Voadam
Legend
I have done various strategies.
In college I was in a local four year weekly AD&D game that had been going on for years before I joined with intense lore and tons of NPCs and politics. I took notes in a notebook every game and referred back to them as a resource.
I was in a 3.0 then 3.5 play by email game on Yahoo groups in the early 2000s and we did group shared files. I made a who's who document of NPCs broken down by context that was great because it allowed me to search for NPC names and quickly re-read past interactions to build up my understanding of stuff as a player then later as a Co-DM as the game branched out. Similarly we made a big picture world lore timeline we kept adding to and riffing off of as co-dms.
When I ran some forum games on here I did the same things, having resource pages with things like Who's Who entries. Here is the one for my old Death in Freeport game. The Who's who entries are generally short one sentence IDs which is enough to search on an NPC's name for checking stuff about them with searches. I did a similar one for my Oathbound Wildwood game. I even did it in some games as a player such as in the Forgotten Heroes game.
For the past decade it was all face to face games and then pandemic fantasy grounds and google meetings online. I stopped taking notes and just played or DMd and it has been OK for keeping things straight at the moment, though I have been frustrated at poor organization of plot, place, and NPC information in some of the books of the Adventure paths I have been running. The biggest notes I would take in this period would be a page in a notebook with current character names and the player running them, which I have done in a lot of the campaigns as both DM and player so I can address people by their in character name in game easily.
In general I work well with a reference sheet to check against, though I can work without one.
In college I was in a local four year weekly AD&D game that had been going on for years before I joined with intense lore and tons of NPCs and politics. I took notes in a notebook every game and referred back to them as a resource.
I was in a 3.0 then 3.5 play by email game on Yahoo groups in the early 2000s and we did group shared files. I made a who's who document of NPCs broken down by context that was great because it allowed me to search for NPC names and quickly re-read past interactions to build up my understanding of stuff as a player then later as a Co-DM as the game branched out. Similarly we made a big picture world lore timeline we kept adding to and riffing off of as co-dms.
When I ran some forum games on here I did the same things, having resource pages with things like Who's Who entries. Here is the one for my old Death in Freeport game. The Who's who entries are generally short one sentence IDs which is enough to search on an NPC's name for checking stuff about them with searches. I did a similar one for my Oathbound Wildwood game. I even did it in some games as a player such as in the Forgotten Heroes game.
For the past decade it was all face to face games and then pandemic fantasy grounds and google meetings online. I stopped taking notes and just played or DMd and it has been OK for keeping things straight at the moment, though I have been frustrated at poor organization of plot, place, and NPC information in some of the books of the Adventure paths I have been running. The biggest notes I would take in this period would be a page in a notebook with current character names and the player running them, which I have done in a lot of the campaigns as both DM and player so I can address people by their in character name in game easily.
In general I work well with a reference sheet to check against, though I can work without one.
