Long time lurker, first time poster. The reason for this post is to ask a very important question to you all and hopefully get some feedback and perhaps conjure up a 9th level Brainstorm.
First, some background: I have been playing D&D since I was 6 years old (now 25). My cousins house had a D&D room with maps lining the walls, dice, props, and contraband galore- yes I know how awesome that is. It was for the big kids, but during social get-togethers us kids would run in there and have grand adventures exploring many fantasy worlds. One of my cousins was always the DM because it was incontestable that he had a gift for it. Over many years of playing almost weekly we had quite a world built up in our imaginations. Fast forward several more years and I live across the country with a friend group of my own that I DM for. I've been doing it for about 4 years and I absolutely love it. It wasn't easy getting started, however. I have watched every Matthew Colvile video probably 5 times. All of How to be a Great Game Master's videos. Critical Role. Interviews with DM's. I've read countless articles and dredged up countless maps, notes, characters, homebrew items, and campaigns people have created and shared online. I've watched and read it all. It took all of that for me to feel like I am a competent enough DM to continually engage my players for 4 hours every week. That took YEARS and most of the good information I had to dig for. Now, I'm a computer programmer and when I see a problem I try to find a way to solve it. This brings me to my actual question:
If there was a piece of software to help you WRITE, CREATE and RUN a D&D campaign, what would it do?
Think about functionality, look and feel, features, plug-ins. Would it help you structure a campaign so it has a cohesive plot arc? Would it make recommendations, or stay out of your way? Would it follow a template, or simply be a white canvas for you imagination?
I'm DYING to hear ANYTHING you guys have to say about it. I've thought on this for probably a year now so I have a pretty good idea of what I'd want in my head, but I will refrain from posting it here so I don't put any thoughts in your head. I want to hear what YOU think.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read all this! Hope to see you in the comments.
TL;DR: if you were going to get software to help you create a D&D campaign what would you want it to do?
I'm not sure how this tracks for everyone else, but for all my homebrew stuff I use OneNote for organization, Word if I need to write up any longer-form text, and D&D Beyond for saving homebrew stuff that needs to be shared to my players' character sheets. Since DDB came out with their encounter builder I've been using that to organize monsters for encounters. Before that I would use Excel for grouping monsters for encounters.
For notes I just use One Note. Does all I need. From an organizational aspect it's perfect for me.
For initiave, showing maps, drawing on maps, moving icons for players/mobs, handling effects and a dice roller I wrote a program to handle all that in visual basic.
To draw the world and other dungeons I use Photoshop, world draft and dungeon draft. Then display them in my program to the players.
The flow charts work real well. I actually use Visio to map out the campaigns since I use that at work and it allows a lot of variety for what can be done with its tools. I also have a few spreadsheets on google drive that I use to keep track other things.
There is a campaign logger that Johnn Four puts out. I do not know how well it works, but it has a lot of features that make organization a lot easier. https://www.roleplayingtips.com/campaign-logger/ It is subscription based so I had not gone with it since I have tools that I use to keep track of things elsewhere.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Hello all!
Long time lurker, first time poster. The reason for this post is to ask a very important question to you all and hopefully get some feedback and perhaps conjure up a 9th level Brainstorm.
First, some background: I have been playing D&D since I was 6 years old (now 25). My cousins house had a D&D room with maps lining the walls, dice, props, and contraband galore- yes I know how awesome that is. It was for the big kids, but during social get-togethers us kids would run in there and have grand adventures exploring many fantasy worlds. One of my cousins was always the DM because it was incontestable that he had a gift for it. Over many years of playing almost weekly we had quite a world built up in our imaginations. Fast forward several more years and I live across the country with a friend group of my own that I DM for. I've been doing it for about 4 years and I absolutely love it. It wasn't easy getting started, however. I have watched every Matthew Colvile video probably 5 times. All of How to be a Great Game Master's videos. Critical Role. Interviews with DM's. I've read countless articles and dredged up countless maps, notes, characters, homebrew items, and campaigns people have created and shared online. I've watched and read it all. It took all of that for me to feel like I am a competent enough DM to continually engage my players for 4 hours every week. That took YEARS and most of the good information I had to dig for. Now, I'm a computer programmer and when I see a problem I try to find a way to solve it. This brings me to my actual question:
If there was a piece of software to help you WRITE, CREATE and RUN a D&D campaign, what would it do?
Think about functionality, look and feel, features, plug-ins. Would it help you structure a campaign so it has a cohesive plot arc? Would it make recommendations, or stay out of your way? Would it follow a template, or simply be a white canvas for you imagination?
I'm DYING to hear ANYTHING you guys have to say about it. I've thought on this for probably a year now so I have a pretty good idea of what I'd want in my head, but I will refrain from posting it here so I don't put any thoughts in your head. I want to hear what YOU think.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read all this! Hope to see you in the comments.
TL;DR: if you were going to get software to help you create a D&D campaign what would you want it to do?
I'm not sure how this tracks for everyone else, but for all my homebrew stuff I use OneNote for organization, Word if I need to write up any longer-form text, and D&D Beyond for saving homebrew stuff that needs to be shared to my players' character sheets. Since DDB came out with their encounter builder I've been using that to organize monsters for encounters. Before that I would use Excel for grouping monsters for encounters.
1. A adventure flowchart creator (similar to the ones on pages 6 and 75 of Descent into Avernus)
2. An area to put named encounters with the enemies and encounter names and any material rewards plus a description of the encounter
3. A place to put level-up points for milestone based campaigns
4. An online dice average result roller (basically you get the average for hp and mon attacks)
There is no dawn after eternal night.
Homebrew: Magic items, Subclasses
Super useful, never thought of using Excel! Thanks for your comment
For notes I just use One Note. Does all I need. From an organizational aspect it's perfect for me.
For initiave, showing maps, drawing on maps, moving icons for players/mobs, handling effects and a dice roller I wrote a program to handle all that in visual basic.
To draw the world and other dungeons I use Photoshop, world draft and dungeon draft. Then display them in my program to the players.
I'd probably want something like WorldAnvil. Which is why I use World Anvil. ;)
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
That sounds like an extremely useful program you wrote. Other DM's would probably love to use it too, myself included!
The flow charts work real well. I actually use Visio to map out the campaigns since I use that at work and it allows a lot of variety for what can be done with its tools. I also have a few spreadsheets on google drive that I use to keep track other things.
There is a campaign logger that Johnn Four puts out. I do not know how well it works, but it has a lot of features that make organization a lot easier. https://www.roleplayingtips.com/campaign-logger/ It is subscription based so I had not gone with it since I have tools that I use to keep track of things elsewhere.