Right before the pandemic, I purchased a slew of tools geared towards optimizing my Dungeons & Dragons game sessions. Among them were a whiteboard GM screen with clips, Inkwell Ideas’ 5E Creature Decks and Deck of Beasts, Pathfinder Pawns, and so much more. Then the pandemic torpedoed the use of most of those things, so I really leaned into going digital. This included taking a multi-day intensive course on organization over at Johnn Four’s Roleplaying Tips. That really expanded my Google Drive, Docs, and Sheets campaign management skills, and helped me reorganize almost every resource I use.

As I’ve gotten back into both in-person and online remote play more often in recent months, I realized I could leverage a much more robust — and still streamlined — way of managing each game session’s encounters. Hence my new Adventure Tracker, which has a lot of really handy features specific to any Dungeons & Dragons or Shadowdark, but applicable to any OSR or D&D-adjacent game. Read on to learn more!

What’s In It?

The Adventure Tracker — click here to download the PDF — can theoretically be used just as well for a game session as an entire multi-session adventure arc. Best of all, you can print it out for analog use, or use this Sheets version (you’ll have to make your own copy) to do it entirely digital.

• Here’s a Shadowdark version.
• Here’s a house-ruled Shadowdark version with house rules, making it more in-line with B/X, and in many ways handy for a slightly house-ruled SD or 5E.

Monster Tracker: On the left you’ve got your monsters and NPCs for ease of tracking their current status. Name, stat block reference (book and page), initiative bonus, morale (if you use it), max HP, and a combined HP tracker and status box. That should be everything you need for the major beats of an encounter at a glance, from “Roll initiative!” right up until it gets defeated, flees, or TPKs your party.

PC Tracker: Then there’s a spot to list all the PCs present during the session, and just enough space to squeeze in the player’s name and/or their Armor Class or Passive Perception, if you need it. I don’t record AC and Passive Perception — more on that below — but for OSR games, you probably don’t need that anyway.

Time Trackers: Below that is a bunch of trackers for time as you need to tick them off. Things are sectioned off so you could easily use this for any edition of D&D (“segments” on this are the same as older editions “turns”), and I’ve even got a version where I dropped some boxes and modified the time spans for a Forgotten Realms campaign: drop a box from Weeks and note it as Tendays (10 days), and update Months to read 30 days. Simple.

Initiative Tracker: Then there are two initiative order trackers. The first one, Crawl Initiative, is for organizing PCs using always-on initiative like you do in Shadowdark. I fill this out even in D&D 5E games, because it’s sometimes useful as a reminder of which players maybe haven’t had the spotlight for a bit. The second is combat initiative, and is grouped in boxes rather than exact numerical order in case of tied initiative rolls. Next to both the Crawl and Encounter orders are a single box I mark when someone’s completed their turn, so I know who is next in the order.

Encounter tracker in a 5E session

What Makes It Special?

The idea is that this is a simple, one-page control panel layout for a game session. Or preferably, several game sessions. I’ve included several quality of life enhancements to make it a little more powerful than your usual “combat tracker” or “session tracker.” Let’s dive into each element.

Encounter Designation

The ENC# column next to the monsters and NPCs is meant to denote the specific encounter each creature is listed in. When running a keyed adventure, this makes it dirt simple to follow the adventure’s encounter locations and note each monster as it appears in the book, then fill out the info on this sheet so I’m prepared for game time. It easily covers most one-shot adventures, as well as many 2-3 session adventures. In a pinch, it could cover the entire level of a (not-too-ridiculously-long) megadungeon, especially if you group stat blocks a bit more, add a couple extra rows, or just print double-sided.

Using this should optimize your adventure prep, because you won’t need to reference other lists of encounters, and can probably fit notes if you skip lines between encounters. In OSR games with very simple stat blocks, you might be able to use that trick to include the entire stat block below the monsters listed for an encounter area.

Monster Individuality

I use the Name column to give every single monster a name.  If there are 6 zombies in location A-1, then I put A-1 in the ENC# column next to the first zombie, then list 6 zombie names going down in their own rows — these can be actual names (Bragen, Durthmon, etc.) or silly names (Slackjaw, One-Arm, etc.). Either way, it’s the name I’d give it if I were using a virtual tabletop, to differentiate between them better than “zombie 1”, “zombie 2,” etc. Now, keeping track of which zombie gets hit (Slackjaw!) and how much damage they took (14 HP!) and the fact that they are now prone (Prone!) is a breeze.

(I have a handy list of all my books and their abbreviation, so that’s how I get the stat block reference. LUMM 250 is Level Up: Monstrous Menagerie page 250. You can easily find tools like A5E Tools or someone else’s spreadsheet for a particular monster book to keep page references handy without actually physically cracking open the books. I maintain my own spreadsheet that combines those resources for just the books I own. Right before game session, I’ll stick a post-it tab somewhere on the pages I need for that particular adventure or session, making it easy to flip to where I need. You can see one sticking out just beneath my adventure tracker in the image above, marking the Steam Mephit page.)

