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

[payn]

~5 games/week.

 

[Distracted DM]

I'd run 2-3 with my in-person West Marches pre-COVID, then in 2022 I left my law clerk job and started Pro-DMing thanks to my wife pushing me to get over the taboo I'd grown up with

 

[payn]

I'd run 2-3 with my in-person West Marches pre-COVID, then in 2022 I left my law clerk job and started Pro-DMing thanks to my wife pushing me to get over the taboo I'd grown up with

Oh, its a job makes sense then.

 

[MNblockhead]

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.

I described the various tools I've used to organize my campaigns and game session earlier in the thread, but I'll add a couple other things I've found work well for me.

In the 10 years since I've been running games, I've worked on making things simpler and having fewer sources and tools to deal with when running my games. For a while that meant spending more time in prep, but since finding a process that works for me, I've been focusing more on streamlining and my prep time has gone down quite a bit.

For instance, do people just use single documents or tons of different documents?

I prefer a since place to go. But it isn't really a single document. I have a single "journal" in Foundry, but it has multiple sections and subsections. Foundry lets me view it as one single scrolling page, or perform more like seperate pages. Each "page" can be a very long document. By using headers, it creates a nice outline in the journal navigation panel. I keep the multipage view on because I have too much content over time that I'm never going to navigate through it by scrolling. I just click around using the outline.

I used to have multiple journals, but with the recently improved journals in foundry, I can now put everything in one journal that is easy to navigate. I can link to nearly any object in foundry by just drag and dropping it into a journal page while in edit mode. That saves a lot of time by not having to go to another part of the interface to navigate through folders or search and filter to find things. I also have a community mod that brings up a quick search. What is really cool about this mod is that I can highlight text that I typed in the journal (though it works in text boxes for most items in the system) and hit the hotkey and it will find matches. I think click on a match and the link is added. It is the quickest cross-linking experience I've used in any tool. RealmWorks might have been better in auto-linking, but I found I spent a lot of time cleaning auto-linked content in RealmWorks or coming up with special naming conventions for articles to only autolink what I want. I much prefer making a choice to link over autolinking, so long as it is quick and simple to autolink.

This allows me to have everything in one tool, the VTT. This is the biggest benefit for me compared to using OneNote, Evernote, World Anvil, or Obsidian. If I were not running my games in a VTT, I would consider World Anvil or just OneNote. With other community mods, I can also search and add tiles, tokens, music, soundboard effects without having to go to another site. (I use Moulinette, which is brilliant). I have another mod that lets me pop-out the journal and other parts of Foundry into separate windows. It is nice when you have multiple monitors or is just convenient to alt-tab than having to constantly minimize and maximize things within foundry.

Do people find a particular program or app to be useful?

As you can tell, I'm a big fan of Foundry. But depending on the system and how much support you want for official content and automation, it may not be the system for you. Also, any VTT will have an extra learning curve and Foundry can get complicated once you start playing around with community modules. If DnD Beyond had the maps feature back when I had to start running games remotely, I would have likely just used DnD Beyond for rules and simple online battlemap functionality and then used either OneNote or World Anvil for campaign building.

But now that I'm very familiar with Foundry and am playing a game system with excellent official support (Warhammer Fantasy 4e), I really love having everything in one place and it really helps me stay organized and focused.

Do they stick stats in with the area description or in its own doc?

When I ran Pencil and Paper in-person games, I also preferred to have stats in-line with the adventure text, rather than having to flip through to the end of the book to get the states. But since that convention seems to have fallen out of favor in most published adventures I've bought from WotC and third parties, I would have the states printed and organized by encounter. It was an annoy bit of extra prep, but made running the game easier. But once I went the software route it became a non-issue. With RealmWorks, any NPC or monster would be hyperlinked and I could just click on it to bring up the states. In a VTT it is even easier and more natural as the states are generally tied to the token. But even when needing to pull up stats for a NPC out of combat when no token is placed, I can easily add a link to the adventure text or my GM notes that will bring up the states with a click, or I can use the quick search mod to pull up stats. So I no longer add the text of the states in-line with the adventure or GM notes text.

