DNAphil

This post was originally published a year ago, but at the behest of some of my fellow bloggers, This is the last in a series of three articles, that will run this week.  Enjoy.

Over the past two weeks, I have written about how I assemble my session notes. In the first segment, I talked about my writing cycle, where I mix imagination and productivity in order to produce my notes. Last week, I talked about the tools that I use in order to create my notes. This week, I want to discuss what goes into my session notes. Where the other two segments really focused on the productivity aspect of creating my notes, this segment is really about how my session notes help me to overcome my own shortcomings as a GM and to support my personal philosophy as a GM.

In the past I spent a lot of time tinkering with how I write my session notes. There are not a lot of articles about that subject. Most GMs whom I know, have evolved their own systems based on reading published modules and then applying parts of those structures to their own writing. I started by copying the structure of AD&D modules (for those of you younglings, that is D&D 1.0). Over time I experimented with different writing styles, templates, and formats, but never quite found what I was looking for. Along the way I learned some very important lessons at work in writing Business Requirements for software programs. So, I decided to put what I knew about business requirements to work for my gaming, specifically my session notes. I started to define what my real needs were from my session notes.

After some thought I came up with a short list of things that were true needs… things that I had to have in my notes to run my game effectively. That list of needs as well as how I addressed them is listed below…

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This post was originally published a year ago, but at the behest of some of my fellow bloggers, This is the second in a series of three articles, that will run this week.  Enjoy.

Last week I discussed my writing cycle, detailing how I organize my time and imagination to produce my session notes for an upcoming game. The cycle is an important aspect of how implementing the ideas of productivity can be used to create session notes. This week I wanted to discuss another area of productivity: the tools used to create the session notes. In this article I am going to outline the tools that I use when I am working on my session notes. Each tool has a specific use and an optimal way to be used. Through trial and error I have refined my list of tools down to this set. I find they are, for me, the most efficient tools to get the job done, and they fit seamlessly into my writing cycle.

Here are the tools….

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This post was originally published a year ago, but at the behest of some of my fellow bloggers, I am bringing this post, and the two that followed it back over the course of this week.  Enjoy.

One of the core elements of Encoded Designs is the marriage of Productivity and Imagination. Writing session notes is one of the best examples of the blending of those elements. I have over the years tinkered with a lot of different ways to write my session notes. At first I only explored different media to on which to produce my notes such as journals, sketch books, word processing, wikis, etc. But about a year an a half ago, I started to apply some principles from my other passion, productivity, to the process to see if I could not come up with a better process for getting my notes written…..

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