Top 10 Time-Saving Tools for D&D Dungeon Masters 

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I got a good one to share. I use these character/monster reference slips made on a 4x2" slip of paper, then fold each one in half and hang them over the top of my DM screen. On the DM's side is the character's name, their AC, max hit points, passive perception, and spell save DC. On the player side is their/monster's name and a "turn order" arrow indicating who is next in the initiative order. The arrow is actually important since I'll naturally go from left to right, but it'll be the opposite for my players. This little tool tracks initiative for everyone all at once, and makes it so I don't always have to ask my players what their four most important numbers are - and takes up practically no space at all. Save the white board for everything else.

Using OneNote has been an absolute game changer for me. Earlier this year I smashed out a one shot in a week and used OneNote for all the writing and then printed out all the notes to run at the table because I didn't have time to reformat them into something else and it worked out great. 4x6 index cards with monster statblocks on them are also a great tool, I spent ages working out a Publisher template for that and also ended up making a half-letter sized one for more complex statblocks.

For me LegendKeeper is the absolute king for D&D notes. Not only is it simple to use, it has both Map and Board features which allow you to work out your world in visuals, rather than text. It also has a very active community that makes templates which can be added to a template folder in a project, allowing you to easily create pages with default layouts. It also allows you to invite players and choose which pages are/aren't hidden, and it's much less clunky than WA

Love the Hero Quest DM screen

I started with One Note but converting to World Anvil. I like the layout it provides and can then allow my players access to view the world info so they can refresh themselves each month before game sessions. That was a huge benefit for me.

For notes: google drive and google documents For the continent map: Azgaar's fantasy map generator For NPC artwork: DALL-E or Heroforge

Currently I'm running Tomb of Annihilation and I use Excel for weather and random encounters. I basically rolled two months in advance, created a table with the weather and the encounters for each day. Also, Luke, you don't suck at all. Unless you buy a popsicle or a lollipop, I guess.

Post it are super usefull for me, I use them constantly to feed some informations to a certain palyer that are not immediatly available to the rest of the table. I found that is working so well in both the case the player wants to keep that information for himself and even if he shares immediatly after to the rest of players because this moves the roleplay "into" the table wihtout forcing the players to refer every time to the DM. Passing a note to the rogue that found a message written in the thieves cant and letting him telling this to the rest of the group creates a more "realistic" roleplay than reading the same message to everyone and just letting the rogue say "yes i tell you what the dm just said". And this is only one example on how to use them, you really have a lot of ways to make your sessions a little better and more relistic using post it.

My DM uses World Anvil for our campaign because we're an online group spread out over different countries, and it's really helpful for general world information related to places and people the party has visited. The one thing they have told me is the UI is a bit clunky to get used to.

2. I use word for session notes. Google drive is linked to the Facebook page so any AL players can have access to pregens and other needed documents. I used binders of physical copies to modules. 6. I have two sizes of white boards. Small paper size which goes into a file box. Then the con size which is about 3 by 2.5 feet. 8. Laptop, phone and D&D beyond account. After thinking of Chromebook and other inexpensive options I decide to go ahead and get the laptop due how versatile, it is. So now I can occasionally do introductions of monsters with theme music.

Oi! RU-vid! This man does not suck!

I also use mindmaps, like Miro, a lot. They are great as folder for all of your NPC's, locations and events and you can easily make links between them. Also, those word files are beautiful. I often don't have enough motivation to do any styling.

1. Obsidian for Notes 2. Dungeon Draft for dungeon, building and encounter maps. It is a one off purchase but super cheap and the UI is really intuitive 3. Wonder Draft for world and area maps. It is a one off purchase but super cheap and the UI is really intuitive 4. Still selecting a VTT. Suspect Owlbear Rodeo will not be free with Version2. Liking TablePlop or StandardAction and other simple VTTS 5, Miro for whiteboard 6. Paper Notes for on the move planning and capturing inspiration 7. Roll Dice with Friends for a free online dice roller for remote users to take part with theatre of mind games, rather than having someone in the room roll dice for them. Brilliant simple dice roller that does the job

