Roam Research on Nicole van der Hoeven

Why I Chose Obsidian Over Roam Research (as a Roam investor)

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 10:03:41 +0100

I was a Roam Research power user, a Believer, and investor before I discovered Obsidian. Here’s why I still ended up choosing Obsidian over Roam as my personal knowledge management tool of choice. My goal with this video is to share with you my reasons for making the choice that I did, not to judge you or anyone else who disagrees. In the end, we all have to decide for ourselves what tool fits best in our lives.

How I use Obsidian for D&D - Player's Edition

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 17:46:51 +0200

I’ve previously written about how I use Obsidian for work, and I’ve also talked about how I use Roam Research for D&D. Shortly after the latter post, however, I moved to Obsidian. That was six months ago, so I thought it was time for an update.

Before the game

World

My World page is the main jumping-off point for all my notes for a specific campaign, and each campaign gets one. It contains:

The main locations in the world
The player characters, and links to their individual pages with information about what my character knows or thinks of them
A link to Open Loops (Quests and Questions and Agenda, as discussed below)
The list of all the sessions I’ve played for the campaign
Campaign-specific house rules that the DM has introduced

Quests and Questions

I like to play high-intelligence characters, so I like to keep track of unanswered questions and other adventure hooks my DM has dropped that the party hasn’t quite gotten around to resolving yet. Some of them are critical quest or story arcs, and others are random tidbits of information that NPCs have mentioned. I organize them by location, and then by quest, so that it’s easy to follow a thread depending on where the party is or how much downtime we have. Here’s an example of that page:

Agenda

While the Quests and Questions page records unfinished business that my character is actively thinking about but may not quite know how to explore yet, my Agenda page is where I write down specific tasks. I loosely follow the Getting Things Done methodology and divide this page into Next Actions and Waiting For. I group tasks by person and/or by location.

I use the Obsidian Completed Area plugin so that hitting a CTRL + ENTER on a task automatically checks it and then moves that task to a separate Completed section at the bottom of the note. This helps me keep the agenda clean and relevant.

During a game

Workspace

One of the best parts about Obsidian is that it allows me to save and load custom workspaces. This is useful because I use Obsidian for work as well as play, so I can set up the two workspaces differently. I also DM one campaign and play in another, and I have a workspace for each of them because I need different information available to me. The workspace features lets me customize my dashboard. Here’s what my workspace looks like for the 4e game that I play in:

At the beginning of a game, I’ll create a new session page in the last pane, enter into it, and then stay in the workspace for the rest of the game. I have my character’s stats sheet handy (which I need to do manually since I haven’t found a D&D Beyond-like service for 4e) and all the powers and abilities I need to refer to.

Session template

I love Obsidian templates! I use templates for things like inserting an HP tracker with all my party’s names, their max HP, healing surges (4e); a defense table to keep track of a creature’s defenses (again, 4e); and campaign-specific session log formats.

At the beginning of the game, I’ll create a new page in the Session List, click into it, and insert a session log template (I have this hotkeyed to CMD+;). Here’s what a fresh one looks like, in Edit mode:

I add metadata to every session so that I can query it later using the excellent Obsidian Dataview plugin, though I do this more often for the campaign I DM rather than the one I play in.

We usually do a recap at the beginning of the game, so I jump into the Recap of the last session section and embed the summary from the previous session using ![](/assets/86_20210717 Day 16 Hunting the Ice Phase Spider#^summary), which pulls in the section marked with ^summary from the last session. That embeds just that portion of the last session in the current session, like this:

This helps me get back up to speed quickly instead of doing the usual “Where were we again?” that takes up time.

HP table

My character is a multiclassed healer, so it’s important for me to know who needs heals or other buffs. I keep track of this separately, and it helps out my DM as well because it’s easy to miss something in the excitement of a battle. I do include the HP table in my workspace, in Preview mode, but here’s what it looks like in Edit mode:

Tables in Markdown can be a pain, but the Advanced Tables plugin goes a long way towards making this easier by adding some nice features like tabbing to the next cell, adding commands for inserting and deleting a column or row, and just automatically formatting a table so that it’s not a jumble of lines. I also heavily use this plugin for my characters stats and skills, both of which I keep in tables.

