I tried something new with session planning for the last few sessions of my Sunday AD&D [Affiliate Link] game on Roll20. The party is traveling West across the sands of The Broken Lands. Rather than do a map of where everything is and have to measure, plan, and plot things on a map, I decided to try more of the Point Crawl method.

With a Point Crawl the focus is more of traveling point to point and not necessarily all the things in between. In my game, there are sand sailors (vikings) with ships that sail the sand. Endless miles of shifting desert terrain (dunes and the things the sands cover and uncover) is much like the endless terrain of the seas. I gloss over the boring parts, and only mention the things that stand out.

How I Did It

I’ve written about using desk pads of graph paper before, here and here. (I also backed the Dungeon Desk Pad Kickstarter.). I took one of my graph paper desk pads and figured out the distance based on how long it took the sand vikings to cross from the West. It took them three days because they had favorable winds. The party has had 3 days of unfavorable winds, so the journey is taking twice as long.

I divided the journey into groups of squares and drew lines after that many squares and determined how many of these groups there were. I numbered them from East to West. These became the “points” of the journey. I determined wind direction, weather, random encounters, adventure locations and other mechanical things that put bookends on what could happen each session.

These loose parameters gave me a basic outline to present to the players during each session. The party is free to choose to stop and investigate anything I explain that they see in the distance. So far, they have stopped to check out most things, or gotten close enough to check things out and kept away from danger.

I set this desk pad on a TV tray next to my chair at the computer where I run the game. I can then check off things or make notes on this check list.

I have found that I was quickly able to plan the journey across the sands and so far two sessions of play have gone very well. I expect at least three more sessions for this crossing, depending on what the players do. Players are always doing things that make travel take longer.

The players seem to be having fun, and I’m having fun as a GM. I’ve been using monsters that either I’ve never run as a GM, or never encountered at all in my years of play. I’m randomly determining treasure, including the magic that appears. Magic items I’ve never had in any game are also fund to have. They finally found some powerful ones in the last session. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

It has given me the flexibility to organize notes and think about repercussions of what they have done, and plan for what is on the other side of the desert. I find that I am planning as much as I need and less likely to go overboard writing or planning things the players will never see. I’m trying to do all the cool ideas. Even if my execution is not how I see it in my head, I’m having less stress in prep and more fun running sessions. As with all things in life the more I do this, the easier it gets. The stage fright is always there, but once I get started, I don’t have time to think about how nervous I am. Even with 4+ decades of gaming, I still have nerves before running a game.

My last podcast episode was a play summary of two weeks ago. I’ll do another summary of last weeks game. I’ll at least do summaries to get them across the sands. I’ve had some summaries of other sessions. If you like that sort of thing, let me know. I’m trying to get my momentum back after getting derailed by COVID-19 and a cancer diagnosis.

CELEBRATION

This article marks the eleventh anniversary of this blog that started on July 18, 2009 with this article. I hope to be around and blogging and gaming for many more years!