This is another forked thread topic, this one from
"Zero-to-hero and emergent story" (https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/zero-to-hero-and-emergent-story/).
Quote from: Eirikrautha on January 28, 2025, 05:32:01 PMThis character arc is so much a part of D&D's deoxyribonucleic acid that you cannot play D&D without it. Sure, you can play fantasy RPGs (or any other kind of RPG) without this arc. But it's NOT D&D. And no, jhkim, just because you played a "campaign" of what you called D&D in March of 1992 where you all dressed up like French maids and spanked each other with carrion crawler tentacles (Has anyone else noticed that he always has some decades-old campaign he played for a couple of sessions that exactly contradicts whatever point anyone is making that he also remembers perfectly clearly? Do you keep a hyper-extensive journal or something? With the number of games you have purportedly played, how do you have time to eat? Things that make you go "hmmm..."), that isn't "evidence" of what D&D is.
To your question - I keep notes on whatever campaign I'm in, usually digitally. I don't think that's all that strange. Here's the journal for the current campaign I'm playing, for example:
http://clanless.wikidot.com/
That's a wiki so it's updated by the GM as well as me, with a few contributions by other players.
What is more unique is that I was an early entrant onto the web. I created my first web page in my third year of grad school in 1993. Since then, whenever I have a campaign that I GM or that I play in, I keep my notes for it in the same directory structure. You can look up my site on the Internet Archive - there's a clear record of it's piece by piece growth from 2005. It accumulated piece by piece from 1993, though. I mostly stopped updating 5-10 years ago, but I still put in a few updates.
Even when I was updating it, though, my time on the website was less than the time spent posting here. It's not so much that I'm putting in huge amounts of time. What's unusual is that I've been doing it consistently for so long.
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To make this a more general topic, though, how do other people organize their campaign notes? Do you keep your notes from past campaigns? Is there stuff that you find useful - or not useful - in organizing your notes?
- I use Roll20 and after every session I write up a what happened in a text file (don't post it on Roll20 until a day or two before the next session).
- I also post a bunch of rumors and story hooks into the group chat hoping the players will decide for themselves what they want to do before the game.
- Lastly I publish those rumors and story hooks in Roll20 as well so they are easier to find them a few weeks later when the chat is filled with other stuff.
Beyond that I'm open to suggestions as I'm still trying to get organized.
I keep raw notes in a Google doc. I then send out the notes to the other players in the voice of my character (my paladin writes the notes as a letter to his Pa). The other players can correct anything I missed, but I'm typically the primary note taker.
I don't keep mine online, but I do take notes on whatever pieces of paper are at hand and then, the day after the game—before I forget what the scribblings mean—write them up. Originally I'd keep a printout, nowadays I just store it on my phone.
This is essential for a long campaign. Our last game was eight years. The players would ask something like "I have this powder called cancer. What is it?" and my first response would be WTF? I introduced cancer to the game? But a quick search and I'd know, right, you found this in your first adventure. It's a vial filled with a white powder and it's labeled with the zodiac sign for Cancer.
I just write down what I need to note and use that sheet. Like we just had a battle with space pirates, so I made a chart of all the combatants and their stats and initiative order, weapon range, dexterity, etc. Ran down the list and kept track of a battle among 18 people in 3 factions
I take absolutely atrocious notes, if you can even call them notes. For most of my gaming career I took minimal notes before sessions (about 1 page for an 8 hour session) and none during or afterwards. I've upgraded that a little more recently. If I'm running homebrewed adventures, I write them out much the way a published adventure would be. If I'm running something published, then I'll just note any system conversions or random table rolls I've already made. After sessions, I write a recap and put it in a campaign log for my players, but I still don't take any notes during the session and I usually write the recap from memory about a week after the fact.
I wouldn't recommend anyone else do things the way I do, though. I'm blessed/cursed with a brain that is extraordinarily good at retaining trivial information which will never make me a dime.
Quote from: capvideo on January 29, 2025, 09:58:30 PMThis is essential for a long campaign. Our last game was eight years. The players would ask something like "I have this powder called cancer. What is it?" and my first response would be WTF? I introduced cancer to the game? But a quick search and I'd know, right, you found this in your first adventure. It's a vial filled with a white powder and it's labeled with the zodiac sign for Cancer.
Exactly. Especially for long campaigns, I find it's great to be able to search.
With digital documents organized in folders, I can use things like word search to find things. I'm a unix geek, so I put my notes in git and sometimes search them with grep - but people can search among many documents these days with Google Drive, among others.
I have one Google Doc which has for each session my prep notes followed by notes I take during play about what happens.
Then before the next session I rewrite the notes into a narrative summary in another googledoc, which also has experience / loot / losses / plans / notes sections at the bottom. I'll also go into whatever notes I have on the locations of the adventure; strikethrough slain monsters & looted treasure, make notes on evolutions & possible restocking.
And players can keep records however they want during sessions, but for most purposes at the table the canonical truth of their player powers, spells, etc is a third Google Doc that only I have edit powers on & they suggest changes to.
I keep a stack of index cards with session recaps on them. One session; one index card. These are intended to be more a TV synopsis than a full recap because their job is to jog my memory into working again and not to actually record every event. That, and sessions groups I've played with tend to be in the 2-4 hours range, which isn't actually all that long by RPG session standards.
I confess I am bad about keeping these things. I will sometimes punch a hole in them and keep them in a manila envelope along with any character sheets with a twist-tie, and I have considered making special recap sleeves and just keeping a stack of recap cards in a dedicated spot on my bookshelf, but I never have.
A well-formatted spreadsheet works pretty well, especially if you run more than one separate group of characters. I described this method in detail last year here: https://vladar.bearblog.dev/strict-time-records/
I primarily use the Google doc format that Naburimannu described, I just also keep an sheet that is an index that links to each week's session recap. It does get a bit cumbersome for longer games, but it's still the best method I've found to keep myself organized.
Hands down, Kanka (https://kanka.io/) is the winner for me. Simple, powerful, flexible. The free version will meet your needs, but it's worth supporting.
I use college journal notebooks to write stuff down. I save them. I know. I'm a dinosaur.
For everything I've made up myself, I still do it all on hand written pages in a binder. I've not tried a fully digital system but I'm resistant to do that, cause I feel like pencil-and-paper are actually faster for certain things - definitely less likely to run in to technical difficulties or to get lost in trying to optimize the system and get it set up how I want it.
I could probably get more organized and actually make an index for my paper notes, but I quite like having the ability to reorder my binder so I can have the stuff I need for that session easily accessible.
Most of my notes are in Libre Office Writer and if I need to share, I export specific pages to PDF.
Quote from: Brigman on February 02, 2025, 01:08:33 AMI use college journal notebooks to write stuff down. I save them. I know. I'm a dinosaur.
I'm a dinosaur too. I've been pretty satisfied with just a simple cheap spiral notebook and a pen.
I record/stream all my game sessions. At some point I go back in and edit the audio for snappy playback, and upload them to my podcast. Then, in between sessions (bi-weekly) I listen to the show and I know exactly what the PCs said and did. I feel I'm making better "decisions" deciding how the game world reacts to the PCs nonsense. Also, years later, I can listen again and remember how much fun, the different people that came and went. This also frees me from taking notes during the game. In turn, I can force my attention on my players more then what I am up to behind the screen. Now the only physical notes I take are prior to game session I list some bullet points on what really matters. And the stats of who they are most likely going to face. This has saved me so much prep time I sprung for my own campaign journal. I designed the pages in the way works best for me, upload the files to drivethru. Whenever I need a new journal I POD a nice new hardcover with some of my hacky drawings on the cover.