Yesterday I held the first session of a new campaign. As usual, at least for me, I was scrambling the night before to get all the things I needed into Campaign Logger. I was in pretty good shape by the time we started yesterday. Or so I thought!
As I was shifting from one encounter to the next, I started looking for the encounter notes I had prepared. I couldn't locate them anywhere! I had a few brief skeleton Pages, but all of the new content I had entered on those pages the night before was missing. My session planning Log entry looked like it was missing stuff as well. I tried the "Clear Cache and Reload All" function, but nothing showed up.
I did what all of you do so well. I made it up on the fly! We survived and had fun.
Later when I got home I jumped back into CL and ... presto! The content was all back! Some serious thinking and sleuthing followed. Here are some bullet points on what I learned and speculate:
As I was shifting from one encounter to the next, I started looking for the encounter notes I had prepared. I couldn't locate them anywhere! I had a few brief skeleton Pages, but all of the new content I had entered on those pages the night before was missing. My session planning Log entry looked like it was missing stuff as well. I tried the "Clear Cache and Reload All" function, but nothing showed up.
I did what all of you do so well. I made it up on the fly! We survived and had fun.
Later when I got home I jumped back into CL and ... presto! The content was all back! Some serious thinking and sleuthing followed. Here are some bullet points on what I learned and speculate:
- I remembered after the fact that I had been switching browsers. I think some of the time I was using Chrome, and some of the time Firefox. I can't remember exactly which one I used when, but I think the missing stuff was on Chrome.
- I now have two Logs, almost identical. One has my extensive prep notes in it, one has simple notes and the notes I took during the session.
- I remember having to "Apply Incoming Changes" when I started the live session just to get any of my preparation notes to show up.
- I think I had to apply changes when I got home as well (on Firefox, I think).
- I speculate there is some issue with changes not being propagated to the online storage from the browser, but I have no idea how that works, so I can't be sure.
- I tend to treat "Log This" as a button that saves my entry someplace where I can get it again. It seems that's not quite true. At this point, I'm not sure how to check if my content is saved-really-saved-honest -cross-my-heart-saved. I'm worried about next session because I've stopped bringing any hard copy materials to the session and I'm completely dependent on CL.
- Is a "really bad idea" to switch browsers like this?
- How can I be certain my content has been safely saved?
- How does browser-online sync actually work?
- Why does the "Apply Incoming Changes" function even exist? If there are incoming changes why are they not automatically applied? What's the use case for making this a manual function? Is there a time I would not want to apply the changes? How would I know?