What do your DM/GM Notes Look Like?

[Oryan77]

I use a laptop at the table and it allows me to access my Excel sheet where I keep all of my campaign info. I'm super duper organized, probably too organized. Excel allows me to keep info separated by tabs, and I can easily move my notes around by cutting/pasting cells. It is so easy for me to access information with Excel, and I have an unbelievable amount of reference material for 3.5 in my Excel sheet.

I recently made new PC and NPC sheets with Excel. They are really cool & I created them with formulas so I can write up a character even faster than I could free hand. But I still like to print these sheets off cause it's easier to reference hard copies of NPC stats during gameplay.

 

[Bumbles]

Ashes and random dice rolls. That's how I game!

 

[Festivus]

I use excel for tracking parcels, xp and notes.

 

[EricNoah]

For campaign notes, there are sort of three directions I go...

1) I prepare a campaign guide for myself, and then an edited version for the players, plus a map for myself and an edited map for the players. See this page for a sample of the player's version of the guide and player's map for my current campaign:
Eric's RPG Page ‎(Eric and Kara Noah)‎

I also prepare a house rules document and update it as necessary.

2) During the game, I keep notes on what major things happened on a campaign calendar. This takes the form of a spreadsheet with columns for date, location, planned encounters on my part, PC actions, and notes. I use this after the session when creating the adventure log and when planning for the next game.

3) After the game, I write up an adventure log. It's not as detailed as "story hours" I have seen, but I find it invaluable when running the campaign and a great source of pleasure long after the campaign has concluded. Example: Western Shore: Adventure Log ‎(Eric and Kara Noah)‎


For adventures ... if I am modifying something published, I have a brief word document outlining changes and including any stat blocks I need. For something more elaborate (a published adventure where I am doing more than a little tweaking, or something home grown) I do write out pretty detailed notes, including stat blocks with the room descriptions, plus room for recording hit points etc. I try to arrange the pages so there's about one or two encounters on a page at most. I also add on any player handouts to this document.

 

[meomwt]

I've started writing an adventure recently and attached are some pages from my notes.

We play 3.5E so I have been making good use of OGL sources, pulling monster stats from the SRD (or, having advanced them, from MonsterForge) and adding spell notes from there too (to reduce page turning at the table). I've been building encounters using Wulf Ratbane's Trailblazer rules, also the Treasure Packet system.

The example pages are for 1st level characters.

I've been writing in Word, I can change or add more easily if I think of improvements to something after I've written it down.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I use a palm pilot (okay, Centro) with palmwiki for my organization. The wiki is a big help since lets me link documents together for quick reference.

I recommend a couple of levels of notes: Campaign, story, session and person/place/group/item details.

Campaign notes should be like an outline, although I use a timeline mostly. I have the BBEG start a plan and figure out how long each phase takes. Sometimes I apply a deadline (e.g. the stars align one week after midsummer), to motivate the BBEG. I'll note when the major events should take place (Mid May - minions steal Jem of Katmandu, early June acquire Staff of Akbar, late June steal the statue of Akbar, July 10 have statue, gem, and staff at the Lost City of Baquar).

Often I have two or three sets of BBEGs working on plots. Some aren't so much BBEG as they are BEGs or mere EGs so that if they stop Lord Fauntleroy from stealing the orphanage's land for a new cumquat farm then they won't be available to prevent the Gem of Katmandu from being stolen.

Story plans are a more fleshed out view of the antagonists intentions, listing their allies, sometimes which other BBEG they dislike, and their goals.

Session notes are the details you need to run any given game. For me session notes generally consist of a list of the NPCs I expect the PCs to interact with and places I expect them to go with short descriptions, all of them wiki-linked to the pages of the specific NPC or place detail notes.

Detailed person notes are straightforward character sheets with motivation/contact data. I also wikilink it to the places, people, groups, and stories they are associated with. Detailed place notes list the people there (wiki linked to any details) and resources and assets. Groups are like the DMGII organizations but since I've been using this general approach for 10-12 years I never really used their mechanism


The advantage here is that as a GM you can more easily cope with the players going "off script". If they suddenly leave Lord Fauntleroy to go chase the Staff of Akbar, you already have some material ready. Even if you don't have a detailed character sheet for the minions dealing with that part of the story, if you have something as simple as "7th level cleric with doppleganger troops" you can use the stock entries out of the guides.

 

[Bodhiwolff]

Here's another vote for Microsoft OneNote. I discovered it a few months ago (from a comment on the Enworld boards) and combined with various other online sources of gaming material my games have never been as organized, or as easy to run.

I didn't even realize that I had it installed on my machine until I went looking for it, and everybody is always surprised to find that they probably already have it on theirs too!

I now use it for a myriad of other tasks, and it has become my go-to piece of software for note-taking and file organizing. I no longer have 400 half-page Word documents!

 

[Bumbles]

For those who don't have OneNote though, EverNote is a free alternative.

 

[Hereticus]

Now, I wasn't having any trouble at all with coming up with the material or story or even the stats for the NPCs and maps, but the actual pre-session notes and campaign overview stuff. The format of the notes themselves. I didn't know how much, how detailed, or how to organize them. Type them or hand written? (Hand written first, then typed?)

I like to write an outline on scrap paper, then I write in the details on the computer. I try to get everything I need on one page, including scene descriptions monsters/NPCs, stats and effects. I like PDFs, because I can cut-n-paste. If I don't have a PDF, I make references to book/page.

As a player, I diary every adventure. But I do not write objectively, it is from the biased perspective of my character.

 

[Shemeska]

My notes are disjointed as all heck. Normally the notes for a single session run from 1 page in Word, to at most, around 5 pages in the same. Almost always the notes of one week's session will overlap with the previous two sessions' notes.

Normally I'll have descriptions of an area, notes on NPC motivations and goals (those important enough to have names).

For instance, for my last session, I had details on five NPCs that were bottled up inside the demiplanar prison/larder of a half-slaadi demigod dragon (spawn of Tiamat and Rrenbuu). One of them may or may not be a mind-seed of Tollysalmon the madly insane former factol of the Bleak Cabal, one of them has an imp in the shape of a pug, one of them is a nycaloth in service to an ultroloth out of Khin-Oin named Holashnar the Devourer of Light, etc. One PC is there, and Nisha (and her xaos imp) from the previous campaign is stuck in there too.

So notes on the dragon's mentality, his wants, the motivations of those five prisoners, and a ton of notes regarding the dragon's lair, its traps, the genius loci guarding the place, and the -five faerie dragons- who get the play the hired help alongside the guardians. The demigod dragon is also undead, so the fairy dragons are all dressed up in little colored slaadi costumes, and one of them had an illusion to make himself appear skeletal. And I give faerie dragons wish 1/day, so that was an interesting session.