Why No PC Stats?

Quick aside into what’s not on the sheet:

I don’t track the player characters’ AC scores because it can change temporarily due to spells and other factors. Additionally, I like to have players roll an active defense: they roll 1d20 + their AC bonuses (i.e. AC minus 10) against a DC of 11 + the attacker’s attack bonus. Either way — me rolling to hit or the player rolling to defend — it’s easier for me to just call out what AC I’ve hit or what DC they need to defend against than it is for me to worry about whether or not there AC has changed recently. In my experience, policing player stats is a colossal waste of time: play with people you trust and you don’t have to do that busy-work.

The More You Know via GIPHY

I don’t track passive Perception scores for the same reason. I much prefer the “OSR mentality” where everything is about interrogating the fiction first, and if you can’t solve the problem that way, then and only then do you actively roll against a DC. It’s more or less the Shadowdark mantra (and OSR in general), and I find it works just as well in D&D 5th Edition.

Back to your regularly scheduled program…

Encounter Initiative

Although you can use the encounter initiative area in the usual ways, you’ll note some formatting choices and text that speak to some variant rules I use. I encourage you to consider them, especially for larger adventuring parties, but even if you don’t, there’s a few nuggets anyone can use here.

First a confession: I love order and organization, but I hate initiative. I use to think of it is a minor speedbump in adventure pacing before you get into the fun of combat. However, more recently it feels like a massive derailment, instead. When I play many games, I’ll use things like Elective Action Order initiative or group initiative, but for most D&D-like games, I still see the value of a more varied initiative order due to various abilities and how the damage/condition cycle works.

How I handle initiative is based on group size, very similar to how it’s presented in Bob World Builder’s Best Initiative Method for D&D Combat video. If there’s only 1-4 PCs and maybe 2-3 enemies, then I might roll it as normal, or just go clockwise (if we’re in person). But when it gets any bigger than that, I pre-group standard monsters at initiative count 12, and minions at count 5. I admit I’m very ad hoc about what constitutes a minion in this case: I’m not necessarily talking about Minion monsters as defined in MCDM’s Flee Mortals, but that’s certainly a valid indicator. Boss or elite opponents would still roll for initiative along with the players. This may not seem like it speeds up things much, but several things help more than you’d think:

1. By organizing the sheet in buckets by grouped initiative scores, it’s a bit faster to place characters in buckets.
2. Having standard monsters and minions already grouped means I don’t have to write them down if I don’t want to; I just mark the box when all of the monsters/minions go. That saves me a lot of writing, as most fights are against standard monsters and minions, after all.
3. Standard monsters and minions always lose initiative ties against the party. That’s why they appear at the bottom of the bucket they are in.
4. Players get familiar with the buckets over time, and see the pre-grouped monsters more as a DC to their initiative rolls, than as a score without context. This can speed up their “readiness” when it’s their turn to act.

Any time a creature acts outside of these buckets, the players immediately know “something’s different about this monster.” (I often will single out a standard creature and just say it’s the leader of the group and give it an initiative roll, so that messes with the player’s view a bit without changing mechanics, and adds a new layer of tension to an encounter.)

I also use the buckets to call out handy references:

• Lair Actions & Initiative Count 0: Certain abilities (generally lair actions and certain trap effects) are triggered at specific initiative counts, usually 20 and 0. I note these so I don’t forget them, when they are appropriate.
• Dialogue: I put in a notation for dialogue. This is my cue to throw in a villain’s monologue, a specific goblin battle cry, or some other roleplay moment, no matter how small, into the middle of combat. Keeps things from getting stale with the “I rolled a 14, I hit, I deal 10 damage” monotony that can crop up.

The point of all this initiative stuff is to help me speed up the organizational effort of initiative, which can be a real slog. Other methods I’ve tried (including Bob World Builder’s) often are too simplified for the nuances of strategic combat, which my players and I prefer when playing D&D 5th Edition. This method doesn’t streamline a whole lot, but when the bulk of encounters don’t feature Lair Actions, bosses, elite monsters, and the like, the fact is that something like 75-90% of encounters do feature significantly sped up initiative management.

Encounter tracker for Blue Alley (available on DMsGuild)

Of course, all of this initiative stuff is completely moot in Shadowdark, since it’s much faster to run and play overall. Roll at the top of the session for “Crawl” (exploration) initiative, then roll for an encounter’s order, then roll again to reset the crawl initiative. (In my photos I used an older version that didn’t have the checkboxes for crawling turns, but now that’s in there!)

Your Turn

What do you think of this adventure tracker? What methods do you use to organize encounters, keep initiative order straight, and mark off time in your game sessions? Hit the comments below!