Keeping track of fights

When a fight breaks out, I insert an intiative template, which is just a list of all the characters in the party:

Initiative!
- Ka'ira
- Maestro
- Xio
- Eraithe
- Keren

This makes it easier to add the initiative value rolled, as well as that of any other baddies we’re fighting. I use the Outliner plugin to be able to easily move people on the list up or down as needed without having to copy or paste. I have the shortcuts set to CMD+SHIFT+UP and CMD+SHIFT+DOWN so I don’t even need to use my mouse.

I also have a template for Defenses. D&D 4th Edition has four different kinds of defenses, and since my character’s powers target a few of them, I keep track of the defenses of each monster. Here’s what that template looks like, in Edit mode:

| Defense | Value |
| --------------------- | ----- |
| [[Reflex Defense]] | |
| [[Fortitude Defense]] | |
| [[Will Defense]] | |
| [[Armor Class]] | |

You’ll notice that I also link to the pages I have for each defense type, in case I need to remind myself which stat a defense is comprised of.

Character powers

Like many, I have migrated from playing games on a literal tabletop to doing it virtually. These days, I play 100% online, using a bunch of different tools. For the most part, though, I still prefer to roll actual dice. There’s just something satisfying about the feel of a die in my hand. Since I switched to Obsidian, though, I have looked into virtual dice. On the off chance I don’t have any dice (ha) or all my dice have betrayed me (much more likely), I use the Dice Roller plugin. It turns

`dice: 1d20+7`

into a random die roll. Here it is when incorporated into my character’s list of powers:

Sometimes, when I’m feeling superstitious about my dice, I’ll switch to using this dice roller “just to be safe”. It has other cool features too, which I’ll cover more in detail in the Dungeon Master’s edition of this article.

Search, linked, unlinked mentions

Frequently, something comes up in a game that I’m sure we’ve heard of before, but I can’t quite remember where or when. Actually, sometimes something comes up that I’m quite sure we’ve never heard of before, but it turns out we have. Luckily, Obsidian is quick to tell me that using the linked/unlinked mentions and the search features.

Here are the mentions in my note for the word “Netheril”:

Unlinked mentions show up too, in case the word came up somewhere and I didn’t think to specifically create a page on it.

On monster pages, mentions remind me when we fought them last, and any tips for fighting them. It can be handy when one of the other players has forgotten something that happened to them, too. If I want to remember how Ka’ira got her festering wound, I can type it into the Obsidian search bar:

and be able to confidently say that Ka’ira got her last festering wound on session 68, in the Blue Crystal Fortress that we now know to be the Twisted Fane, while fighting aberrations.

After a game

I think I might use Obsidian even more between games than during the game, because after the game is when I process everything my character learned.

Session summary

Immediately after the game is when I create a short session summary. I like to do this when the session is still fresh in my mind. Then, I add ^summary at the end of the paragraph to identify it and to be able to pull it into the next session’s recap. Block references and block embeds are some of my most frequently used Obsidian features.

Creating new pages

I then create new pages for any people, places, magical items, or events that we encountered. I like to use a standard frontmatter:

---
type:
location: [Neverwinter]
world: "Forgotten Realms"
campaign: "Order of the Wandering Mind"
date: 2021-06-23
---

Here’s an example of the page for an NPC:

If my DM has given us character art, I include it in the page.

And here’s an example of a page for a location:

For this page, I used a plugin called Obsidian Leaflet, which lets me add maps to my notes! In this case, my DM gave us this map of the structure as a guide, but during combats we didn’t use a map. To keep myself oriented between games, I added red pawprint pins where we had spotted or fought monsters, green thumbtacks to mark where we’d ended sessions, and green markers where we had spotted allies. I also like to add links to monsters or sessions on the pins/markers so that I can jump to those pages quickly if I need to.

