RPG Basics: In Praise of Notebook Paper

Over the years I’ve written a lot about binders, journals, notebooks, file cards, and wikis for use in capturing data, tracking and planning all sorts of information for roleplaying games. In my ongoing quest to explore all possible solutions, I have managed to overlook the simplest solution of all, the very first method I ever used for roleplaying notes: a single sheet of notebook paper, stuck into a rulebook.

Last Sunday I was sitting in The World Famous Jason Corley’s living room, playing our regular World of Darkness game. On my lap I have the core rulebook (tabbed so I can easily find any rule I might need to reference in the game), and a 3-ring binder containing my character sheet and all of my notes from the campaign. On the seat next to me, I have my partitioned pencil box with writing utensils, dice, and post-it notes in separate compartments. That’s been the status quo for this game for several months.

For whatever reason, I just got tired of juggling all this stuff on my lap. I grabbed a handful of dice and put them in an empty Altoids tin, which I had with me for no apparent reason. I took the character sheet out of the notebook, along with a single sheet of notebook paper, and stuck them in the rulebook. I put everything else away, except for one mechanical pencil. It was all there if I needed it, but it didn’t need to be out. I used the book as a surface to writ notes on and roll dice. I pulled out the character sheet as needed. Easy-peasy.

In the early days in my career as a gamer, this was how it was done. You showed up at a game with your Player’s Handbook, your character sheet, a piece of notebook paper or two, and that was it. None of us had been infected by Getting Things Done or productivity hack, had yet to be lured by the siren song of fancy journals and clever binders. We scribbled random notes on a piece of paper. Maybe a spiral-bond notebook. The notes were random and disorganized. It was chaos, but it worked.

As a gamemaster, I had sheets of notebook paper stuffed in my Dungeon Master’s Guide, with notes on NPCs and house rules. It gave me a limitation, because I kept trying to fit everything onto that single sheet of paper. When it all got too confusing, or if I ran out of room, I’d re-write it neatly on a clean sheet of paper, but leaving out stuff I had since memorized or no longer needed. A crude editing process, but it worked.

The 4th Edition campaign I’ve been planning has largely been developed while laying in bed. Typically I’ve got a binder, two journals, a laptop and/or the Alphasmart, plus four core books (DMG, MM, PHB 1&2) spread out. Plus at least one dog, and as many as two dogs and four cats. It wasn’t working for me. So I got rid of everything but the animals, the DMG, a single sheet of paper and a pencil. I used the DMG as my writing surface, and started plotting my adventure. As I needed to reference rules, I looked them up in the DMG and made note of the page number. If I had to reference another book, I made note of it and kept going. After I was done, I did all my Monster Manual references, then my Player’ Handbook references, but at no time did I have more than one book, and one sheet of paper, on the bed. For editing and cleanup, I sat in bed and typed the notes into the Alphasmart (easier to use in bed due to the lack of cords, heat, and weight), which were later uploaded to the desktop computer. But the Alphasmart and laptop were really only needed for blogging and wiki purposes — to run the game, all I needed was the single sheet of paper.