When I craft a game session, I begin by remembering that a game is really just a series of scenes. A place, an encounter, an event. Sometimes you have time for 2 or 6 in a game session and sometimes it's just one. So, what is a scene, and how do you plan one for a TTRPG game.
A scene always has a place or a setting, but that may not be the most important part of your planning. A road can just be a road. A room in the castle beside the gate may be all the description that you need to describe an encounter with a guard who just wants to ask your PCs a question. What is the key thing that is going to happen? A simple scene could be a short description of a beggar who accosts the PCs and tries to steal a coin purse. A complex scene could be a place: The Bears Cave, a local tavern. Here's the hard part. Because a scene can be almost anything, start with the "why."
Why would this scene occur? What is the key goal for the PCs? Example: The players decide to travel to a nearby village to meet with someone. There are a pile of scenes in that why. Planning for it doesn't have to be over complicated, but getting some idea of how you want to handle it is key.
- Travel: Should this be easy or hard? You decide based on what you want to accomplish. At lower levels, I enjoy a fun travel with some random encounters, so I can pile 5 scenes into a travel. If I end up not using then, no biggie. I will just save those scenes for later. A caravan of missionaries. A traveling Merchant. An attack by bandits. A Thunderstorm with three required ability checks or bad things happen. All good stuff, and all separate scenes that I can prepare.
- Village: A village can be 10 scenes or just one. It just depends on how prepared you want to be. Grab a preprepared village with a bunch of locals each with a a one line description. Or just craft a brief description of the village and bring the PCs directly to the next key event. A meeting with an NPC.
- The someone NPC: For me, this is an easy one. I generally decide in advance if a combat is possible. Yes or no. Either way, after a brief description of the the place, I decide how I want to handle it. Not every combat needs a map, and not every encounter can lead to a combat. So, don't feel like every single time there is a meeting with an NPC, that you need a stat block and a map. You can just bullet out the conversation with a couple of ideas about the NPC. The "someone" is a local lawkeeper name Meredith Backspoke, she is tall with black curly hair and a thick country drawl. She has three clues for the players (depending on their interactions with her. The three clues are: blah blah blah. If combat is not possible, She dies as soon as they strike her. Bad for them. Bad for her. If combat is possible I make sure to get a stat block ready. Maps are optional. Theater of the mind combat is just fine.
This basic plan has the potential for 20+ scenes. As a GM, you don't have to create them all, but you do need the three basics - travel, village, NPC. As you describe each of the scenes, players will provide the most important part. They tell you what they are interested in based on what you describe. This goes back to the most basic element of being a game master of a TTRPG.
- You describe the setting and situation.
- The players describe their actions.
- You describe what happens next.
Here's the hard truth
If you are bad at the first part and the third part, don't expect your players to be good at the second part. The more you can describe the situation, the more your player will have to think about and react to. This doesn't require the game master to be a genius poet or writer. The simple way of doing this is just to list a few details of the setting, event, or NPCs.
I will often think of locales for places. A well with some deep scratches in the stone. A shadowy alley way. For NPCs, a bartender who seems a bit preoccupied with the back door and a black eye. A young prince who seems annoyed at something. For events, the time of day or the weather or a strange smell in the air like rotten eggs. Anything that help bring the situation to life. If it helps the players focus on the scene, it's good.
The best way to plan a game is by planning it scene by scene. In Quoth, in addition to just planning a general scene, there are three choices for scene type: place, event, encounter. The reason for this is that everything you plan in Quoth scenes in those categories can be saved into your World Codex (your library of books if you will that you can call on anytime you want). However, that's a bit of an artifice because a scene can be all three at once - a place, an event, and an encounter. All scenes are saved into your scene library on the world tab.
Want to go deeper?
Scene craft is one of those skills that sharpens with every session, and there's no shortage of great thinkers writing about it. The Angry GM's How to Code a Scene breaks down the structural anatomy of a scene with his trademark bluntness — useful if you want a more systematic framework for what you're building. Ginny Di's YouTube channel is a goldmine for GM advice; her video Make NPCs Your Party Will Obsess Over is a great companion piece to the NPC ideas in this post. D&D Beyond's article How to Create Engaging Scenes for Your Players offers a tidy, accessible breakdown of what makes a scene interactive rather than just descriptive. And if you want to rethink scene prep from the ground up, Mike Shea's Five Scenes at Sly Flourish makes a compelling case for why five scenes might be all you ever need to walk into a session confident.