History

To keep historical events straight in my head, especially since we tend to discover them out of sequence, I use the Obsidian Timelines plugin, which lets me create pages like this:

by using this code in the timeline page:

```timeline
fr
\```

(without the backtick) and this for every event that I want to include:

---
date: [2021-06-23]
tags: [timeline, fr]
---
<span
 class='ob-timelines'
 data-date='1443-00'
 data-title='Xionerys is born'
 data-class='orange'
 data-img = 'assets/xionerys.jpg'
 data-type='range'
 data-end='1443-00'>
 Xionerys is born in Calimshan.
</span>

Using this method, I’ve been able to call out discrepancies in what two different NPCs told us and figure out that one was lying– or at least misinformed.

Replace all

When I inevitably get a fantasy name wrong, having pages as flat .md files is great because I can do a find and replace on ALL mentions of a certain NPC name/place I’ve misspelled (those fantasy names!). I do this with my usual code/text editor, VSCode, just because I usually already have it up, but you can do it using terminal commands. If it’s just the name of a page, updating the spelling in Obsidian changes it everywhere else it’s linked to as well, which is useful.

Updating open loops

To finish processing the last session, I update Open Loops: I add new points or update existing points in Quests and Questions, and then add tasks to Agenda that I want to do in the next session. I find that it’s best to do it after a game because it’s a week, sometimes more, between games and there’s a high likelihood I’ll have forgotten what I want to do by then!

Publish

I also publish my D&D notes, just for transparency. My DM has joked that he looks in there sometimes when he’s forgotten something. Even if he doesn’t, I enjoy having my notes so easily accessible. I often navigate there myself when I have a spare moment, remembering old sessions and thinking about some loose threads. If you’re interested, here they are! Just be warned that the plugins won’t work in the web version, so sometimes you’ll come across bits of code that didn’t render. I also migrated these notes from Roam Research, and haven’t gone back and updated all the older notes.

Conclusion

Since I’ve switched to Obsidian, it’s been an indispensable part of my workflow for D&D. Without it, I’d be just another murder hobo with no notes. And no DM wants that!

Downloading files uploaded to Roam Research for use with Obsidian

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:27:59 +0200

If you’ve recently transitioned from Roam Research to Obsidian, you might run into a few issues, even after you’ve run the “Markdown format importer” core plugin. One of the most annoying ones that I ran into was that files uploaded to Roam (images, pdfs, etc.) are automatically uploaded to Google Firebase.

Roam assets are linked to in the Markdown files like this:

![](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/firescript-471a1.appspot.com/o/imgs%2Fapp%2FMyNotes%2FxRFXx7l-ZK.png?alt=media&token=1e03b680-5472-33dc-9b06-a127301af37f)

Now, since Roam relies on security by obscurity on this front, the links to your assets will still be accessible in your Obsidian vault, and they’ll still render correctly. However, I still think it’s worth downloading the files for three reasons:

If you don’t intend to use Roam anymore and cancel your subscription, they will likely delete those assets at some point, leaving you with a lot of broken links in Obsidian.
Part of Obsidian’s appeal is that you own your assets. Not so if they’re on someone else’s server.
You can’t access Firebase files without an internet connection.

So, instead, you want to download the contents of that link and replace it in your notes with something like this:

![](assets/newfile.png)

That way, you’ll have full control over all your assets, and you won’t be dependent on those assets being stored on Firebase by Roam.

To fix this, I wrote a Python script that will:

Go through every file and every folder within a specified root vault directory
Look for links to Google Firebase
Download all assets from Firebase to a local folder (/assets by default), using the timestamp and index number as a filename
Replace the Firebase links in your vault with links to the newly downloaded files, accounting for PDFs, whose links are formatted differently in Roam as {{ pdf: ... }}

Before you run this script, I highly recommend backing up your vault or trying this out on a dummy vault.

After downloading and saving the script, run python3 downloadfirebase.py on your terminal.

This worked really well for me, and I can breathe a little more easily now that my vault is self-contained.

Readwise to Obsidian

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 09:55:36 +0100

