AUGUST 8, 2024

by Keaira

<aside> 🔖 This is my contribution to Autocratik’s event happening during the month of August aimed to talk more about the hobby of table top roleplaying games.

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I love pretty gadgets and boxed editions and card decks. I collect dice, each of them different, small big, all possible shapes and colours. I also own multiple dice bags, most made by my favourite dice shop where I get my dice advent calendar. But in the age of online play, I rarely ever use them. So my dice became more of a designer piece for my shelf than actual tool of play. Discord bot rolls for me, without colour and shape, Google owns my character sheets, many of them pretty and automated. Are online tools “the accessory” I should talk about today?

The “accessory” that I use in my games recently is the one I write this “blog” on - Notion - an organiser online tool for anything from planning a trip, class schedules all the way to… well campaign wikis. And Impromptu blogs.

I am constantly searching for good platforms to use in gaming. I am a simple person when it comes to a game session - all I need is a discord for voice/video chat, some channel to post pictures of NPCs and a good character sheet, preferably in excel form. VTTs are distracting for me, maps are nice, but not needed, music on the background takes away the focus and I tend to zoom out and miss the speech. Theatre of mind - that is the way to go for me. That said, I am freakishly into having accessible, neat information about the campaign/game in the downtime, organised session notes, rules overview, accessible pictures, information about the world and characters in it. In my view, players can click and find all they look for, in a form that is well sorted. Anytime, anywhere. And there is where Notion comes into play.

Notion is easy to use, move elements around, work with pictures, lists, even embed external sites. What I love the most, is the way it works with databases. I can sort and tag NPCs, connect them with locations, create relations between the database entries. And show it in a nice gallery view with character pictures in the foreground. I can make a database of moves in a PbtA game and sort it by basic/special, filter easily and I can connect session notes to specific NPCs.

I can keep GM only information separate from the “public” part, that I can publish to the web and move NPCs or locations there, when relevant. While I use other tools for my GUMSHOE scenario preparations - like Scrivener or TiddlyWiki, for campaign Wiki, Notion is my favourite go to (until I find something better).

And here is a picture of my dice: