7-Day GM Organization Challenge

[JohnnFour]

Question: Assuming CL as the Source of Truth (and that you're a subscriber) - what do you do about ideas that don't fit in a current campaign? e.g. ideas for a campaign or just NPCs, plot lines and encounters that don't suit the current campaign? Is it worth setting up an 'Ideas' campaign or something?

Hola @Barbarulo.

For ideas, I first decide how many characters I need, in general. Characters in the writing/keyboard sense.

In CL, Pages have a 250,000 character limit (a short book) and Log Entries have 2,500 character limit (~400 words).

So I first decide if my ideas are quick notes or more like Works In Progress that need a higher character count.

If 400 words or less is all I need, then I create an Ideas Log for each Campaign. This lets me use all the Tags and whatnot for that campaign as I ideate.

If I need to write a small book for an idea, then I would either create a new Campaign for this purpose, or I'd designate one of the free Tags for that. I haven't needed 250K chars for my ideations yet, so I've only used the Log approach.

Here's my Basilica ideas Log:



I hope this helps. Cheers.

 

[Sethvir]

Registered for the 7 Day Challenge and have just started listening to the first couple of days of presentations that you have put together. Really my biggest challenge, I think, is capturing good session notes.

So currently running PF1e, Paizo AP The Ironfang Invasion. I'm more of a Sandbox GM and rely more on extensive prep which allows them a fair degree of freedom for adventuring, but also still allows me to keep them moving forward in the campaign.

Tools I use. I have three primary ones that I use and a couple of supplemental.

1) Legendkeeper - Use it as my rules wiki that covers allowed classes/races, new and updated house rules as well as most of the data from the Player's guide for the AP and my modifications to it including other related content referenced by the Paizo Player's guide that I want them to access to.
2) Chronica - My world content. Houses, player characters, NPC's, Locations, Encounter notes, inventory, wealth, shops and notes about how I plan to run each encounter as well as the in-world calendar where I can tie PC's/NPC's and locations together in a timeline of events.
3) Combat Manager - Where I run all combat. I have baseline PC's and then I have the encounters prebuilt with the monsters and saved so when the encounter occurs I can just pull it up and it adds the monsters for the encounter to the application and am ready to roll.
4) Hero Lab - Combat Manager has 95% of what I need but if I need a more advanced change to a monster I tweak it here and then import the portfolio to Combat Manger and save the monster and the relevant encounter.
5) Inspiration Pad Pro - I have a ton of random tables I use and I have built a lot of them into it. When I don't have them built, I revert back to PDF's for random interesting things depending upon the environment where the PC's find themselves. I use Raging Swan Press' Wilderness Dressing line extensively for random weird stuff they might encounter when exploring.

I usually try to be a few weeks ahead of the group planning for their future encounters from the AP and building out supplemental ideas and tying back future happenings to things they've already encountered or has some relationship to the beginnings of the AP.

Most of my session notes, are notes to myself for distribution of treasure and moving it from the Encounter in the application to their party inventory and updating the wealth log and updating NPC's so they are available to the player's for future reference.

 

[Sethvir]

So after a bit of testing with the same data set for both Alfa ebook organizer, and Calibre, my assessment is that Calibre is better at reading the meta data and the file and coming up with correct names. Also easier to bulk edit. Biggest issue for me is that it copies files from the directory where I download them from Drivethrurpg. So I end up with two copies of the file. I'd really like it to just keep track of it within the existing structure of the download files.

 

[JohnnFour]

I'd love to hear how things go there with Calibre. That might be something we could share out to help GMs in the same boat.

 

[Sethvir]

Since it was moving my files around and creating duplicates I scrapped using it. Alfa doesn't move them but isn't as good at assigning names. More thoughts to come.

 

[JohnnFour]

Summoning @ExileInParadise. Could you check out @Sethvir's two posts above? You have a robust system for managing your PDFs.

 

[knoppi]

I'm not Allen, but I also managed a lot of PDFs in the past.

I use Calibre for ebooks and like it quite much. It acts a bit like iTunes did for mp3 files: quite exclusive. Once you manage files using Calibre (mobi, PDF, epub, whatever), you should only access them through Calibre.

For managing references in my PhD thesis I used jabref. Last time I used it it had quite an old-fashioned user interface but eventually you will have a filterable (is that actually a word?) table and can link the entries to your PDF files, that means you retain control over your data. I just had a look at it once more because I'm also considering using some management for my PDFs and that is actually my favourite candidate.
There is a screenshot of my quick try:


A more modern apporach is paperless-ng - it's a document management system that runs in a browser. Drawback is: running the application is not straight-forward and typically runs on a separate server. Plus: You can add tags to all the documents and it can scan your inbox to automatically insert invoices (for RPG books) in your document management.

 

[ExileInParadise]

Summoning @ExileInParadise. Could you check out @Sethvir's two posts above? You have a robust system for managing your PDFs.

The duplication issue is pretty much why I don't use Calibre for anything except Kindle-wrangling - and I don't use Kindle much anymore because its a DRM'ed cesspool.

I run my own private cloud server which has a share between my desktop and mobiles - its still duplication - but for good purpose since its acting as a backup on another server rather than duplicated on my same machine.

Perhaps you could do something similar for Calibre?

Unfortunately, I don't expect my system for managing my library itself would work well for others: It's not software.

It is literally me acting as my own librarian and carefully stacking things the way I want in folders using a tree structure I've tuned and pruned for decades now.

I manage everything using Linux command lines, from a shell prompt.

And the shell I use is called Xonsh which is basically the Python3 interpreter blended with a Linux shell.

That let's me use Python as code for tools - or scripts - or my shell for things like PDF metadata, OCR calls, JSON extractions what-have-you..

 

[Sethvir]

As I always say I'm an analyst, not a programmer. I read code, I don't write it. LOL. I can use software with the best of them, but not write it or code it. Although friend of mine says I am a programmer, just lazy, because I read and understand and follow code better than virtually any other analyst he has worked with.

That said, I have scrapped Calibre and have been testing Alfa eBooks Manager and a program called All My Books. Between the three of them they do pretty much what I want except not in one program. Alfa eBooks Manager seems to be giving the middle ground between the two, not moving the files, and gets some of the data right, not as much as Calibre, but is somewhat reasonable to a point where I can live with it. Most of my content comes from DrivethruRPG, supplemented by a few other companies webstores since I back kickstarters and a lot of them run the rewards through their own stores, so I have purchased content from multiple sources. I've just taken to using the Drivethru downloader and then just adding in the relevant other stores content to that structure. I can add tags and it has a few custom fields you can assign your own values to as well. Downside is there doesn't seem to be a bulk edit where I can select multiple books and update common factors for them all at once, like updating the publisher for a particular group of books. When new books are added, Alfa ebooks will pick up the new books in it's scan.

It is better than what I had been doing before, which was all built in an Access db where I copied and pasted the list of books from the website and formatted them into my custom format and then mass updated some of the tag fields I had, like game system, and other types of flags I could determine from the file name. I do use that data for some other stuff I do, so I am hoping that once I get Alfa data all cleaned up, I can systematically export it and reuse that as my source.

 

[JohnnFour]

Out of curiosity, what features do you need for a file manager?