August 10th, 2021: Readwise just released their own Obsidian plugin, Readwise Official, which is available now! I now recommend this method over the one outlined in this article.

I’m about 9 months into heavily using Roam Research as my primary note-taking, task management, capture-everything system, and for the most part, that’s gone very well. Obsidian is another excellent personal knowledge management (PKM) system, though, and I’ve been curious about it for almost as long as I’ve been using Roam. I’ve had it installed for a while, but I never really seriously attempted to make the switch. Until now. I’ve decided to use Obsidian as my primary PKM and zettelkasten for the next month, to see if it’s something I can switch to.

Why I’m considering switching from Roam to Obsidian is another post, probably one I’ll write at the end of this experiment, when my thoughts and opinions are more solidified. For now, I want to address one of the things I struggled with when switching over: Readwise integration.

Readwise is an app that’s all about importing notes and highlights you’ve made from all over the internet and exporting them all into a single format. Readwise supports far more import sources than I use, but here are the ones I’ve got hooked up to it:

Instapaper (for highlights and notes on online articles)
Amazon Kindle (for highlights on ebooks)
Twitter (for interesting tweets)
(Readwise) Web highlighter (for straight highlights off any webpage)
Airr (for quotes and notes from audio podcasts)

Readwise collates my activity in all of these input sources and automatically sends them to my Roam Research account. Here’s what that looks like when it gets pulled into my Daily Note:

Readwise also pulls metadata into Roam, depending on the source. Here’s what the page for the book “Ready Player Two” looks like in Roam:

Readwise integration is an essential feature for me in any PKM, because I can take notes wherever I’m consuming my content and just have it automagically appear in my notes, tagged and ready for processing. So it’s absolutely something I need to have in my Obsidian workflow.

That’s where things get tricky, because Readwise doesn’t have an Obsidian integration.

Source: Readwise Exports

The closest thing is the Markdown export, but that’s not automatic. You can manually trigger an export, and then copy those exports over into your Obsidian vault, and thne make sure they’re in the right format with the right tags. I knew I was never going to do that, so I found a way to automate it.

readwise2directory

I discovered that Readwise has an API, and briefly thought about building my own integration. Happily, I found this Python project on GitHub by nicrivard, who had already done that! Why rebuild the wheel? His solution already did what I needed:

It connects to Readwise via your Readwise access token
Checks for new highlights or updated ones
Exports the new/updated highlights to a local folder of your choosing (presumably your Obsidian vault)

It even pulls in highlight tags from Readwise, if you’ve created any (which I haven’t).

I forked the project here to add just a few minor touches:

Changed date format of imported notes
Added a section to output the import date to a comment block (an Obsidian Insider build feature) rather than YAML frontmatter, so that the date would actually be linked and backlinked.
Customized tags and filename for my use
Sort imports into folders within my Obsidian vault depending on source (Article/, Tweet/, and so on).

This works out pretty well. Here’s an example of an import from the podcast app Airr into Obsidian, in Edit mode.

It’s placed within my Podcast folder inside my value, is tagged appropriately, and contains links to the source. Switching to Preview mode shows an imported cover photo and even a playable recorder for the part of the podcast that I snipped on Airr:

So that works out well, except for one thing: firing off the script that does all this is still manual.

Scheduling the script

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to schedule a Python script to run at certain intervals. I’m on macOS, so I used a built-in utility called cron.

Give cron full system access

Cron needs to have the right permissions to run scripts on my behalf, so I had to go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Full Disk Access on my laptop and add /usr/bin/cron to the “allowed” list.

Open crontab

Then, from my terminal, I ran the command env EDITOR=nano crontab -e to open up the list of cronjobs I had currently.

Set a schedule

I added a line to crontab for the schedule I wanted to create. This line has to be in the format

* * * * * command

where the five asterisks correspond to:

minute
hour
day of the month
month
