GM notes during session?
 

Just learning the ropes of RW now, migrating stuff from The Keep (by NBOS Software) into RW. I'm mostly happy, and one Exalted session under my belt now with notes in RW. The UI is a bit klunky and won't win any beauty awards, and having to run it under Parallels on OS X is annoying due to lack of OS X support.. but it does the job, and offers a lot more features than Keep.

Anyway, there is one basic thing I could use some help on: what's the recommended way to do session-related GM notes (during a session)?

On Keep, I'd start up a game log when we started playing, and I'd get a date and timestamped new page on which I could scribble quick notes on what was happening at the table.

Here, I can log a game session (start and end), but the associated text box doesn't seem to be something I can easily edit and update during the game session (also, it doesn't seem to support hyperlinking etc). So I'm a bit puzzled what the purpose of that text box is, in the first place... is it just for holding general "Game 8 of Campaign Y" title info?

So to do GM notes, I resorted to manually adding a new note (in the User Notes section), naming it with the current date and game date, and adding stuff there. However, this seems to be pretty cumbersome: I need to separately start/end a RW "game session", and then separately create and name a note, without any sort of link between these two. Ugh.

What am I missing here, or is this a piece of missing functionality? What I'd like to have happen is that when I start a new game session, RW automatically creates a new note linked to that session, which I can iteratively update during the game session, with full linking etc support. After the game, I'd like to be able to access this note via the game session history log.

The main purpose of sessions is to keep track of what you've revealed and/or concealed each time you play. (You can see this under Reveal History.) In theory this shows you and your players which places they've explored, people they've met, enemies they've fought, and so on in each game session.

If you want something more extensive to share with your players, you could try creating a new Topic after starting each session, taking notes in individual Snippets and choosing which ones to reveal. Then you'd have your normal complement of linking abilities and the revealed items would show in the History.

Well, it's not something I want to share with players, it's for my own during-session notes. On-the-fly generated NPC names, quick notes on who did what (to help me remember what happened later), stuff like that.

Ok, so it seem that this sort of automatic functionality doesn't exist. I'll just have to continue manually creating notes for this, each session.

For the future: having the "notes" field in the session tracking be a "proper" note/topic, and one I could easily update as the session goes along, would be very close to what I'm looking for. At the moment, I'm not sure you can edit that field after you start a session(?). Even if the main purpose of that session tracking function is to track reveals, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to add some editable notes to the session entry.

Maybe I'll add this as a feature request :)

No need IMHO as the feature is already there. User notes are not revealable and can be organized as you wish so you can easily find what you need.

Yes, but as I wrote: you need to add and name them manually, and there is no (system-level) linking between the game session entry and a User Note I create for notes about that session. This is cumbersome, and makes the game session tracking functionality less useful than it might be.

Now that I think about it: maybe the ability to link game sessions to Notes/Topics would be a general solution to this one. I can think of several cases where you might want to (formally) link a certain topic to a game session or sessions -- for example, the sessions which feature the NPC heavily. Having the "game session" be something that can be formed links/relationships to would be useful.

One enhancement we have planned is something called Contextual Notes. This would allow users to jot down notes directly from within the relevant topic or plot, though you would still need to create the note. The net effect is something much closer to sticky notes applied to a page in a book. These are normal notes with full linking. The only difference is that they are contextual.

So how this would potentially work at the table is you have the topic open for the dungeon that the PCs are exploring. The PCs do something in one room that will affect them later (maybe it wakes the dungeon guardian), so you create a note in the Dungeon topic to remind yourself for next session. Does that sound like something that would meet your needs?

Well, not exactly, but that does sound useful and nice, too. Thanks :)

Mostly here I'm trying to figure out an optimal workflow for myself both before a session and during it. Since in practice I find myself needing to jot down things during a session, and wanting to view all the notes pertaining to a session later, I think just a manually created User Note is closest to my needs for now.

In other words, I'd ideally like a contextual note (or notes), but with the context being the current running game session instead of a specific Topic. If game sessions became "first class" entities which could be linked to, this would be ideal -- but I understand that may be technically too difficult/not worth the bother at this point. The game session tracking seems to be (only) intended for reveal tracking, at this point in time. Maybe later it will be expanded.

Oh, and to be clear:

I'm very much enjoying Realm Works. It a bit rough around the edges, but I'm already finding it vastly useful. I'm currently using it to organize information about an upcoming (FFG) Star Wars game I intend to run, and the ability to jot down information about planets and races, with automatic hyperlinking, is helping my prepwork a lot. So good work, guys, keep it up :)

Just to add another "idea" is I use the "Home Page"/Main Page of the Realm for my DM notes. It hyperlinks automatically and it has a very convenient button to quickly open up the page from anywhere.

So I just don't reveal those DM snippets but I take notes for locations, NPCs reactions, or poisons/diseases that are still running.