Ondath
Hero
I got the urge to start this thread due to a specific concern I'm having, but feel free to have a more general discussion!
I'm having a bit of a conundrum in my D&D 5E first-homebrew-world-now-multiverse campaign, which has been going on for more than two years now. This is a campaign that spanned several different media (first face-to-face, then fully online when the pandemic started, then back to fully face to face when things settled down and now a hybrid form because some players moved cities), and my own DMing style has shifted slightly over time: At first, I felt the need to custom design every monster from scratch because I was dissatisfied with WotC's monster design, then I got A5E's Monstrous Menagerie, I added and removed a ton of house rules, things like that. One side effect of going through so many forms and DMing styles in the duration of this one campaign has been that my campaign notes have been... to say the least, completely disorganised.
I first wrote everything by hand and kept a file, since that was an option when going face to face. Then I moved the game first to Roll20 and then to D&D Beyond when we started playing online, and while those platforms had some advantages (automation or at least ease of reference for NPC and PC sheets, nice maps on VTTs, that sort of stuff), my notes started spreading to different platforms over time. I tried starting a campaign bible on OneNote so that everything could be easily cross-referenced, but the sheer legwork needed to transcribe every NPC, game summary and piece of lore anew to OneNote meant that I never got around to finishing the campaign bible. Instead, these days some of my notes are on an unsaved file on Notepad++, some are on OneNote, and some are on the VTT du jour that I use for that specific game. For 10+ games it's been Foundry, which is also a contender to house my new campaign bible but once again I cannot bring myself to do the - by now astronomical - legwork needed to transfer everything there.
I don't mean to say that my campaign is inconsistent or that my games aren't fun. I regularly manage to set up huge callbacks to earlier games, and the players really do have fun with the massive scope of a game that's been going on for 87 sessions and by now covers multiple worlds. For most weeks, I manage to get just barely the necessary amount of prep and prepare notes for the upcoming game. But then the next week rolls in before I can get to organise my earlier notes, and the pile of disorganised campaign notes keeps growing. Sometimes I want to start a new campaign just so I can stick to one medium, one document and keep everything organised, but obviously this is no reason to drop a campaign.
With that in mind, I wanted to ask the residents of EN World how you organise your DM/GM/ST/Referee notes when you're running a campaign that's been going on for a while (let's say more than 10 games). Did you pick an organisation format and stick to it all the way? Did you get fed up with your random notes and manage to bring them all together midway? Is your campaign still a collection of barely intelligible notes? How do you do it?
I'm having a bit of a conundrum in my D&D 5E first-homebrew-world-now-multiverse campaign, which has been going on for more than two years now. This is a campaign that spanned several different media (first face-to-face, then fully online when the pandemic started, then back to fully face to face when things settled down and now a hybrid form because some players moved cities), and my own DMing style has shifted slightly over time: At first, I felt the need to custom design every monster from scratch because I was dissatisfied with WotC's monster design, then I got A5E's Monstrous Menagerie, I added and removed a ton of house rules, things like that. One side effect of going through so many forms and DMing styles in the duration of this one campaign has been that my campaign notes have been... to say the least, completely disorganised.
I first wrote everything by hand and kept a file, since that was an option when going face to face. Then I moved the game first to Roll20 and then to D&D Beyond when we started playing online, and while those platforms had some advantages (automation or at least ease of reference for NPC and PC sheets, nice maps on VTTs, that sort of stuff), my notes started spreading to different platforms over time. I tried starting a campaign bible on OneNote so that everything could be easily cross-referenced, but the sheer legwork needed to transcribe every NPC, game summary and piece of lore anew to OneNote meant that I never got around to finishing the campaign bible. Instead, these days some of my notes are on an unsaved file on Notepad++, some are on OneNote, and some are on the VTT du jour that I use for that specific game. For 10+ games it's been Foundry, which is also a contender to house my new campaign bible but once again I cannot bring myself to do the - by now astronomical - legwork needed to transfer everything there.
I don't mean to say that my campaign is inconsistent or that my games aren't fun. I regularly manage to set up huge callbacks to earlier games, and the players really do have fun with the massive scope of a game that's been going on for 87 sessions and by now covers multiple worlds. For most weeks, I manage to get just barely the necessary amount of prep and prepare notes for the upcoming game. But then the next week rolls in before I can get to organise my earlier notes, and the pile of disorganised campaign notes keeps growing. Sometimes I want to start a new campaign just so I can stick to one medium, one document and keep everything organised, but obviously this is no reason to drop a campaign.
With that in mind, I wanted to ask the residents of EN World how you organise your DM/GM/ST/Referee notes when you're running a campaign that's been going on for a while (let's say more than 10 games). Did you pick an organisation format and stick to it all the way? Did you get fed up with your random notes and manage to bring them all together midway? Is your campaign still a collection of barely intelligible notes? How do you do it?
