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I'm just curious how other people design encounters. I'm running a long campaign (every week for over a year now) and my planning methods are rather scattered. Typically I think of something while I'm out on a walk, speak my idea into speech-to-text in my phone, and then take those notes once I'm back home and try to put them into bullet points.
The problem arises in that sometimes I keep my notes in text files, but sometimes I try to arrange them in a spreadsheet with appropriate columns, and sometimes I just drop the text files in a folder hierarchy on my laptop.
Do any of you have any sort of de-facto planning method for encounters? I'm thinking I want to lean more toward a spreadsheet with columns like "encounter type" (I.E. social/combat/skill), "location", "related plot points", "other notes", "NPCs involved"
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I made up a process I can rely on:
1) I collect random encounter ideas in a text file. They might come from reading PF books, other books, the forum or whenceever, and they span one to three bullet points, normally. It might take a long time till they get used, or they won't be used at all, but that's no problem given the little effort.
2) In the same text file, I create sketches of upcoming sessions. That's like 8 to 10 bullet points per session. Sometimes I can pull from the collected encounter ideas (see 1)), but often enough I have to create them from scratch.
3) I create a separate file for each upcoming session, and copy the session sketch into it. It will stay there, at the bottom, but I will copy parts of it again, within the session file, and add meat to the bones, to create actual encounters, including stat blocks. The order in which I refine the sketch is erratic - I pick the part that inspires me most right now and start working on it. I try to start preparation multiple days before the session, hoping that each new day comes with some new ideas.
4) During the session, the players might avoid an encounter, maybe without even noticing. Then I move the encounter to another text file, basically a backlog. Chances are that I can reuse it in a later session, maybe with minor adaptations (often a CR increase). There is a table of contents (created manually), split into roleplay encounters and combat encounters. The latter have a remark about their CR and are sorted by it.
So in summary, I use only plain text files, navigating them with Ctrl-F and trying to save every idea that seems worth it.