I've been GMing tabletop games since 2008, 15 years ago at the time of this writing. In that time, I have dedicated about a dozen notebooks to building and planning games (not to mention the many folders of online notes). I looked back over all of them in preparation of writing this, and I was struck by how my writing changed over the years. My early notebooks had lots of story ideas and logs of games--they mostly planned the part of the game that I was most anxious about, which was creating an interesting story. All these years later, my notebooks are almost entirely additions to and expansions of the games we're playing--I've become comfortable spinning a story along with the players, so I focus instead on personalizing the experience to each player. This sometimes expresses itself in the form of mechanics, like when I created custom classes for every player in a campaign, or in the form of tailoring the narrative to characters. But as I continued to study my notebooks, I noticed a few other things which I think bear some investigation. So below is a selection of the lessons I learned looking back at all those notes.
One thing I know for sure is that you need to do what works for you. Some people like the structure of the many available guided notebooks that prompt you for various details as you write; others of us prefer to just write down what we know in the system that makes the most intuitive sense. Looking at my notebooks, I can easily see that I am the latter type. There is almost no discernable organization--I simply filled the pages in chronologically. This does mean I sometimes have to search for a specific set of notes, but it's functional for me in that I tend to build off my most recent work, which is conveniently right there. And I'm sure that some GMs are grinding their teeth thinking about this lack of clear organization, but it works for me. That counts for a lot.
Another expression of this lesson is seen in the example I began with. My early notebooks focus on story ideas, and that was because I was playing with people who focused on wild fantasy adventure stories. I wanted to give them something good, so my notebooks were dominated in big campaign ideas, profiles on interesting NPCs, and exotic places they might go. This served my needs at the time. My early experience as a GM had been mostly goofing around. When I wanted to take it seriously, I needed to prepare something that would help, so I focused on the story elements. My first serious campaign was about a mysterious questgiver who commissioned the deaths of every important figure in the royal retinue; it would turn out later that the princess of the kingdom, a committed anarchist, was the questgiver, sabotaging her own kingdom for her beliefs. That story was something born of my work then, and my notebooks show how. I did what would serve my purposes at the time--I did what worked for me--and it created a great campaign.
I also learned the value of good note-taking. Taking notes for a tabletop game when you're a player is pretty straightforward; you write down the major events that take place, and you might include specific ideas about your character--plans, special abilities, or other details. But taking notes as a GM is a massive undertaking. You need to track events, your plans, information about the world, game rules, and combat information, sometimes all at the same time. Things are bound to fall through the cracks, but you can still practice good note-taking skills. One practice I encourage is being more specific than you think you have to. I can't count how many of my notebooks have cool phrases that I have never been able to recall the significance of. An example of this appears on the first page of a mid-career notebook: "Uses reality-bending to make himself harder to kill." This was listed as the entire description of an NPC who was the BBEG of the campaign I was using him in. It's a cool idea, but I had nothing else to go off--just that he uses reality-binding in a way that helps him survive anything. I never got to find out what would have happened with this NPC because the campaign ended due to a pair of breakups, but I do remember feeling at a loss when trying to develop him. I just wasn't sure what my notes were communication.
Another important factor in good notes is related to the first lesson: figure out the details that work best for you, and focus on taking them down. I have a weakness for remembering the consequences of the sillier parts of the game, like when players spend half an hour in danger so that they can have a picnic or when they want the narrative game you're leading to be a restaurant ownership simulation. My mind tends to process really strange things as too far-fetched to exist for real in the gameworld, so I often forget to note when one of these bizarre actions affect the reality of the story. I've learned as time has gone on to notice that and write it down so that my plans aren't actively foiled by some detail I've forgotten about. When I look at the combat notes I've written in my notebooks, I see that I write down the NPC combatants' vital numbers, notes about effects on combatants, and not much else. (I do usually give first names to every combatant, even in meaningless fights, to help me differentiate the various enemies. It's also pretty funny when the party kills some mythical creature and I say, "You killed Vanessa.") Because I focus on descriptions of combat in terms of how attacks miss or land, I need reminders of the numbers behind it, but I don't go beyond that. Take notes on the things you need, but try to stay focused on the game.
Which leads me to my next lesson--it's worth taking a moment while GMing to take some good notes. This is true when something big happens, but it's especially true when you have an idea about how to plan for the campaign. Whenever you think you need to remember something, don't rely on your memory alone. I often say to my party, "Okay, give me a minute here to catch up my notes." And I've never had a player who was anything less than understanding about it. I've written before about how important it is to begin every session with a review of last session. This is something that would be totally impossible without good notes. I've noticed that the quality of my notes has increased since I switched to mostly digital notes--I find that I can type and edit quicker on a screen and keyboard than with a pen and paper, which is helpful when you're trying to return to the game quickly--but that's what serves me best, and you should do whatever you're comfortable with. And remember that since you've paused to take the notes, it's worth taking enough time to make it good notes. Pausing to write notes and not recording enough to make sense of later is a double loss--both time and information. Don't be afraid to take the time to be detailed.
