I was diagnosed less than two years ago, but have been running games for over three decades. Before the diagnosis, I ran my games, including some long campaigns mostly as improvisation on top of worldbuilding.
KEY: figure out what
helps and hinders you, not some generic recipient of advice. I mean, I have my own advice below, but people are different and ADHD symptoms vary as well. Play to your strengths and cover your weaknesses, not someone else's.
In my case, for improv support I evolved a method very similar to the "Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master". I tried to explain how to evolve it in Fudge Factor way back when:
https://web.archive.org/web/2003080...gefactor.org/2003/04/01/little_is_enough.html
...but didn't really explain the method I came up with. Save yourself some trouble, read the "Return", just keep in mind that while the advice is excellent, you need to make sure it is right for youself.
For worldbuilding homebrew or store bought didn't really matter: what mattered was reading and writing private notes, until I had a vibrant and dynamic model of the world in my head. Those notes didn't really matter after the fact: writing them helped build the model, but the model is what was important, not what I wrote down. The model allowed me to easily figure out reprecussions for player's actions, and come up with "what's it like there", "what complications could arise", "what do different rulers want, and how do they go about it", etc. (This is really improv support as well, just of the Huge Effort Up-Front -variety.)
Specific recommendations:
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Meds. I know everyone doesn't get a huge benefit from meds, but if you do, oh boy.
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Only stuff that happens is real. If it hasn't happened at the table, it hasn't happened and is purely speculative, not canon of any kind, even if the campaign guide spends 100 pages on it and you've written twice that as fan fiction.
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Session notes and post-session thinking over pre-session prep. During-session notes and post-session thinking is
super valuable. IMO far more important than any specific pre-session prep. What happened in last session? What consequences does it have in-world? What consequences does it have at-table? (Did players really like / hate something? Did they come to any conclusions - right or wrong? Do they need a win, or a hard challenge?)
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Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and Sly Flourish's blog / youtube channel. I highly recommend the videos where he preps for his games, warts and all: I wish more people made things like that. Esp. Secrets and Clues is gold.
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Obsidian.md for notetaking. Don't go crazy with plugins, though. Learn the basics and only if you find yourself constantly missing for piece of functionality, then go get the plugin. These days if I could not use Obsidian I would probably make notes on paper and stick them in a binder instead of using another program.
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All session notes in one big file. For me it is much, much better to keep entire campaign's worth of session notes (prep, during, and post-notes) all in a single file, latest session at the top. That way if I've missed the prep, I can just open the file and everything that has happened is in there. Copy-paste NPC descriptions from below when you need them, etc. With Obsidian it might be tempting to make on file per session, or dozens of small ones. For me this is way better. I use Obsidian's linking features to link campaign notes to the session note file for easy reference. If I need to update a campaign note, I do it outside the game.
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Item ids. When you hand your players an item (especially if you just came up with and have no clue what it is): (1) Give it an id, write the item and location down with the id: "Q27: Broken longsword found in Zelligar's quarters." I use one letter for the adventure / location, and a running number. Keeps the numbers shorter. (2) Tell the players the id: "Ok, you stow the ancient looking broken longword: write down it's Q27." (3) Post-game you can add more details to the items if you need to. I sometimes do, but mostly not. (4) Later when the item comes up, you will know where it came from, and you can use that to decide if it's interesting or not, and how. Example: "The buyer is looking very excited and identifies it as one of a pair of longswords made for Zelligar by a legendary smith. 'I never believed the story, but seeing this sword is real, let me tell you what I know about the other one...'"
This works especially well coupled with Secrets and Clues method by Sly Flourish, creating callbacks and connections throughout the campaign without needing to build them up-front. The stuff they picked up is the important stuff, the stuff they didn't pick up won't generally speaking matter. (Exceptions yeah yeah.)
obsidianttrpgtutorials.com
wow - this is an amazingly good idea! Going to steal this for sure