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?

This really depends on the sytem. Games like InSPECTREs is great for low prep because the players take part in narrating what happens in the game depending on their rolls. But the trade off is that you need to be comfortable with a bit of improv and thinking on your feet. True with most TTRPGs, but much more true with more narrative, collaborative systems like InSPECTREs.

For crunchier games like D&D and Warhammer Fantasy, it helps to buy published adventures that are prepped for the system you are using. Obviously a more improv style will require a lot less prep than reading and getting ready for a published adventure, but it is a lot less work than creating the adventure yourself, preparing battlemaps and tokens, etc. A VTT can require a lot more prep than even pencil and paper for homebrew or third party material that is not prepped for the VTT. But if everything is prepped, it makes it so much easier to run the game, since the content is easily searched and navigated, initiative tracking is managed, and for many systems a lot of things are automated.

I like D&D Beyond for character sheets and for looking up rules, but I've never liked running adventures from it. While it is searchable and hyperlinked, I still find navigating around the adventure content not very convenient.

The one think I don't like about Foundry is that taking notes while running the game is not that convenient. Most TTRPG-software suffers from that. This is where tools like OneNote and Evernote, or even the basic notpad apps on Windows and Macs excel. Jotting down quick notes. But I just don't like juggling lots of windows. I still have a notebook and pen to jot down quick note in the middle of the game. The chat function of VTTs would be good for this, except you have to toggle to GM only mode to keep such notes to chat private. Which I find annoying. There was one quick note community mod for Foundry, but I found it clunky. I would love it if there were a hot key that would bring up a text box where I could type a quick note, hit enter, and have it disappear with the notes logged to a journal item.

Anyway, for my main multi-year, in-depth campaigns, with crunchier systems, Foundry is working wonderfully for me. If I didn't want to use battlemaps with all the bells and whistles, I would use OneNote or World Anvil, maybe with a VTT-light approach like the White Board feature in many online meeting apps, DnD Beyonds Maps tool, or something like Owlbear Rodeo.

 

[MNblockhead]

I do love me a good random generator. I actually have two different random name generators bookmarked on my toolbar (fantasynamegenerator.com, and then one for modern-day names).

Yes. I've use Fantasy Name Generator for years. For my current Warhammer Fantasy Game, I use the excellent "Jodri" Discord bot. The official system for Foundry has decent name generators built in, but the Jodri bot is on another level, allowing for detailed NPC generation, inn and store generation, weather generation, and much more.

 

[Distracted DM]

Oh, its a job makes sense then.

Yup! I was doing 2-3/week in-person as a hobby though re: West Marches. COVID ended that

Sort of went from 1/week hobby to passion ~8 years ago.

On-topic, another thing can help is deputizing eager players to be lore-keepers: players that are more organized than you... but that's not a really good solution if, like me, you don't lay everything out on the table and like to have lots of mysteries for players to put together. But, here's my secret at least (obviously requires some practice and skill), I usually don't know the answers to the questions/mysteries that come up. Answers come later- questions first.

So I don't write out all the great mysteries and answers beforehand- usually in the course of play, thanks to events occurring or player actions, or even something brilliant happening in a session, that's when the answers come. Once the answers come, that's when I enter them into my terrible mess of Discord server/google docs :')

 

[MNblockhead]

OK so... "how do you ADHD DMs organize your campaigns?"

Messily.
Google docs. Discord. Search functions.

I'm very improvisational- 90% of my setting details are made during sessions; so I quickly type names etc into discord and what/where they were, so I can Search function it later when it comes up. Messy- but I also find consistency to be important. Once something is established, it's a part of my setting (which I've been running for almost 10yrs)... things do get lost, which I hate, but I haven't found something better. Tried on and off WorldAnvil but it's "too much." I liked Obsidian Portal but their quality went down the drain a long time ago.
My methods are not great, but they work "well enough" for my ~5 games/week.

Yeah World Anvil is bit much. But when I had more time, I was really into world building. World Anvil can be create for that, but it becomes a hobby in and off itself. Also my experience with RealmWorks makes me cautious about putting hundreds of hours of time into creating setting content into a proprietary system run by a small company. At least World Anvil now allows you to export your data, but then you have to put it into another system and rework it.