A very important lesson I learned was that ideas might not come to fruition when you first write about them, but that doesn't mean that you won't get to enjoy later on. The ill-fated and ill-conceived reality-bending NPC I talked about earlier came from a campaign with a setting I was still designing. I knew it was a big, sandy, mountainous island that would be at home in any western story, and I had designed one town in very specific detail--I still have the document profiling literally every resident of the town. But the other eleven settlements? The campaign died when they'd only been to one of them. I had ten practically blank pages in my notebooks. And they stayed blank for several years. Then, I got a new group together who was interested in my western setting, and I got back to developing the island's settlements. That island is now Ramsey, a setting I created along with more than a dozen maps, all in distinct styles. Once I had a group who was interested in the setting, the development became easier, and I had the ability (as well as time and space) to actually use it. And getting to see more than half of the island in the campaign was incredibly enriching--I loved getting to see people enjoy what I had created.
On the other hand, not all ideas have their day. My notebooks are littered with notes about directions I thought would be interesting to take the story. In the margins next to my notes on major actions, I have often written in ideas--"Come up with x" will appear next to ideas. In some cases, I went back to these ideas and implemented them in the campaign. But not all of those ideas could work. And accepting that is hard, but it also frees us as GMs. When something we come up with doesn't make it to the game, we should remember that we got to share our other ideas and appreciate that success. Honestly, looking back at some of these notes, I'm glad I ignored them. I love the way my campaigns have turned out, and I wouldn't want to go back and fiddle with the way that they came out.
One of my notebooks is almost entirely lists. It includes the list of names that became my NPC database, the list of taverns that became my Taverns and Barkeeps Database, the table which I would revise to create my Chaos Table, and my Wheel of Voices. It also includes organizational breakdowns of major groups in my homebrew setting as well as information about who's in charge of various settlements and what their values are. This type of information could be categorized as information that gives me partially generated content. My NPC database tells me who a character generally is, but it's up to me to decide how that applies in the moment given the story and the player character(s) they're talking to. My Taverns and Barkeeps Database gives me the same sort of information, but with the addition of atmospheric elements. The Chaos Table gives me an effect--I have to decide how to apply it. The Wheel of Voices lets me pick a distinct character voice, but I still have to interpret that into the character's personality. And the organizational information is far from complete--it's not thorough guides to every detail of a settlement, but instead just enough inspiration that I could improvise a story about the place. This all reveals that I'm a pretty improvisational GM, and I am again doing what works for me. But what I'm arguing for here is ultimately that knowing what you don't want to devote mental energy to and giving yourself an advantage there is really helpful.
That's actually a larger point I want to make here. When you GM, you're thinking about roughly two dozen different things, and you have to constantly both take in more information, process it, and give back new input. It's mentally exhausting to say the least. I found that as I GMed, I would often stall out trying to come up with character names, business names, random things, and voices. Walking into a town I'd never developed made me anxious. And the reason is that I'm juggling those two dozen things, and coming up with a name for an NPC who will speak three lines in this scene and disappear forever is not energy I want to spend. So instead, I decided to pre-generate a bunch of material that I liked and just plug it in as necessary. Next time you GM, pay attention to the things that slow you down, and then do something that helps you deal with it more smoothly. The benefits will surprise you.
The last lesson I'll mention is that things you write don't have to serve the function you set out to serve when you make them. I mentioned above that I created my NPC database to help me come up with names. Well, the names that appear on that list in my notebook (the same names that appear on the linked page) didn't originate there. I didn't start that list by sitting down and writing as many names as I could think of. I looked back through my older notebooks to see if I had any material I could use. In my notes on Ramsey, long before the second campaign would explore the continent, I had generated a bunch of basic governmental and leadership information about the towns. I created NPCs who ran the towns and the organizations in them. Each settlement had about 5-10 NPCs like this. Every one of those names was salvaged for the NPC Database list. That gave me about a third of the list done without real effort. I never could have known when I wrote those notes that the most important part was the NPC names, but that's what they became. Don't dismiss anything you've written--one day, it may be just what you need.
There you have it--a variety of lessons learned from 15 years of GM notebooks. I hope that these serve you in your efforts to plan and preserve the fun you have with your party, and I hope that your games benefit from valuable notes.
That's all for now. Coming soon: why I originally wanted to become a GM, why I think philosophical conundrums make the best inspiration for a campaign, and home décor by culture in my homebrew setting. Until next time, happy gaming!
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