I'm looking for a suggestion on how best to organize my ideas for my weekly RPG
I implore anyone who can think of a better way to phrase the title, please suggest it.
Essentially, I use a self-hosted MediaWiki which is where I write everything, but when I just have an 'idea', I have a private Discord channel that I submit the information to. It can be a picture, or a character idea, or an idea for a scene or a shop or whatever-- I just have a channel where I dump all of my ideas, and then when I have time, I go back through them, iterate, add them to my wiki (making them 'canon'), and then deleting the messages.
I would really like something else to do this, because Discord is obviously not meant for this. Unfortunately, the caveat is that it needs to be useable on mobile, because I'd say 80%+ of my ideas like this happen when I'm not at my computer.
My first thought was to set up and self-host a ticketing system-- something like Znuny, but outside of using Zendesk for work, I don't really know that much about them, and it feels like it might be overkill (on top of not working on mobile, I don't think). It has the benefit of being able to immediately have the data organized, so I can double-check to make sure I'm not repeating character names, or ideas, or anything like that.
So, with that in mind, what all are my options?
My old GM used OneNote and it seemed to work for them.
Personally I use Obsidian, but I accept it's mobile experience is... not great. I guess Notion is also a thing that can be used in the same vein.
+1 for OneNote. You can type or write stuff in (especially if you have a Note type phone), paste images in, and draw or annotate maps. Not sure one would need much more for this use case.
Honestly (if your on Android) good old Google Docs/Sheets does me wonders.
I have a folder in Drive for each campaign I've ran over the years and in the folder I have my notes in whatever documents.
Since I can edit it from anywhere at any time (mobile or desktop) it's very easy to have an idea where ever and just blast it down in the doc.
Obviously the caveat here is it doesn't work well the bigger your world gets. I only tend to run stuff for a year or so, so nothing tends to get out of control.
I use a mind-mapping program called Xmind to organize my world (but a search for mind mapping programs will find many alternatives). I do all my work with the program on my PC, but it does have a phone app (at least for android, not sure about apple). I'm running a seafaring campaign in an ocean world, so rather than drawing a world map, I use a node for each island and then branching nodes for each city or important location that can be found there. I also have nodes for each of my PCs and significant NPCs, a node for my story plans, a to-do list, session notes, etc. This may not be the best option for people with extensive notes since the text-editing experience could be better. You can add text to nodes, but instead of opening a full page text editor, it's more like sticky notes. You can group nodes together as well, so each island node is contained within a box representing each of the major oceans, that way I know roughly where they are in relation to each other. Obviously this idea doesn't work as well with a more traditional land-based setting, but it might still be helpful tool.
I've considered this for my own oceanic game, but I tend to write in longer-form prose than quick bullet points so I've been hesitant. How much do you actually put in to each of the individuals nodes and branches?
You can fit a good amount into the text boxes, I've never hit a limit yet. Some of my nodes have several pages so I really don't know how much they can store.
Edit: To clarify, I tend to keep the text length on the nodes themselves fairly short, but you can add more text to them that is only shown when you cluck on the node.
My assumption is that you're playing a tabletop RPG(s) and want to keep those sessions organized, and evolve world-building content between sessions.
I've used Notion as a GM. It works well enough with taxonomies for regions, specific locales, encounters, and NPCs with varying metadata. You can use the board view to move players through encounters, or for sequencing. The gallery view is nice for an in-game introduction to an NPC(s)-- you cast your browser to a larger screen in your game space. It was less successful for bringing the players aboard or sharing info between sessions -- the cost model is prohibitive for what is essentially hobbyist use.
What has been more successful -- and this is just for chat, and not organizing assets or world-building -- is Zulip. We play a variety of games, and so maintain one channel per game, and then various streams (topics) within, e.g. for character creation, for rule questions, for each character's advancement, and so on.
What I have started to explore is use of wiki.js. It can be structured to your liking, have protected GM content, public content, and collaborative player content. You lose the Kanban board view that something like Notion confers. It is self-hostable.
I also use Obsidian for journaling and notes at large. The graph view is nice for connecting ideas and seeing relationships, but I wouldn't use it for GMing myself -- it is not sufficiently structured for my liking, and not collaborative. Lastly I will note AnyType, which looks very neat. It has graph and Kanban views. I have only played with it around the edges, and haven't tried migrating content or data to an instance.
An old school solution, for the right game, like PbtA variants, is index cards. ;-)
Fleeting Notes is built for your use case. It assumes you use Obsidian, which I would definitely recommend even if it's just a capture area before moving things over to your wiki.
I have used Trello when running games, for all notes and ideas. The way I can create and organise cards on a board, and add comments and attachments within cards, works well for my purposes. Their mobile app is not the slickest, but it's functional enough.
https://workflowy.com was life changing for me for organizing my information, work and personal. Tldr it’s infinitely scalable bulleted lists, which doesn’t sound like much but you can “dive” into any bullet and make it the root bullet? There are a few apps that have copied the idea and added more features but workflowy’s focus on simplicity and minimalist ideals has kept it fast and focused without clutter.
Roam Research is another that I’ve seen folks use that’s in a similar wheelhouse but the simplicity of workflowy was mindblowing.