For those of you with ADHD, how do you organize your campaigns?

[TheSword]

I too echo how great Foundry can be for organizing a campaign.

I start with a master map with locations and a master journal entry that separates the campaign into parts each with a small summary.

I then have three different elements that interlink….

Scenes are the locations the party will explore - you can add map notes to details areas and those map notes have links to the NPCs that are found there and storylines that can be triggered by visiting there.

Actors have all the NPC details as well as links to the areas that they can be found and what storylines interact with that NPC

Journal Entries detail individual storylines and also link to involved NPCs and locations.

This works brilliantly for me, and because everything links I don’t have to worry about searching for things or forgetting.

 

[thullgrim]

OneNote for gm notes and session prep. Lore, factions etc. it’s pretty easy to organize and link it the way you want.

Google Docs for shared player documents, lore dumps, session recaps etc.

Discord server for weekly posts, scheduling, between session activities like buying and selling, rules issues discussions and so on.

Almost everything makes it way to my OneNote notebook for the campaign so I have it all in a central place. N

 

[HippyCraig]

Take a look at obsidian.md. It’s free And has feature to help draw outline with what the call a canvas But look at excaladraw it’s a plug-in for obsidian there are tons of people that use it for organizing

check out these tutorials

Obsidian TTRPG Tutorials - Obsidian TTRPG Tutorials

Obsidian TTRPG Tutorials - Obsidian TTRPG Tutorials

obsidianttrpgtutorials.com

 

[GreyLord]

Well, without ADHD I use some of the same ideas as in the thread. I find improvisation is actually a great thing to have running a campaign.

If I had ADHD (or my best guess of what it may be like) I'd probably do something similar to how I sometimes run games now. I'd use a campaign world (such as the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance/Krynn) and a module or pre-written adventure. That would be the jumping off point for the adventure and the inspiration for running it. I don't have to stick strictly to the adventure and neither do the players, but it gives a good direction to head and the backgrounds I need without having to prepare it all myself. In addition, as it is in a premade world, I have the background information I need should it be required.

 

[Yora]

I guess the answer is: I don't.

I do have maps and NPC stat blocks ready on paper, but they only have any kind of context in my head.

No idea how that has worked as well as it did so far.

 

[aramis erak]

I normally do standalone adventures without much of an overarching plot. But my players are really looking forward to my running more of a real game with such an arc. Worldbuilding is easy, but organizing NPCs, factions, background events going off, chains of events... well, there's a reason I didn't do well in school.

So what tools do you have or tips that you use to make it easier for you?

I need to note that, until nearly age 50, I didn't have any memory issues. My ADHD resulted in having distraction and digression bomb issues. Wait, no, about 45, the PTSD started... which is a memory issue, but not one of forgetting... but remembering things at inappropriate times and from inappropriate triggers. (Writing this is triggering memories of intimacies 30 years ago... and of holding a student's hand as he died on the street, 20 years ago, having been {Spoiler for traumatic situation}[o]hit by a semi along my route home after work; yes, he was a student in one of the classes I was the teacher for. Kindie. Such a goddamned waste. I can even smell the diesel and gasoline exhausts, taste the road salt in the air...[/o]). And of being about 14 months old and looking up at the furniture in the other room. And of Great Granddaddy in that other room, years later, Christmas of 1976. And of helping catch the goose for Christmas dinner.
My players, all currently younger than I, also have digression bomb issues.
Organizing my notes was never an issue - but reading them was.

Techniques I've used to keep on task, however... they do tend to overlap.
:d10-1: Run published adventures. The best have needed nothing else. (WFRP's The Enemy Within for 1E even has cheat sheets for the NPC stats already in some volumes!)

:d10-2: work from outlines. The Major Plot Arch needs to be schematic - the more detail, the harder it is to bring to fruition. This was very vital to running BTVS, and very useful for running a homebrew collection of Sentinel Comics. I also write many adventures as outlines, rather than full prose.

:d10-3: Notes taken during play.
My current sunday group, I've a single file, with every major NPC I intend to reuse having a one liner - Name, Race, Class, what they look like (usually an actor), a couple words of personality and a goal, and if a caster, what spells.

:d10-4: booklets of NPCs.
My Dragonbane notes for an adventure include, in order, the NPCs for each encounter, how many, and tracks for HP and WP points.
I really should be doing those right now, but instead, I'm doing this.
You can extend this to factions, too.

:d10-5: Writing Session Reports
I don't do the session write-ups I do on DTRPG for others benefit - I do them because it's useful for fixing the important bits in memory. That it's useful for others is a nice bonus.

:d10-6: adequate medication
For those with meds, not just the GM, but the players. If everyone's medicated properly, the game goes more smoothly.

:d10-7: Journaling
Keep a log of what happens in the background with major factions, and how the player actions have affected that. It doesn't need a lot, but just a "What they've done"...

I'll also note: I've done the journalling in TiddlyWiki before. I found it an ideal tool, due to the hotlinking and on-the-fly page creation - while keeping everything in a single file. YMMV.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I used to OneNote for everything but when I switched my VTT to FantasyGrounds I started to use that to organise stuff. I am still learning that and refining how I use it.

 

[MNblockhead]

@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.

But the period when I was diagnosed and first treated for ADHD was also when I was heavily getting into D&D and other RPGs. I've never really thought of it before, but I don't recall my ADHD being an issue in my ability to run or play in games back then. If anything, I could be unhealthily focused on the hobby. My problem was more focusing on school work, chores, and other responsibilities.

I will say that my passion for the hobby at that age helped make me more organized in other areas of life by the time I headed off to college. Being a gamemaster for a TTRPG is wonderful for daydreamers to learn to create structure and learn to plan, while these organizational tasks and skills are supporting those flights of fancy. As you develop these skills, they are readily transferable to other, less interesting, but important, areas of life.

I would say that the only way that ADHD may affect how I approach the hobby is that without the tools and structure, I would likely find it difficult to keep things focused when running a game. I not saying I need to have everything planned out and detailed. Far from it. But I just am not good at keeping things in mind if I don't have at least some way to jot notes and have rules and lore readily available to look up. But, then again, I think it is too easy to make too much of the impact of ADHD on these things. I know plenty of people without ADHD that would have difficulty staying focused and keeping track of their games and campaigns without tools, notes, and organization.

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.

 

[Jolly Ruby]

Notes. Excessive notes.

I manage everything in Emacs, using something called org-mode. Emacs is probably a bit too hardcore to get into if you're not really enthusiastic about it, but I think for this use case it is unbeatable. It allows me to write notes in plain text and then to have sections of the text hidden away as needed. I structure my document like a hierarchy, something like this:

* NPC INDEX
** Bob the Barkeep
Bad temper. Knows about the bandits. Has told the PCs about the bandit hideout.
** Bill the Bandit
Has a hideout near Fiddle Rock.

What's useful about this system is that I can just make emacs hide all the NPCs when I don't need to see them at all. I have a similar structure to store a session log, something like this

* SESSIONS
** Session 1, 2024-02-01
The players met Bob the Barkeep.
Found the note left by Phillip.
They fought a bunch of wolves on their way to Whateverton.
** Session 2, 2024-02-08
Spike pick pocketed a clown and got a cursed ring.

I use the session log to also store future notes. Things like ideas for what NPCs will say and so on.

I do the same, but in visual studio code.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I tend to do a lot of stuff in Scrivener; included here is stuff that comes up in play I want to remain consistent about in the future. Depending on the game system/campaign I may do more or less formal prep up front.