day of the week

In my case, I wanted it to run every hour, so here’s what my schedule looks like:


0 * * * * cd /Users/nic/git/readwise2directory/ && /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/bin/python3 /Users/nic/git/readwise2directory/readwise-GET.py >> /Users/nic/git/readwise2directory/readwiseGET.log

Python issues

I had some trouble getting cron to work until I realized it was because I had multiple versions of Python installed. I ran a which python3 to find the path to the version I wanted to use and added that path to the command. I also had to cd to the project directory, for some reason.

While I was troubleshooting, I found it really useful to output to a log so I could see what had gone wrong.

Once I added the schedule as in the example above, though, it worked a treat!

Conclusion

This solution did require some setup at the beginning, but doesn’t need any maintenance once it’s going. I’m pretty happy with it as it means I can keep taking notes on various places from anywhere, and it’ll all be waiting for me in my Obsidian vault whenever I’m ready to sit down and process them into my system. Thanks to nicrivard for the repo that made it possible!

Note: This post contains an affiliate link for Readwise. Clicking on that link will give you a two-month trial of Readwise, double the usual amount, and they give me a small percentage if you sign up for a plan. Check out My Ethics Statement to see my standards for promotions.

Taking Notes on a Video: my YiNote to Roam Research Workflow

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 22:00:34 +0100

Listen to the audio version of this blog post here:

I was working on an article yesterday comparing the performance of k6 with JMeter, and I had a chat to Mihail, one of the devs of k6. He mentioned that a large part of why k6 is so performant compared to other tools (particularly Java-based ones) is that it’s written in Go. He talked a bit about Goroutines, and when I told him I was a Go noob, he recommended this very excellent video by Kavya Joshi, which explains a bit more about the Go Scheduler and how it manages to achieve performance for Go apps that exceeds the typical 1 Virtual User: 1 kernel thread paradigm that many load testing tools (like JMeter) use.

Anyway, I got around to watching the video today, and because it was a video I knew I’d learn from, I took notes - and ended up improving part of the workflow (more on that later). Other people have commented on my notes before, so I thought I’d share how I process videos into my personal wiki, currently held in Roam Research.

Install YiNote Chrome extension

I use a free app called YiNote to take video notes in particular. I use their Chrome extension.

Take Notes

I was pretty dubious about using an app just to take notes for video specifically, but there were a few things that sold me:

When you click on the text field to take notes in the extension, YiNote automatically pauses the video so that you can type without missing what’s being said.
YiNote also automatically saves the timestamps associated with notes you create, so that you can click on it afterwards to jump to the specific section that you wrote a note on.
YiNote has an export to Markdown option - great compatibility with Roam or Obsidian
You can also export your notes to a PDF, which is great for sharing. It saves screenshots of the presentation and puts your notes next to the relevant screenshot.

Here’s what it looks like while taking notes:

Export YiNote notes

After watching the video, I click the Settings wheel from the Chrome extension panel.

I click the Export as Markdown button.

That lets me save a .md file to my local drive. I always save YiNote files in the same folder as the script below.

Run reformatter script

This is the part that I tweaked today. YiNote’s exported Markdown file is formatted in a way that doesn’t really play well with Roam. Here’s what it looks like, fresh from YiNote:

<!-- Generated by <a href="https://www.yinote.co/#installation">YiNote</a> -->

<!-- # [GopherCon 2018: Kavya Joshi - The Scheduler Saga](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHRO5WQGh0k) -->

<!-- ## [1:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHRO5WQGh0k&t=79) -->

The scheduler is what makes sure the Goroutines run concurrently.

<!-- ## [1:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHRO5WQGh0k&t=89) -->

All the information is there, but importing that to Roam, with the comments, isn’t really useful. I want to see those timestamps as clickable links, and I want my notes to be nested underneath the corresponding timestamp so I know what belongs where.

