- Hi everyone, I'm Nicole van der Hoeven. I'm a developer advocate at k6.io. And today I'm not
actually gonna talk about how I use Obsidian for work. I'm talking about how I use
it for play, specifically D&D. Let me show you this graph. This is the graph view
of the three campaigns that I play in on a regular basis. So that's weekly. This large one is 93 sessions in, and it's a 4e campaign set in The Forgotten Realms. And both of these two colors,
the purple and the orange, are set in Exandria, except this larger purple
one is 39 sessions in, and I DM that. And this smaller one is
only four sessions in, and I play in the same game that the previous speaker, Andy, DMs. So I really like keeping
all of my information in the same vault. There are very few
connections between them. And I think that taking
notes is even more important when you have something
like this situation where I am both playing and
DMing in the same world. So there are some pretty
major differences, and I need to make sure
that I'm not metagaming. So today I'm gonna cover how I keep the campaigns separate. My notes as a player in Andy's campaign and my notes as a DM and how different that is from each other. So three ways that I keep
the campaign separate. Firstly, each of these campaigns
is in a separate folder. So in Roam, when I used it, I used namespaces. That way
I can have the same note in multiple campaigns and
that's handy for these two games where there are a lot of the same places and there's a lot of overlap. And the second thing that I
do is I do keep world pages as sort of Maps of Content. So let's look at the one that
I've got for Andy's game. This is The World of the
Temporary White Circle. So I've got the player characters there, and each one has a photo as well. And I have Quests and Questions. And this page is where I put
in outstanding quests, things, more like projects, you know, things that'll take a bit
of time to finally take off. Sometimes they're very general, they're not even really questions, just observations of things that I see or that are happening in the world. I also follow the GTD
system in this agenda. So I use Next Actions,
Waiting For, Someday/Maybe. And I like to do that just because sometimes there are things that I need to do in the next session. And if I don't have a separate
one to quests and questions, those just, those just
get lost in all the mix. And the bulk of it is in the sessions. So we'll just have a look
at this one that I've got. I do use a template for all of this. I won't go into templates because I think Lea will go more in
detail into that later, but in general, I follow Sly Flourish's, what do you call it, Lazy DM guide for session prep, except I do it as a player as well, but I do have a session summary
that I do for every session at the end of every session. And then I tag it like this and that's mainly so that I can embed it in the next game. So this one is the
embedded session summary for the previous note. And that's just handy to refresh my memory as well as sometimes the
memory of the other players. Because in this game, there are only two of us to take notes. So then I have the log. Now, when I'm filling this in, during the game, I'm just pasting handouts there and not having as many links. But what I always do is after the session, I go back through the notes and then I start to piece things together. I start to turn some things into links and I create notes per NPC or per page. And I like to do that after the game, so that I have some time to
think about what I want to do in the next game as well. A key thing to these notes,
is that I only ever write what my character knows,
or at least I try to, that way I'm not metagaming. Going back to this map of
content or this world page, I do have these three sections,
factions, gods, and places. And if I look at Hupperdook,
for instance, you'll see, oh, by the way, that's Leaflet. I'll talk about that later. But for every location, every city, I also have some places within it. So these are kind of like either places of note or districts, and these are some shops and all of this is done through data view queries. And I use the metadata
that I have in every NPC or location page as
folder for these queries, I find it really useful
both as a player and as a DM to see the people that
are in a certain city. Now, let's, I wanna show you what
my workspace looks like. Not the one that I play with Andy, but the one for my
fourth edition campaign, because in both of my
fifth edition campaigns, I do use D&D Beyond. So I don't really need
to have a character sheet and all that. But for my fourth edition campaign, I do need to have everything in Obsidian. So this is a little bit squished because I'm using the smaller monitor, my laptop monitor, just so it's easier, for you all to see, but
this is what it looks like. I've got it spread out
on my bigger monitor, but this is just a cool
way to save this view because I always need these
things opened during the game. So I'll usually go to
the session log here. I have next actions here,
quests and questions. This is the HP for the party, which I can adjust on the fly as well. These are the abilities of
my character, or powers, as they're called in fourth edition. And these are my scores
and skills and stuff. I'm also using Jeremy's
Dice Roller plugin here just in case, I mean, I typically like to roll physical dice,
but on the odd occasion that I feel like all my
physical dice have betrayed me, I do just roll here as well. So I just like to have, I like this setup, I like having a workspace because that way I don't need to open
each one up separately. And sometimes it reminds me too that, hey, I need to be, I need to be looking at the
things I've said I want to do, and putting things in there
as the game progresses that I wanna do later. So going to how I use it as a DM, I do, I said earlier that I play
as a DM and as a player, let me just exit out of these. One of the plugins that
I use just for DMing is the Gallery plugin. So this view shows me a
bunch of photos of NPCs that I haven't yet used, but they're usually photos
that I found at some point while browsing the internet
for interesting characters. And I don't really, sometimes I have an idea for
where I want them to fit in, other times I just think they're cool and I save them for future use. And I use Gallery for this
because it's just nice to be able to see all
of them in one place. And sometimes I start here
when I'm creating an NPC, because if I already have a photo, then that's less work that I have to do. What else do I do? I also
have a separate vault. So I said that I like
to keep things separate as much as possible, but this vault is actually
just for my players. So everything in here is tailored to them. And I don't like to, I don't like to show too much of, actually I don't show them at all what I'm doing with my campaign, with my campaign notes. But what I do is I
always have a video here. We do record our sessions,
but it's only really for us. So these are all unlisted.