Great video. Enjoyed the other side of seeing thing. I'm a gm who travels to the location and runs the game there. No fancy TV in a table, and a few places they can't afford internet so I have to be ready for that. My kit. On a folding luggage cart is 2 boxes for just the books. A few odds like maps and templates, but mostly books. One bag of just 3d printed stuff, mostly tiles, but scatter terrain, dungeon dressing, trees minus leaves, and props. The last bag is the gm kit with screen, handouts, loaner tablets loaded with the apps and things needed already installed and updated. My personal dice and 2 sets loaner dice, 4 boards with tavern games, and tokens. I don't use minis because portable. Sure 7 or 8 for flare and flavor, but not the chest with 50 drawers you see plenty of people with. For me I use blsnk dice i found at a con and ceramic tiles I found while reworking my bathroom. They fit a grid perfectly and come in 1x1, 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 sized, no luck of a 5x5 but I do have 1 6x6. A quick number and or mark with a marker, dry or wet, and the bad guys are on the field. On the side of the cart I carry my battle mat and pretty mats. I use " front line games " mats in addition to my " crystal castle " battle mat. I keep a beach front, forest with a path and 1 without, sea, desert, artic, and now a space one. The marker are right inside and the wet wipes to clean up and the base i roll the maps around. Now some will wonder. So I use color note, the program that one note was based on, and Google drive with a smattering of Google sheets mixed in. That's it. I have to run from my phone worst case scenario. Out of the 11 games I run a week, 3 have no internet access. I do use 3x5 cards for inattentive tracking, but I can't carry 12 binders and the books, and the pcs, and the. I have to remain as light and portable as possible. It's base enough i carry said cart to two games in a 3rd story apartment on the same day across town from each other, riding the bus to both locations. Would anyone be willing to share 3d print stuff that I can add to my collection? Any ideas are welcome

Post-its are great for reminders, like "Give Inspiration".

I use Notion for story, homebrew mechanics, and link Excel books for DM screen, monster and player stats, etc…

Very helpful to hear what other DMs do at their tables! I use Word, but OneNote sounds really good for organization so thanks for that tip. For tracking initiative, I print out a Word doc with a blank table for initiative alongside a table for each monster's stats and hit points (with space to pencil in damage done by the PCs, which I add up until they reach the target; I discovered early on that subtraction is not my strong suit in the moment!) I tried a white board once, but it didn't erase cleanly. I like having each encounter's monster stat block on the same page as initiative and damage tracking. Having that on separate pages/cards/boards would drive me crazy!

I'll leave a mention of Obsidian here. It's for those with more computer knowledge, as it uses nested folders to organize your stuff, markdown text, and many free plugins to customize your experience.

thanks for the knowledge master!

I make binders for my players, and include plastic pocket sheets that hold 9 baseball cards, I have MS Publisher from back in the day and create papers for all magic items, all their feats, and abilities and give them the magic spell cards they know. Also I make a personal main page that fits in a clear sheet protector so they can write on it with markers and this shows hit points, spell slots, and any abilities they have that get used like rages and such. And of course I make personal character sheets for them as well.

Great video as always!

I use Campaign Logger both as DM and as a Player. But using it as DM is where it really shines. It has an automatic tagging system which make retrieving and organising information really blissful

Switching to onenote has been a gamechanger for me, too. I used to run session notes just in word in one big file, with everything else strewn about all over the place... now, I can have it all in one notebook for the campaign. I do the same for the games I play in, and keep all my session and notes in a separate notebook.

I use Miro to organize my campaigns. I have in various panels on my canvas - Reputation Tracking Rubik, Mind Map of the adventure, Timeline of the game, Encounters, and I use Miros featuer to link between each of the sections so I can jump back and forth and don't have to scroll. For quick notes or brainstorming I use an app called Mindly on my Android phone. It's the quickest mind mapping solution on the phone I have found. I can literally take pretty organized notes with one hand and then either export that to a mind map or just recreate in miro later.