So I dusted off my Python skills tonight and wrote up this little script to do just that. Warning: I am not a developer; I just occasionally code. So I’m sure that this isn’t the most concise way to do it (contact me and let me know how it could have been better if you have any ideas). But it’s functional. And, in the spirit of learning in public, here it is:

The script results in an output file that is better formatted for Roam.

Import resulting file to Roam

On Roam, I hit Options > Import Files, select the output file, hit OK, and that creates a new page in a way better format than the one directly from YiNote. After adding the date, author, and “Recommended By” fields, this is what it looks like in Roam:

That’s it!

I don’t do this for every video I watch, but I find this process useful for more technical videos that I really want to learn from. It’s really important to me to get all my notes from disparate sources into Roam, so that they then get processed like any other note into my Zettelkasten - but that’s a process for another day.

How I use Roam Research for D&D: Session Notes

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 20:13:13 +0100

In case you thought this site was all about performance and load testing, surprise! It’s not.

If you’ve talked to me personally for longer than ten minutes in the last year, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve mentioned Roam Research, or the note-taking and learning methodology called Zettelkasten. Sorrynotsorry. I’ve been obsessed since I discovered it.

To say Roam Research is a note-taking device is like saying Bitcoin is currency: yes, it IS that, but also so much more. To me, it’s my second brain. It’s a record of what I know and what I want to know, and sometimes even things I don’t know yet. The real reason that Roam and the Zettelkasten idea resonated with me so much is that I can use it a lot for my work. But I’ve discovered another use case that Roam is perfect for: Dungeons & Dragons.

This became longer than I thought it would be, so I’ll just talk about how I handle Session Notes in particular.

Starting a new session

Everything starts with sitting down to play D&D. I write a log of events and information that comes out while I’m playing. Here’s what a new session log looks like:

I preface pages in this campaign with D&D/ to make it a separate namespace. A namespace is like a folder, and I use it mainly because I have two D&D campaigns, both of which would have the page Campaign, Characters, Locations, etc, even though the two campaigns are on different worlds. To keep them separate, and to keep from getting mixed up (Was Gloomtoes an NPC in this campaign or that one?) I use different namespaces for each campaign.

I add the real-world date in the page name, and then an in-game date reference. The in-game date reference is useful for keeping track of time since I might go a couple weeks (okay, maybe one week; let’s not get too crazy) without playing this campaign, but no time in the in-game world has elapsed. Then, I end the page name with a descriptive title, which I always end up changing after the session. Sometimes I’ll title a page Exploring Castle Never, but then we end up getting carried away in another part of the city instead. That’s okay - when I change a page name, Roam then updates all references to that page that I’ve made from other pages.

I don’t type all this out manually - I use a TextExpander template so that to start a new session, all I have to do is create a page in Roam, type ;s.dnd and that is automatically replaced with prompts for a few fields.

Date: This is the real-world date of when I played this particular session.
Tags: When I first create session notes, this is prepopulated with #TVZ, which stands for To Verzettelen. It’s just my personal way of marking a note as one that needs to be processed.
Location: Here I note down the in-game places that my character visited this session. Usually I’ll just put city names, but I sometimes also split locations up into districts within a city or rooms within a dungeon.
Characters: I’ve found it helpful to keep track of which characters (players and NPCs) I’ve come across in this session.
Session Summary: This is a section I leave blank when the session is initially created.

Filling in the session log

The rest of the page, after Session Summary, is where I’ll spend most of the time writing. I just write whatever comes to mind and whatever I have time to write, in bullet form. I don’t worry about formatting or grammar or linking to other pages. I just type all my thoughts out in plain text.

HP

I like to play healers, which means I care a lot about how everyone in the party is doing so that I can figure out who best needs healing. {{[[table]]}} in Roam lets me create a custom table, and I have a ;hp snippet in TextExpander that recreates this table, with all the names of the people currently in my party, so that I just worry about filling in the values. Sometimes I still get it wrong, or miss a bit of damage that the DM calls out, but it’s enough to give me an idea of who needs heals.

