The life of a dungeon master is never easy.  Players show up and they get to enjoy themselves, hang out, eat food and bask in the entertainment that is produced as the result of blood, sweat and tears from the DM. I try to keep my games as organized as possible, but as our meeting frequency begins to have ever growing gaps, I need to be just a bit more diligent.

With that in mind I’ve been trying to come up with a system in which I can store all of my relevant adventure information and campaign information in a single place. I’m sort of a tools guy and prefer to have a specific tool for a specific task.  Alas, my search has come up with no specific tool for managing my adventures, so what are my options?

1. Bento — Bento is to Mac as Access is to Windows, only better. Sounds crazy right? But Bento could provide me with everything I need. A small database to manage NPCs, information tidbits I’ve shared as well as treasure loot note taking. It’s a database, with a very slick form designer tool.

Pros:Contains everything I need in one neat package.
Cons:It’s a LOT of work on the front end and is not portable.

2. Word — Everyone’s favorite text editor.
Pros:Portable across Windows and Mac. I already own it.
Cons:Organizationally it sucks. One long running document. Boo.

3. Excel — Everyone’s favorite Spread Sheet.

Pros: Also portable, I own it and sheets allows me some organization to it. Not to mention I’ll have the power of formulas.
Cons: Without a lot of work, it’s going to be extremely unintuitive interface wise. It will also remind me of work, which is not cool during D&D time.

4. OmniOutliner — An outline tool for the Mac.

Pros: The term “outline” really doesn’t do this application justice. It’s got some power to it, flexible, great support for embeded documents.
Cons: Not the greatest tool for quick data entry. It can be a wee-bit troublesome to navigate when you’re getting complex with your tasks.

I could also use Google Docs to replace any of the Office suggested solutions. That’s extremely nice because not only is it portable, but it’s accessible anywhere and always backed up thanks to Google’s revision history feature. (And by the fact it sits on the cloud)

What are you guys out there using to organize your games? I need to be able to access storyline elements, monsters, NPC information and to be able to easily take notes about a particular event, encounter or situation. Also I often have to introduce a character spur of the moment. I have a list of names to pick from, but once their selected I need to jot down information about them. It’s just too much for my little paper notebook to handle.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Games, Roleplaying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.