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Finally got my DMing filing system!

I keep everything on my laptop.

In the last three months, everything has gone into an excel file, hyperlinked, so I can find most things within 20 sec notice. It's great!
 

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There are some really interesting ideas posted here!

Munin: I really like your flowchart idea. I have not yet incorporated it into my system, but it spurred me to make a running index of encounters and creatures that I've written so far. From there it's only a short step to making flowcharts on another sheet of paper. (For the moment, I'm trying to create the groups and structures that exist in my campaign world - interrelating them will come afterwards.)

Piratecat: *lol* Showoff yourself! :) I wish I had 3+ notebooks full of campaign material! How do you go about finding anything in that morass of notes? Navigation must be hazardous at best...

Inconsequenti-AL: Ouchie. I hope you don't mind if I ignore your advice. :D

Mac Callum: My first occupation was as a database programmer, and your comment brought that back to me. I like the manual aspect of index cards, but I can appreciate the hyperlink concept as well. One thing that's come out in the rub is that index cards are small. If there is insufficient room, the cards' primary purpose is now to tell me where to go to find the relevant information.

Morpheus: Nice points there - I'll try to fit the colour coding idea in somehow, most likely to denote affiliations. (I'm running the game as alignmentless except for the Always X types.) Less-is-more is wisdom for the ages!

Hand of Evil: You guys are trying to subvert me into Digital DMing, aren't you? There have been some mighty compelling arguments thrown out so far...


There is an additional stage that has been part of my planning groups from the get-go, but I neglected to mention it before: it's the spiral notebook of ideas. Any idea I get goes into the notebook, and when a few ideas glue together into something that makes me go "Oo, shiney", I write up an index card or five. Every once in a while I leaf through the notebook for inspiration.

The cards will be the actual elements I use in play, while the notebook should never even come close to the gaming table. It's too unstable and generally disorganized, although I try now to use it as an organizational tool as well. Yesterday I decided that I needed to figure out the history of my world, so I started a History section, then filled it up with random ideas and material from the sources that I'm using. That list will later get chronologicized into a timeline.


I'm learning a lot from this thread! If you have any other planning/organization/filing tools or systems, please post them! :)

-blarg
 

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