Pathfinder 2e General Discussion

I'm currently planning to run Abomination Vaults after my group finishes the beginner box. I wanted to keep using my homebrew setting from when I used to run 5e, so I've started a document in Notion with conversion notes. Basically any time as I'm reading through AV I notice something that doesn't jive with my setting, I make a quick note about what I'm changing.

The main change I need to make is the stuff with cosmic entities. My setting is a bit like Eberron, where there's no real proof of the existence of Gods or religions. Nhimbaloth is probably going to change from being an "Outer God" to being a Lovecraftian Great Old One. Not sure what to do yet with the devils that come up in the second book.

For AP's I exclusively use FoundryVTT, and buy the official AP modules from Paizo. My current group doesn't play in person, but I suspect if that were to change I would still want to incorporate Foundry into home games to some extent, even if that just meant showing the map on a TV and ignoring the character sheets & encounter tracker altogether. It's just too nice having most of the prep done for me already.

I also play quite a bit of Ironsworn: Starforged, and rely quite heavily on Obsidian for that. I don't use a lot of different plugins personally, but I did see an obsidian ttrpg guide posted the other day.

I use Obsidian for prep and pen and paper for play. I absolutely adore Obsidian's versatility and have a crapton of plugins that I all use.

When worldbuilding, I like to start with a loose concept of the world, pitching that to players, and then have them ask questions about the world. I'll take those questions home and try to find satisfying answers for them until I have a barebones world, detailed enough that my players could feasibly pitch characters in it. From there, I have them all pitch 3 characters so that I find what needs to be more detailed and then I write that bit of the world.

It's all play and write as needed from there.

So first off, I run all my games with foundry. So that keeps it easy and I can put long-form stuff in its journals after first drafting in my text editor (sublime text).

Side note: I even use foundry for in person games, I just control it all from my end for folks using pen and paper and it acts as a substitute for physical maps and minis.

For my notes, I use workflowy. This is mostly short form stuff, so as I read through an AP, I’ll jot down anything I need to remember in each section in workflowy. Notes on NPCs and how to portray them go in there too.

As we play, anything I improvise goes in there so I can remain consistent, and major story beats also go in there to track what players have done and where they’re at. Finally, I’ll have some hooks in there for the next few sessions – whenever I think of cool things to throw at my players, I’ll write them in there. Tie-ins with backstories, that sort of thing.

Right now I’m mainly doing adventure paths and I kinda riff off those. If I did a grand homebrew world, I’d probably use something like scrivener or obsidian before throwing things in foundry journals. But for how I run my games right now, workflowy is a great lil organized notepad.

As you mentioned, I've used One Note in the past, but having moved away from Windows systems, I can't justify messing with the web-based version. I've used Evernote in the past, as well, but I'm also looking for a solution. I've seen Obsidian come up recently, for other topics, and so I've got it installed but haven't actually played with it any.

I can say that Google Drive/Docs is a really clunky way to do it, but works in a pinch. I don't think I'd ever try doing that again unless they added features and/or plugins that really improved the experience.

Additionally, I mostly run PFS scenarios, and the way that I prep those is with highlighters. I print out a copy of the scenario, yellow highlighting is for mechanics/DCs, pink highlighting is for story, setting, and worldbuilding (because a lot of it gets left out of the canned blurbs that they hand you to read to the players), and orange is used for optional/conditional things. In the margins I make extra notes like if a check is secret, or if I need to reference some stats from a different page, also reminders for exploration activities and hero points. On the stat blocks, I highlight the main mechanics, but also write in what actions the NPC will perform on their first turn (if it's complex), or other notes about how an encounter is supposed to work.

I know that an AP is going to be an entirely different beast than running a PFS scenario, but hopefully you can get some ideas that are helpful out of that. I'm also looking to get back into running APs soon, and I'm considering solely using Foundry VTT for it.

I'm only using OneNote atm for all my ttrpg stuff. Feel like I'm missing something by not using Obsidian, is it that much better?

I use a combination of Goodnotes on my iPad to handwrite ideas, and then I get them into one or more "org" mode files in emacs for outlining, tagging, exporting, etc. (like obsidian but open source and more powerful but with a steeper learning curve)

I try to go as detailed as necessary. Which is more of an art than a science. Too detailed and you can't remember it or it's clunky to run. Too little, and you're stuck doing too much improv (yes that can be a thing when you mess up your skeleton of ideas).