I play DnD with my wife and daughter at home, so I don’t have an immediate need for this. At the same time, there are loads of people who find themselves playing remotely, so this is a compelling option.
Other tools
Even though we play in person, I’ve been using a number of digital tools to help manage our games.
DnD Beyond
I’ve been using DnD Beyond quite a bit lately. I’m trying out the paid, Master Tier subscription to manage our campaign. The subscription enables me to create encounters based on the characters’ levels (that translates into somewhat more accurate difficulty estimates).
I also like that I can share the digital books that I’ve purchased.
The Combat Tracker is terrific, and helps managing initiative, and monster damage a lot easier. This works hand-in-hand with the Encounter Builder. I’ve realised that creating encounters from within the campaign manager/page allows me to create campaign-specific encounters.
The DnD Beyond character sheets are also terrific. I only use the online version for my character, and my wife has switched over to that version for the most part, too.
The new digital dice are really nice too. I’m looking forward to trying those out too (although I think I prefer physical dice on the whole).
Notion
Notion has been really useful for my campaign notes, and tracking the party’s progress through a campaign. I add maps, tables to track overall encounters, XP awards, and even individual encounters (there’s some overlap here with the DnD Beyond Combat Tracker).
Options like inline tables, internal links, and other Notion blocks are proving to be really helpful, although I’d like to build page templates that I can start a new adventure with.
There are a number of terrific digital tools available to us. They add to in-person games too, and can really enhance online game play if you can’t meet up to play your games.
I found myself exploring Notion as an Evernote alernative again, yesterday. I looked at it briefly about a year ago, and it didn’t seem like something that was worth switching to at the time. After all, I’ve been using Evernote for years, and given how much I was using Evernote, I wasn’t sure that investing in a new service was worth it.
My prompt to explore Notion originated in my thoughts about my Dungeons and Dragons adventure notes, and my curiosity about it as a possible replacement for my handwritten notes (handwritten notes leave me feeling a little twitchy because there aren’t any backups).
An example of my adventure notes
I found a couple great discussions online about the tools that other DMs use for their adventures. Popular options include OneNote, Evernote, a number of services designed for role-playing games, and Google Drive.
I found a couple discussions about Notion as an option, too. One reddit user posted an intriguing Notion page template that they use for their adventure notes.
What I like about Notion
There’s a lot to like about Notion. It uses blocks, much like the WordPress Editor, to insert different types of content into your pages. Evernote supports some options, but my inability to add media from other sources (or even, in some cases, directly), feels somewhat limiting when I want to create richer notes.
For example, my options for adding content in the Evernote Web editor (probably on the leading edge of where the editor is going) look like this:
By contrast, I can embed a YouTube video in Notion much like I can do this in WordPress:
I keep mentioning the WordPress editor. The reason for the comparisons is that I really like using the block editor to add different types of content to my posts and pages. It’s a remarkably flexible editor that gives anyone the ability to create some really interesting, and complex layouts, pretty easily.
Some of the other Notion features that I enjoy, and that I’d love to see in Evernote (or any similar service I use) include –
Support for Markdown;
The ability to link to individual blocks on a page;
The option to create a wide variety of page types, including simpler databases that I could refer back to later in other pages; and
Frankly, Notion is cheaper than Evernote (almost $20 a year cheaper relative to the Evernote Premium plan that I’m on).
I also like how easy it is to import my notebooks from Evernote into Notion. I ran a test import of my DnD notebook, and it generated a really handy index page with links to the individual “notes” (or sub-pages):
Room for improvement
All that said, moving to Notion isn’t an easy decision. For one thing, Notion lacks the powerful search features that Evernote has. Evernote will not only search your notes’ text, it also does OCR-based searches on your note attachments.
I also use the Evernote add-on for Gmail to quickly archive emails that I want to refer to down the line. I don’t see a similar option for Notion, or even an email address that I can forward emails to.
A small issue that I noticed is that I also can’t change the storage location for Notion on my Android device. I made the mistake of buying a phone with 32GB of storage, so space on the device is at a premium.
Not being able to move the app’s storage to the SD card on the phone is a challenge.
Can Notion replace Evernote (for me)?
Currently, I’m not sure. I still want to spend more time experimenting with Notion, and may use it to create my next DnD adventure as a sort of “real life” test.
The search feature limitation is, well, a limitation. I add PDFs to my notes because I want to reference them later. Many of them are already searchable, so not being able to tap into the text that’s there already isn’t ideal.
For now, though, I like what I see, and it’s certainly worth exploring further. If the search feature is updated to at least include PDFs with searchable text, Notion starts to become a pretty compelling alternative to Evernote.
My Evernote Premium subscription is up for renewal in June, so I have a little time to decide whether to continue.
When you think about the types of people who play the game, you probably don’t think of jocks playing Dungeons and Dragons, but they do.
The stereotypical DnD player is probably a pimply teenager in their basement, or something, but this doesn’t give you an accurate picture of who is playing the game these days at all.
I’ve started getting back into Dungeons and Dragons in the last few weeks, and I really like how the game has evolved, and is very much going strong.
The people who are championing the game are diverse, and passionate about it.
I’ve just started watching some streamed DnD games, and really enjoyed this streamed game featuring Jocks Machina from June 2018:
There’s a great background interview for this game here, too:
I love this paradigm shift where people like these burly actors and sports professionals, who you wouldn’t expected to be into DnD, are super passionate about it.
