Incredible Vehicle
(It's a blog.)
June 29, 2015 at 9:00 am
filed under Roleplaying
Tagged dm tools, DMing
I first used Evernote in 2009. I didn’t think much of it; I imported my bookmarks from delicious.com (or del.icio.us as it was at the time). Evernote was fine. Not having much need for a note-taking app nor for another bookmarking app, I forgot about it until someone mentioned it in passing as a great DMing tool.
Now, Pinterest in itself is pretty amazing. Strangely, it took an app which exploded in 2012 to help me understand an app from 2008. Now I throw D&D websites in there. Now it’s someplace to store all my musings and one-off ideas no matter what platform I’m on. I’ve already migrated a bunch of my electronic notes there.
I’m actually wondering if I shouldn’t try moving some of the content in my paper notebook to Evernote. There’s some good stuff in there that’s just an accumulation of notes from here and there, websites and books and such. I don’t necessarily know where I get everything; I’ve been reading so much DM advice lately that I can’t always keep track. Evernote helps. My dream is that one day what I write in my DM’s notebook (physical notebook, with this stuff called “paper”) will auto-sync to Evernote or an equivalent.
I can’t overstate how great it is that Evernote has native apps for all the platforms I use. Being able to jot something down on my phone as soon as it occurs to me means I’ve added many more notes that I would otherwise have forgotten about. Forgetting isn’t the problem, mind you; cultivating a habit of writing them down is hard when you can’t practice it.
I encourage you to try it if you are digitally inclined. I used it with Basic for a while before deciding to upgrade to Premium, partially for the unlimited uploads. I also prefer to pay for software I like; if it makes my life better and it’s afforable ($50 per year is $4 and change), I want to reward that. Hell, I used to spend more than that on coffee every month.
If you use this referral link, you get a free trial of Premium. I get something out of it, too: I get some points toward Premium. It saves me a little bit of cash, sure. But it also lets you test drive Premium for a while.
There are some rough edges. For instance, if I wanted to make this wiki-style, I cannot trivially link between notes; you have to go to the note you want to link to, copy the link, and go back to the first note. Even if they added some form of inline autocomplete it would be a marked improvement. I’d rather not have to choose between a wiki and Evernote for my notes.