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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blackbrrd" data-source="post: 6503535" data-attributes="member: 63962">This is my experience as well. For instance, the way I am doing initiative now is to have a cardboard triangle for each monster with a number on it, and one for each PC with the name on it. We roll for initiative, and then I sort the cardboard triangles in a line in front of me, first initiative to my right, last on the left. I use a token to show who's initiatve it is. What this accomplishes is to track initiative so everyone knows who's turn it is and it's really easy to remove dead monsters from the list and so on.For the session, I keep a A4 page with notes with likely encounters, the monsters I think will be in them, their HP and possibly a pre-rolled initiative. If it's homebrew, I might have some additional notes as well. I usually get 4-6 encounters per page. If it's a dungeon or house or some other place where you might draw attention from nearby locations, it's really easy to move a monster from one encounter to the next my just crossing it out from one encounter list and putting it in another.For story, I usually write a cheat sheet (max one A4 page) and it's usually more than enough for a 4-6 hour session.Prep time necessary? Not much. Concretize ideas/read the module, write the cheat sheet. Make a list of likely encounters with monsters. Done in about an hour. More important is probably to write some notes during or after the session. Let's say half an hour. I usually start each session by going through the notes from the previous session(s). It helps the players get off facebook and into the game. It also help clearing up misunderstandings from the previous session.The prep above works just as well with 4e and 5e, it's just that I can get through a more encounters/story in 5e than I can in 4e in the same time. That's after I "optimized" the 4e party to be direct damage dealers/low defence instead of condition inflicting/high defence characters. 5e comes naturally "optimized" for quick combat.</blockquote>

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