If I were to go back to running a campaign in my homebrew campaign world, I'd likely use OneNote. Easy to dump in ideas and notes on the fly and reorganize later. Good search. Okay cross-linking. Easy to export to a variety of forms. Google Docs is getting much better at allowing you to easily cross link content, but I still like having everything in one "notebook" rather than a bunch of stand-alone, even if cross linked, documents.

All of my homebrew setting's conent is in an instance of RealmWorks on a virtual machine image. Having to either use a no longer supported program or having to copy and rebuild in another system really splashes cold water on any desire to run a campain in my setting again. So I'd be very cautious about what tool I would choose for world building if I get into that again.

 

[Faolyn]

It's a whole lot of "do the best you can" and "don't let perfect be the enemy of good." And improvisation. Lots of improvisation.

Always the hardest part, of course! The "perfect being the enemy of good," that is. I'd have to say running PbtA has done quite a lot for my improv skills.

Having PCs with goals is also a great help. Because then they remember those things. If it's important to the PC and player, they'll remember that NPCs' name, the name of their hometown, the name of the magic scroll, etc.

Oh. Damn. Yeah, that's bad news. Good luck with that. Hope your player is okay. Might be a great time to talk about lines and veils with the group to avoid that from happening again.

We have lines and veils, but they hadn't thought about that one when we made our list. The game takes place in a sorta-haunted Spirit Halloween store, so I used a picture of one of their animatronics. The player in question just asked that I take it down off our discord so I did, and they're fine, but the distraction made me forget a crucial bit of information (which I've since sent them).

(It's probably a good thing that, at that point, the animatronics hadn't been animated yet to attack them; it was still just a store decoration at this point.)

Absolutely. Word and an organized folder on your computer work just as good. I'm just used to Scrivener so it's what I use.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is one of the best resources out there for running games. Especially if you're in the ADHD club. Mike also has a great YouTube channel where he talks about a lot of this stuff, including overviews of the high points of the book. It's cheap and absolutely worth the price tag. But you can get a lot from his videos, too.

Books are easier for me to handle, so I'll grab a copy.

 

[Distracted DM]

Yeah World Anvil is bit much. But when I had more time, I was really into world building. World Anvil can be create for that, but it becomes a hobby in and off itself. Also my experience with RealmWorks makes me cautious about putting hundreds of hours of time into creating setting content into a proprietary system run by a small company. At least World Anvil now allows you to export your data, but then you have to put it into another system and rework it.

If I were to go back to running a campaign in my homebrew campaign world, I'd likely use OneNote. Easy to dump in ideas and notes on the fly and reorganize later. Good search. Okay cross-linking. Easy to export to a variety of forms. Google Docs is getting much better at allowing you to easily cross link content, but I still like having everything in one "notebook" rather than a bunch of stand-alone, even if cross linked, documents.

All of my homebrew setting's conent is in an instance of RealmWorks on a virtual machine image. Having to either use a no longer supported program or having to copy and rebuild in another system really splashes cold water on any desire to run a campain in my setting again. So I'd be very cautious about what tool I would choose for world building if I get into that again.

I've heard OneNote thrown around a lot alongside Obsidian. I should check it out if it's easier to get into than Obsidian, so thanks for mentioning it.
World building isn't the appeal; for me it's something done alongside and in service of TTRPGs. It's important but I wouldn't be doing it if I weren't running games.

 

[Faolyn]

Yeah. Fronts, countdowns, clocks, or whatever you want to call them are amazing for making the world feel dynamic. All the important NPCs and factions have goals they’re working on. Give them each a clock with different time scales and/or different number of ticks before reaching that goal. Check out Blades in the Dark for the varied use of clocks. I think most of it is in the SRD. Another method is giving each a usage die. Roll it between sessions to see what pops next.

For things like weather, I found the hex flower works great.

Huh--I don't think I'd heard of the hex flower yet. Or if I did, I hadn't really explored it. Into my cart it goes (along with Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master."