A new system to handle DM prep from one spot

I’ll admit it: I’m fairly new to the world of dungeon mastering. I’ve run a handful of one-shots and I’m currently running a full campaign.

Truly I’ve been having a blast. There’s something really magical about tabletop RPGs that I’ve never grasped until this year.

But my systems have left something to be desired. It’s all fun and games until I have to look something up or prep for sessions.

I’ve tried every system.

One of my “toxic traits” is that when I get into a hobby I spend way too much time on the adjacent pieces of it. I can’t just play D&D, I also have to get a good system in place and research how other DMs handle worldbuilding…and of course I have to worldbuild!

It’s been an obnoxious journey to be honest. I started by reading article after article after post after website, trying to figure out how other people do it.

Trying to adapt someone else’s system to your own way of thinking is less than simple, however.

• Early recommendations said to use something like Notion to manage everything, but I find Notion to be one of the worst user-facing interfaces I’ve ever used. That died out quickly.
• Some folks were using several apps and websites to manage things. I started doing this and quickly found it slowed down sessions in a very avoidable way.
• I also tried putting together an Obsidian vault, which was the closest to what I wanted, but I still had to jump around between tons of stuff. Not ideal.

Some people thrive with physical notebooks and keeping the various handbooks nearby, and while I see value there, it’s not for me.

I also have to admit we live in a moment where time is incredibly valuable and the less time I have to spend digging around the Dungeon Masters’ Guide, the more I can spend playing with my party.

Solving my own problems

By trade I’m a web engineer and have been building websites and interfaces for something over 15 years at this point. That means if I see a problem that isn’t immediately solvable with an existing system, my first thought is always, “Can I just build it?”

Why do anything simply, after all?

I’ll write more about the stack later, but genuinely the first thing I started doing was just trying to figure out a better initiative tracker and note taker where I could just pop everything I needed into one spot and carry on.

Everything was stored locally, a very bare bones solution, but from day one there was something spectacular about, “Ugh I wish it did X or Y…ok I’ll just figure out how to add that”.

At the time of writing it’s nowhere near as robust as I’d like it to be, but it’s been incredibly helpful in my own sessions for exactly the sort of system I’d like to have.

I’m taking the best parts of other systems I’ve used, chucking out the things that didn’t help, and putting this system together in RollEncounter.

Excited to share more of this journey as we go!

Join the waitlsit

If you’re a DM dissatisfied with the ways other tools have tried to solve the system of game prep and running a session, I’d love to hear from you.

There’s a beta waitlist currently open, join up and let me know how I can make this system work for you!