five relics that are tied to Thera’s power and influence. Three have gone missing from their guardian merchant families. The players were present when the fourth was stolen from under their noses at a merchant stall. 

With this information, the party has decided to position themselves around the merchant stall of the final guardian family to keep their relic from being stolen. They thwart an initial attack on the merchant from several dark spirits. So the next combat encounter is going to be a siege on this location. Hence, the “touch and go” type of combat coming up.

I mainly decided on this because it makes sense to me. The group of cultists that are after the relics to finish destabilizing/depowering Thera still need all five for their ritual. So it seems to be a logical step for the cultists to press the attack on the heroes to try and get the last relic. Now I am planning to have a limit on the number of enemies that are going to attack. I also have to balance the encounter by taking into account the enemies’ CR and other factors to make it an exhausting but not deadly fight. As part of my planning, I have taken the large market map that I have been using for their investigation work, copied the merchant booth they are guarding and the surrounding booths, and made a combat scale map of that area for this encounter. With the tools that Roll20 gives me, I have put in dynamic lighting and walls of the various merchant booths and streets surrounding the target merchant. Scale and sizing are important to me, so I have taken special care to make sure that it is as close as I can make it to the same sizes of booths and buildings that they have seen on the larger map. 

From there, I have decided to add a level of complexity to this series of encounters that will make up this “siege.” I plan that as the cultists and their spirit lackies try to get this last relic, they will employ distraction tactics, including causing threats and harm to other merchants in the market, and threatening harm to some of the contacts the PCs have made along the way. The party has also made some allies in the form of a group of priests, the Pearl Priests, from a neighboring riverside settlement. 

So I have to take into account how the Pearl Priests will be involved and how they may help or inadvertently harm the Party’s intentions. Through all this, I plan to make the party feel divided between protecting the relic and protecting the people of the market. How do I plan to do that? Well, I want them to hear the sounds of attack and damage to the market structures and the like. This will mostly be ambient noise that they hear and have to assess. I am also going to have some of their allies, like the Pearl Priests and the market urchins, come to them with messages about the attacks and requests for aid. With all this, I am writing myself notes on timing and when these instances should occur during the “siege.”

I may interject some of these messages and sounds during a wave of attack on the players, but most likely I will deliver these conundrums during the lulls between waves. It gives them a moment to make the decision and then feel the consequence when the next wave hits. All of this is to “exhaust” the PCs and to make them feel drawn out and stretched. Again, no single attack or wave should be particularly dangerous, just drawn out and tiring. So I need to keep the waves small and weak. They adequately handled six of my weakest shadow spirits last time, but they were nervous. That was also when they were just at level one. Now they are level two. They have more HP and slightly better attack and feature options. I have to account for that. 

I will likely look at it as three or four waves in this siege and I would like for each wave to be slightly harder than the last. Therefore, I have to plan strategically for how to keep the waves low enough that they do not cripple the party, but certainly will keep their attention. I typically work my encounters from the boss fight backwards, so I will likely do the same with this one. I will start with the final wave of one or two cultists and their stronger spirits. Then the other waves will be a mix of the cultists, stronger spirits, and the basic spirits. 

I also have to design little “parties” of enemies for the other locations around the market, should the PCs break off a part of the party to go aid an ally in the market. Again, I do not want these to be too strong, so I will make these as small batches of the weak spirits and probably a single cultist and a strong spirit. I will have to run these through a couple of encounter balancing systems I use to make sure it will not be too much. I also will have plans for if things go well or worse for the PCs, I can tweak the encounters to match as needed, instead of having to do it in the moment. After I do all that, I will double-check the maps I plan to use and make sure everything is there, and then I will be ready for the session. 

I hope this was helpful in seeing inside my head on how I do my session planning. I will likely revisit this with other types of encounters for which I have to plan. Until next time, thank you for reading, and Game on!