So I can't share them. And I have the session summary here. I tend to keep that pretty,
you know, spoiler free. So it's safe to show my players. And then during the game I
will drop in things here, handouts, NPCs, things that they see. And I won't provide that
much context because that's their job really. So then when they feel like it, or as they feel like it
they'll then put things into the people section. So you'll notice that in my other vault, I don't actually have, I don't use my folder
structure much at all. They're all just in
the same folder within, within for the campaign, but here, because my players aren't really that, they're not using Obsidian
outside of the game. They're more used to a folder structure. So, I kind of replicated
that here as well. So then they'll go and
separate out those photos and they'll sometimes have notes as well, depending on which player it is. And I kind of just let
them do their own thing, but at least all my handouts
are in this one place. I also like to have
this story thus far page where we go through, I go through all of the session summaries, and then in the ones where
I started recording videos, I also embed them here, aside
from it being a nice place to, to look back and remember what happened in the previous session. It's just, it's kind of, for as a DM, it's kind of nice to see how far I've personally gone, as a DM and how far my new, my players, who are both pretty new
to D&D have gone as well. I also have an about our game page, where I have links to things
that we need during our game. And when we meet a few
things about the world and a link to the calendar. So I do have a calendar
on Fantasy Calendar, but I don't let them see that. I just think that they
should be able to know, you know what, the days of the week are and that kind of thing. So going back to my, my
vault here, my DM vault, let me close this off. I also wanted to show
you this random tables thing that I've got. So I mentioned earlier that I have Jeremy's dice roller plugin, and I use that a little bit as a player to actually roll dice. But what I use it the most
for is generating random, well, rolling on random tables. So I really like having my
own encounter tables or, or really anything. So how that works is you
have a table like this and you can with Obsidian, is
just so easy to create this. I do use the Advanced Tables plugin to keep it looking
nice, even in edit mode. And then you just have to
put this thing here too, to kind of name it. And then I have this random rolls note, and I use this syntax to roll
on something on that table. So if I switch to preview
mode here, I've got well, the current adventure. Well, the next adventure
that I wanna do is "Shemshime's Bedtime Rhyme"
from Candlekeep Mysteries. So I have some things specific to that, but I also have one for
NPC creation, for example. So sometimes I will put an NPC that they've already encountered, but other times this is
just for when they say, "Oh, so what's the name of this shopkeeper "that I didn't tell you
I was going to look for." So then I can kind of go
through these and I say, "Oh, his name is Idel." (laughs) That's just a good way to
never be at a loss for names. And it depends on how these, I don't always use all of
these things for some NPCs. It's enough to just use
this, but for others, it's nice to have, to be
able to know their bond or flaw or secret. It's kind of, you just click on it when, until you find something that makes sense for this character. I have a whole bunch of names. I also have things that
are more setting related, like for settlements and taverns and such, but it really depends
on, you know, what I, what I'm looking for. But I think that having the
dice roller for Obsidian is what makes it the best
note-taking tool for D&D because it lets you very easily
create your own encounters. So for these ones, I usually
start with something else. So I will start with some
of the like D&D specific or D&D-created, or Wizards
of the Coast created encounters and that. But then sometimes I'll, I like to add things in,
depending on, on where we are, or some specific, some things that are
specific to the character. So I also, like, for instance, I use the "Tome of Beasts"
series as well for, for a lot of my monsters,
just to keep it interesting. And so I created my own
encounter just for plants, because we were going
to a place in my game where all of the enemies were plants. It's very cool just to
be able to create a list and be able to randomize from that. So another thing that I wanted to show you was the Statblocks. So let's go to Clockwork Weaving Spider, it's another Jeremy Valentine plugin. He's really just nailing it. This is a really cool one
where you can create your own, your own Statblocks basically. And there's a format for this. I have a shortcut for it. So anytime I just type in that shortcut, it puts this, it enters this, and then I can start to
modify it as necessary. So this is one for a
Clockwork Weaving Spider, which I got from the "Tome of Beasts". But then I changed a few things. I increased the challenge rating due to me changing some of the hit points, and some of the damage
that it deals as well. I gave it another reaction. So this is a really, this is a really good reason
to use Obsidian as well, because I use D&D Beyond,
but on D&D Beyond, even though you can
create homebrew monsters, it's a little bit more
of a pain to do that. Last thing that I want to
show you is how I use leaflet. So let's go to Firefly Cellar, and I actually have two maps here. This one was the one that
came with the adventure, and this is a much cooler one
that I found after the fact. And I love it because you can zoom in and really see the details, right? So you can do that very
easily and Obsidian. And I also liked that I can
put these little markers. So if I don't remember what something is, like, whose room this is or anything, I can just click on it and, oh yeah, that's Gailby's room. Or, you know, if my
players go in through here, I'll click on that. And it takes me to that
section of my notes. So then I can say, Okay, this is, oh, this is the Obsidian Admonition plugin that Jeremy also creates,
using a pattern here, but I use this info block to tell myself that this is something, this is box text. So this is what I'm going to
actually read word for word. And then there's just a few notes as well. Then I always have a back to map thing so that I can go back and say, "Okay, well now they've gone to this." Oh, that was it. But then I can say, "They've gone to this room." So I really love doing it this way, because then that lets me jump quickly from one section of my notes to another. So that's not really something
that you can do with, you know, something like
one note or, or notion. I just find it really, it really enhances my game and lets me as a relatively new DM feel confident about running and adventure. Okay. Just to wrap up here, I do have some, some things that I've written. So you can, you can see
more about how I do things. My setup in detail, by going to my site, nicolevanderhoeven.com. And I'll put this link in the chat so that you can have a look at that, but this is one on how
non lazy DMs use Obsidian for D&D in my opinion. And there's a, I also have another one where I talk about how I do the same thing,
but for as a player. So have a look at that. And if you have any other
questions about my setup, feel free to hit me up on Twitter. My Twitter handle is n_vanderhoeven. I'll put it in the description
or the chat as well.
