In the most recent edition of 5 Geek Things for Friday, I mentioned that Evernote was one of the tools I was considering for plotting my novels.  The gist of my comments on it was that it was more frustrating than helpful in that regard.  Shortly after the post went live, the Northern Voice blogging conference commenced at UBC campus, and I was watching the comments stream in via twitter.  One of the talks that generated quite a bit of buzz was on Solutions for Coping with Social Media by Alexandra Samuel.  One of those solutions was using Evernote.  After reading her article (and her 2 previous articles that she links to in the post), I decided to jump back into the program to try to see if I could recapture my initial enthusiasm for it.

It struck me as I was playing with the interface and weeding notes out of some neglected notebooks, just how handy this program could be for gamers if you can have a laptop or an iPhone/iPod Touch at the table.  And I promptly set about revitalizing my RPG (Role Playing Game) notebook.  I’m currently playing in 4 different campaigns that are being run in several different systems, but it’s mostly the classic Dungeongs & Dragons.  Here are a few of the things that I’ve set up that will hopefully help me out at the table:

  1. Character Progression
    For a couple of the campaigns, I’ve got the future progression of my character planned out with regard to which feats, skills, powers, etc. they will be taking.  I had this all set up previously in Evernote, but since I originally planned it all out, Evernote went and added tables1.  As I was re-organizing my haphazardly spaced text into a properly formatted table.
  2. Character Notes
    Since I have a terribly short memory, I have a hard time remembering all the little details I come with about my character’s backstory and their goals and motivations.  After reading an article over at Gnome Stew on how to Cover Your Character Sheet I started creating one page character summaries about my characters.  Since I can’t draw character sketches and don’t have the time to find appropriate images online2 or appropriate figures/miniatures, I try to make the text & layout match the personality of the character.  I find it’s a great way to connect.  But, sometimes, with all the paper already at the table, it can get a little unwieldy.  But, with Evernote, I can have a note with the same information in it, and my iPod Touch takes up a lot less room.  I can also refer to that while I’m in the process of creating my cover sheet3
  3. Campaign Notes
    Depending on how evil forthcoming your Game Master is, you may, or may not need to keep notes about different clues that arise during your adventure.  Or, perhaps you run a character that likes to collect things and write it down somewhere.  Our group often likes to jot down hilariously appropriate in-character quotes that someone says at the table.  But, add to that my horribly messy writing, tendency to spill things, and (lately) my penchant for trying out different character sheet templates, and it’s easy to see how these little notes can become indecipherable or get lost entirely.  So, I can keep them digitally now.  The other benefit of this is that if you keep your character sheet at the host’s house, you still have access to the list of clues and information between sessions so you can still work on figuring out what to do between sessions.
  4. Rules
    Since some of our campaigns have adopted a few house rules, this is a great place for characters to keep track of the changes to the game mechanic that the campaign is using.  I also tend to get incredibly confused about the way areas of effect work in DnD 4th edition.  So now I have a note with the rule wording.  This way, I’m not going to be) interrupting people on the turn before mine, asking for the book or asking them how it works, when I’m trying to figure out which power to use and where to place it.4
  5. Images
    For one of the campaigns I’m in, the Game Master created some digital maps for us to look at and emailed them to us along with some other background information.  So, I clipped them in to Evernote.  We’ve got access to at least one of the maps at the game sessions, but the table is tiny and we have anywhere from four to six people around it, so space is at a premium.  This way, if I want to look at it between turns, it’s easy for me to flip open my iPod Touch and check it out, without causing two or three other people to have to twist, turn, move books, etc.  If you had an iPhone, you could also snap pictures of the battle map at the end of the night, hand drawn symbols, etc.

The nice thing is that since you can tag each note, I can put them all in one central notebook, and then just call up the relevant ones by searching for the tag of the campaign/character that they refer to.  I can see them whenever I have access to a computer with an internet connection.  The only potential downside is that I might get distracted by other iPod Touch apps while I check things during the game.  But, since that sometimes happens anyway, I don’t think it’ll be too big of a deal.

Got any other ideas on how to use Evernote for gamers?  As a player, what tools do you use to get organized for your campaigns?

  1. Yes, I’ll have to eat some crow about that, since my previous post said they didn’t have tables [↩]
  2. sort of the same way I don’t have time to find good pictures for my blog either [↩]
  3. since sometimes it can take a while for me to be inspired and/or have enough time for it [↩]
  4. Instead I can interrupt them about entirely different things :D [↩]

No related posts.