@Faolyn - I'm curious what prompted the post. Is there anything about ADHD that you feel creates challenges for planning, organizing, and running games and campaigns? Since the mid-90s the term ADD was deprecated and ADHD is an umbrella term that emcompasses all forms of attention-deficit disorders, even if hyperactivity is not present. As a pre-teen and early teen, I was pretty strong on the hyperactive presentation. I was on Ritalin for 2 years, which made me feel like a zombie, and after I was taken off of it, I did fine, I just needed to develop habits to address focus issue. I was against drugs like Ritalin for much of my early adulthood, but I realize that for many people, the medication is necessary for them to function, and I've long stepped off that soap box. As I entered adulthood, my ADHD became much less of an issue. This is party due to being able to develop effective coping habits, party due to productivity software and mobile devices becoming common at the same time I was entering the work force, and partly because of getting my thyroid issues diagnosed and treated.
Heh, well, I was diagnosed at 38, because girls just didn't have these sorts of issues in the 80s and 90s when I was in grade school (so instead, I just needed to apply myself more, although I was never actually shown
how). I can't take stimulant meds due to other health issues; the one I take now is OK, in the sense I can generally watch an entire TV show now without getting
too distracted, but that's about it. For me, though, my ADHD has gotten worse as time goes by. I was barely organized as a kid, and now it's exhausting to even try now.
But as for why, it's because I happen to be terrible at planning and follow-through and remembering to do basic things. It's not a big deal when I run my typical games, which are barely-connected stand-alone episodes (I'm doing Monster of the Week now, but the players are still in that sort of mindset where they rarely want to go off to do their own personal things).
But several of my players have been jonesing for something with more mechanics (in this case, Level Up) in a much more ambitious setting (a homebrew Industrial-Fantasy city) with several different fronts (class divide tensions coming to a head, people colonizing a new plane of existence, weird energies from that new plane leaking in and causing mutations), a war between two other nations that is slowly approaching our own nation). So I can see where the traps are going to be and I want to be more prepared.
Rather than broadly asking what approaches to campaign building can help someone with ADHD, I think focusing on the specific areas where an individual is facing challenges leads to better advice and that said advice would likely be useful to any GM, whether diagnosed with ADHD or not.
Well, I was looking (as the post's title says) for actual organization tips. For instance, do people just use single documents or tons of different documents? Do people find a particular program or app to be useful? Do they stick stats in with the area description or in its own doc? That sort of thing? Are there particularly good tips or even mechanics from various games that they've found extremely useful in taking some of the burden off the GM? Things like that.
obsidianttrpgtutorials.com
