GM's tools

Since the pandemic forced our gaming group to migrate our campaigns to a virtual tabletop I've struggled with creating good maps. I think having a nice map enhanced the VTT experience, since the players can see the map in that situation. I'll be moving my Traveller game online to keep William in the campaign, and I'm happy to do it, but I think I'm done agonizing over the "right tool" for map creation.

When you sit in front of a computer all day, if you're like me, you may not want to spend the evening working on a computer. OK, maybe you like it. I don't. I find fiddling for hours with creating a map on the computer to be excruciating. What takes me very little time with pen and paper takes hours on the computer. 

This, after looking at computer-based options for a long time I've landed squarely back in the pen & paper camp.  I like to sit with my wife and our pets in the evening, watch TV or listen to music, and talk.  I don't want a bunch of wires and gadgets all over the place. So I've settled on the A5 size dot grid notebook as my preferred medium for writing games, drawing maps, and recording game session reports. I have one that I scribble notes in, plan out sessions, and mock up drawings and ideas, and one that I draw the "final" maps and session notes in. These notebooks take very little space at the table when we are playing and are easy to handle. When I need to look up monster stats or rules, whether I'm sitting in my chair in the evening working on an adventure or we're in the middle of a game, for D&D I just open up the right book in D&D Beyond. It makes it very convenient to look at the current versions of the player characters as well. During my workday, during lunch, I'll certainly use Google Docs to plan out sessions and ideas as well, but I print those out and have them at the table, rather than having my laptop there. 

So I feel like I've come to a point where I have a comfortable mix of basic pencil/pen & paper stuff mixed with appropriate technology, all of which streamlines my worldbuilding and scenario building as well as actually running the game. 

Obviously I write up the game sessions here on this blog (or on this one for Traveller), in order to make the information easily available to my players and friends. I also have a very affordable subscription to LegendKeeper where I keep the full records of my campaigns. LegendKeeper is allows you to create wikis for your campaigns, and it's great. Finally, I'm working on a little 5.5 x 8.5 3-ring binder to keep campaign info at the table. Small versions of maps, monsters, whatever, but I may not even do that since the A5 notebook seems to be filling that need. 

I am a little concerned about the effect of the upcoming 2024 changes to D&D Beyond, so it may soon get to the point I have to use the physical 2014 books, which is fine. We'll just see how it all works. If they just ruin its ability to run a 2014 5e game I'll just go right back to the physical books and be done with it for the time being.