That’s true! The point I was trying to make was simply that players could also look left and right at the other members of their party when making their characters so that the entire group becomes more effective, rather than just optimizing on isolation. I remember treantmonk mentioning a story of a group of optimized characters facing a mindflayer. None of them had int save proficiency so one mindblast just rekt them.

Thank you so much!

Ouch! I feel for you. That must have been a very bad experience.

Thank you so much for your comments, @Imperor and @[email protected]! Might I ask how you do your set up?

I used to (and still do) keep a relatively flat onenote notebook for my session notes and stuff. When it comes time to run a session, my overhead work is simply to copy-paste certain sections into cards I put into trello i.e. not much time at all.

The bigger effort I can acknowledge would be maybe if you were running an adventure module, and you were going analog i.e. with physical sticky notes. However, these books most of the time tell you to read through them before running them, right? In the process, I used to make my own notes to summarize things for me, or do the highlighting and all that. If instead of the usual flat pages, I simply wrote sticky notes during that prep period, the overhead should not be too much.

It would be so cool if you would also place your comments on the video. I check the youtube comments more often and also get notified when there are new ones, so I could be much more responsive there. It also really helps me out!

Thank you so much for your question! I’ve used this system myself for a while, most recently this past weekend, so it works well for me. Let’s talk about two different levels: Session and Campaign.

For session prep, I make cards similar to the ones I showed on the video. Anything that makes logical sense to chunk, I create a card for it. They are likely encounters that will play out, locations that the PCs would be exploring, or info drops or reveals I want to provide. So if my WIP limit is 3, my players are exploring a cave (one card for the cave), they found an NPC they are interrogating (one card for info drop), I know I could possibly accommodate one scene split, say if a party member chooses to move to a different location (another card for that). But if more ideas come out all at once, it triggers me to finish a situation/card first, say the lore drop, so I can pull a new card.

For campaign planning, this is where the plot points would go. I have user stories for active quests. If my WIP limit is 3, then I don’t start new story lines until I bring an existing one to a satisfying stopping point.

If possible, would you mind commenting on the video too? It really helps out a lot for fledgeling channels like mine.

Thank you again for offering your perspective.

I merely want to share techniques that are likely to be helpful if you want to foster good relationships with your table while also being able to live your best tactician life. It just so happens that these things I’m sharing, I learned from work.

If you’re in a well running D&D group and have no need for any of these, that’s wonderful. I’m glad for you. But for the rest of the people who may be having some trouble, what’s wrong with considering other ideas, even if they come from the professional world? I would reiterate, if you find yourself treating/having a worse relationship with the friends you play with worse than your colleagues at work, to me it makes sense to ask why and how to make it better.

But thanks for sharing your thoughts anyway.

I hope it helps! Thanks a lot for your kind words!