I’ll be starting small, and letting my organic prep - and player contributions - drive what winds up on the wiki. Having started campaigns only to have them collapse under the weight of my self-imposed obligations - like documenting locations that may never get used in agonizing detail, spending hours drawing maps (that may never get used), and writing up adventure recaps as short stories - I can see how this would be a real, and tempting, problem. Micah, who runs Obsidian Portal, cautioned me about not trying to do everything all at once from the outset, and I’ve heard him give this advice to others. I’m also loving that it helps make a task that can sometimes seem monolithic - prepping to run a campaign using a system I’ve never GMed before - into one that is easily chunked-up into smaller tasks that I can handle as I go. I have to fight the urge not to jot notes in Evernote or elsewhere, but once OP is open and I’m prepping right there where I’m going to need the material, I can see how efficient this is going to be. My group just settled on me running a Star Trek campaign, so I’ve just started prepping game material in OP it rocks. My players will have access to game material online at any time, something that they enjoyed during the last game I ran, and will have the option of writing character journals, taking notes of their own, and otherwise collaborating on the written record of the campaign. I type much faster than I write, and using this approach I’ll have 100% of my campaign material in one spot, accessible from anywhere, and will hopefully save some time both before and during the game. No fat notebooks, no crappy handwriting, no decentralized mess - I think this sounds awesome. When the campaign ends, leave it online for reference.Write up post-game stuff (and tidy up in-game notes) in OP.Document NPCs, locations, and other easily-forgotten elements.Do all of my written game prep in Obsidian Portal.My idea is simple, but represents a big change for me: Wikis are pretty easy to update, very easy to cross-link, and are great for collaboration - you and your players can use OP to create and document a campaign together. In a nutshell, OP is a wiki-based campaign management tool with features geared specifically towards gamers, including adventure journals, the ability to hide GM’s-eyes-only material on the same page as public material, and more. Making my choice even easier, as a contributor to Open Game Table, Volume 2, I received a free 6-month Ascendant (paid) account on OP - a donation the founder of OP, Micah, made to all 70+ contributors. The site just won its second ENnie Award, and it’s home to thousands of campaigns. There are lots of ways to manage your campaign online, but from everything I’ve heard Obsidian Portal (OP) is one of the best.
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