Oh good LORD, EverNote is JUST what I'm looking for. I've been doing it by hand at first, and I moved my DM stuff to my iPad this year and I've been using Apple's basic Notes app. I've been so frustrated having to make up ways to codify and organize by using bold, italics, and underline along with bullet points/check boxes. Memorizing combinations of these to find things I need all in ONE note... ugh. Thank-you for this video!!

Obsidian, Logseq, Joplin are like OneNote but in Markdown. They also create graphs and webs of relationships and a ton of other plugins.

I use Google Drive with Docs and such. I do almost everything old school (paper, pencil) at the table, but I have players that use DnDBeyond at the table. I'm fine with that. I use DnDBeyond to make NPCs because it's faster than doing it by hand, but I print those for use. Keeping organized in Google Drive is easy and I use it daily for work anyway, so I'm already familiar. I use PostIts for non-permanent notes (tracking HP and such). I pre-roll encounter monsters/NPCs and put that on a postit attached to the stat block for that purpose. And thanks to you, I now also include a LOT of handouts.

Love your T-shirt in this video Luke!

I use post it notes as bookmarks in the event I'm using a printed module or if I give a source book to a new player to mark things you need often. The Player's Handbook is pretty daunting for a new player and flipping back and forth looking for the sections can turn them off of the game altogether. Most of the time now I use D&D Beyond, but occasionally someone has a paper preference.

Campfire is a really good one when we talk about world building and in general, keeping track of what the party does and so, the only downside is that the free version is limited on the amount of projects you can have, but if you only have like 1 or 2 parties, it should work well enough

I stay organized by using Lair Magazine 🤣 Since most of my games have mostly been online if i do need anything its typically been Google Docs/Sheets set in a folder with more folders with more sheets/doc and more folders... you get it right... I do want to use One Note a bit more tbh.

I bought a copy of "campfire pro" before they went online subscription. But using the world building expansion+ regular set . Allowed me to stick a whole bunch of material into one location. Had to develop spread sheets(random tables) and maps using other programs. But it's great for sticking a whole bunch of info in one place. Depending on the subscription price though world anvil might be a better price because last time I checked that subscription had better map, location, character integration. If a dm is looking for a cheap dungeon map option dungeon scrawl works well. The issue is you need to pull the online page back up to view these dungeon maps you have created. Takes a few minutes to learn or search a vid to figure it out. But worth it in my opinion.

I create a wiki for each campaign I run. These days, I use dokuwiki because it is easy to set up and relatively flexible. If it's a particularly complex campaign where there's a lot of public information (such as something modern day), I'll often create two wikis or a wiki with two different areas so that there can be a place for PC facing info that the players can edit themselves.

I jot initiative down on the battle mat in dry erase and let somebody else keep track for me.

A good free alternative to word is Libre office, you can save documents as word compatible and it works just as well. That's just my preferred method.

Get off my Lawn! I'm pretty old: I put everything down on paper with pencil, on a couple of different note pads based on which group is in play. Some of them cross, since the groups are all playing in the same game world. I hand-draw how my maps are related to one another (we're using VTT so each map has to be a certain size and I link which one goes to where.) OneNote is a great way of putting this all into electronic format and be actually searchable (instead of flipping through note pads.) I have run into issues remembering an NPC name from one group and encountered in another. I use Excel spreadsheets for planning since a computer is faster with math than I am. VTT thankfully are developed enough to track much of the game mechanics stuff for me.

I use improved initiative for encounters. I run on my laptop connected to a 2nd monitor which can display the combat order for the players :)

I keep my monster stats in browser tabs I opened beforehand.

I mostly use excel. I created a bunch of calculator and tracker: CR calculator (homebrew), Encounters calculator, homebrew monsters, encounter tracker, … But I’l’ definitely check OneNote! Love your work and rants.

digital alts 1. Joplin and Nextcloud for note-taking and google drive 2. trillium notes for when you want more power than Joplin 3. Plasmic-UI or world-maker ( chunky-dev on itch ) [best alt for fantasia archive] for world-building physical alts 1. digital tablet table [whiteboard] 2. day/night clock-dial (basically a few layers of paper like those paper decoder disks) 3. group (+ npc behind screen) knowledge boards [public knowledge for the party] [npc on dm side/ group on player side... makes good use of dm screen] Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!