I also write down initiative orders, the defenses/vulnerabilities/immunities of monsters we face, descriptions of NPCs we meet, suspicions or questions I might have… basically anything and everything that comes to mind. Session time is pretty much a brain dump, with no formatting.

Equipment

If I acquire a new item during a session, I’ll tag that line with #[[D&D/Carrying]]. This lets me stay on the Session Notes page while still maintaining an up-to-date record of what I’m carrying.

A tag in Roam is the same as a page, so when I click on that link, it takes me to the D&D/Carrying page, which conveniently also shows me all the references to that page from other pages.

Roam shows me not just the page, but the exact block where I made the reference to D&D/Carrying, so it’s easy to see at a glance what I have and where I got it.

Next Actions and Waiting For

I use David Allen’s GTD methodology in D&D too. When I want to remember to do something later, I tag it with #[[D&D/Agenda]] and #[[Next Actions]] or #[[Waiting For]]. This presents me with the same opportunities as D&D/Carrying, where I can see references to those pages later as well.

Processing the session

Sometime after the session, I’ll go and fill in the metadata from my template, including the session summary, which is just a paragraph or two describing what happened in the session at a high level. This is mainly to jog my memory in the next session, when I’ve already forgotten what we did in the previous one.

Here’s what it looks like, all filled in:

Adding links and fleshing out pages

I then go back through the notes themselves and add turn any people, places, or interesting objects that I mention into links. In Roam, that’s a matter of highlighting them and hitting [[. Then, I click on the page I’ve just created and try to add information that I’ve learned. This isn’t strictly necessary, since all mentions of that page will show up as a linked reference, but it’s an opportunity to consolidate my information on that subject and see how it fits into what else I’ve written there.

Here’s a page for an NPC:

Having these links means that when an NPC says “I’m from Leilon”, I can type Leilon into Roam:

… and say, “Oh, Leilon. I heard you had a dragon problem there recently. Did your family get out okay?” Boom! Instant advantage on a Diplomacy check.

Sometimes we’re in a dungeon with many rooms, and this is the point where I draw a quick map on my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil using Notability, and then I upload it right from my iPad to Roam.

This map is in my page for Castle Never:

The little blue “8” on the upper left of the map is versions. Information rarely comes all at once in D&D; it usually comes in trickles. As I learned more about the castle, I revised the map and added a new version to it, so that I can still see previous versions and what I thought the map was like when we first explored it.

At this stage, I also add any tags I forgot to add during the session.

Reviewing quests and questions

After I go through the session notes, I go to the page called D&D/Quests and Questions, where I keep a running list of all the open quest hooks and any unanswered questions I might have.

Not everything on this page is meant to be resolved, but I find it comforting to track everything anyway, in case I happen to find myself in a city with nothing in particular to do. I mark these with a checkbox ({{[[TODO]]}}) in Roam) and tick the box when one is resolved. Roam lets me filter out the resolved quests so I only see things that are outstanding.

This is where I get the most value out of taking notes. It’s at this point where I’ll add our progress towards quests, make connections between two seemingly disconnected quests, and situate what I’ve just learned in the session within the broader context of the world and the campaign. I also review and update items on the Next Actions and Waiting For.

This is the part that takes the longest, but it’s also what most prepares me for when I get to the table again next week.

Tying it all together

I use a D&D/Campaign page as my landing page for this campaign. It includes D&D/Quests and Questions as well as a list of all sessions to date, so that I always know what happened and when.

Why do I take notes for a game?

You might be wondering why I go to so much trouble. Why do I take complicated notes about something I do “just” for fun?

Taking notes helps me offload this all safely from my brain.
I take my fun as seriously as I take my work.