I love Bacon.

Lol I was not expecting to see marvel strike force ad. Been playing it for 3+years.

Yea microsoft restricted my one note when i started using it because it might ´violate terms of service´ i just filled in a couple of pages for npcs sooo i dont think ill go back to it. I dont want my prep to disappear overnight. Hopefully everyone else has a better experience :)

I'm loving all the recommendations in the comments too!

I use a note book to track initiative during combat. I just use D&D Beyond & Discord for my online games.

I like to use D & D Beyond to keep organized in my game.

World Anvil. Huge fan. Almost as good as Bacon. Almost.

I write magic items on index cards. When a PC finds one in the game, I give the player the card. Reduces scribbling on their sheets especially when passing the item around.

The toothbrush on the thumbnail made me curious 😉

I use Word sometimes, because my computer backs up my Documents to OneDrive so I can access them from anywhere. But most of the time I use Google Drive because the sharing function on Google Drive is easier to use than OneDrive's. As far as world-building tools, I have used both World Anvil and Scabard. Personally I prefer Scabard, because it auto-generates tags between different posts to link events and characters and such together easily. For example, if I write up the notes about an event and mention the characters who were in that event, Scabard automatically links to those character bios. I don't know if World Anvil does that.

Started with One Note, then went to Obsidian and now Notion. I love Obsidian the most and still use it for other stuff, but Notion became my to go for D&D because i can just log in on a different device and continue were I left off. I had two pretty big crashes with One Note (over the span of 1 year) and thus lost a lot of data. It became frustrating so I'm never using that again, for anything.

I use OneNote also but not as well Good information

I used to make notes on paper. Until I realised I would be faster if I wrote notes, adventure prep and such digitally. Even came with the advantage of me not having it stained with coffee all the time. Jokes aside. For adventures and campaigns I run, I usually make a folder structure: [Campaign Name] with various text documents for first planning the campaign and some random notes on it -> [Adventures] contains all the adventures the campaign is made of -> [01 - Adventure Name] with each folder being numbered and named. Inside I put everything relevant to said adventure. In the groups I play and GM in, we either use Table Top Simulator or Talespire as VTT. After I have my ideas and most plans together for the campaign / adventure I make maps for either Talespire or Table Top Simulator, which, for me at least, erases a lot of note taking since I know why certain things are on the map and I can just note down a few little things about it.

The best thing about Hero Quest is the Dungeon Master's Screen.

Started out organizing my campaign on WorldAnvil, but swapped to OneNote cause I just found it simpler and easier to work with.

I use three digital tools for RPGs: LaTeX, python and my file system.

Me and my players use notion. I used to use one note as an online database for all the character sheets and such as well as dm planning. But sharing onenote was honestly terrible and very hit or miss. Notion is extremly easy to share and makes dm prep a breeze

thumbs up!!!

Notification Crew!

I recommend milanote and inkarnate

I can say, without a doubt, that Luke doesn't suck. (also bacon is delicious)

Could anyone possibly help me figure out how to make the colored tabs at the top of a notebook? Im really struggling to find it

Me - Has meltdowns trying to one campaign DM Lair - Ohh you know, I run just the TWELVE! 😆

That’s not a dnd t-shirt! (It’s still cool though)

light mode buuuurns us, precious

not exactly faster, nor more organized, but my adventures are all on yellow stickies. I write too small for players at the table to read, so it's effectively encrypted. kind of a pain in the ass, though. one of my players was bored over the holiday and rearranged my house rule word doc into a Google Doc. way better that what I had. I do have everything in a Dropbox folder for everyone, even copies of the rulebooks, but a couple of players can't access it at work for some reason.

Whats the elephant logo on thumb nail referring too 🤔?

Somebodey saaaaaveemeeeee......time! (8)

I have a white board....but I lose it so often I usually end up writing on my glass desk -_-

Have you tried obsidian? Much better than onenote.

I mostly use google drive for organisation

Goodnotes... syncs in iCloud.

A free note taking program that I personally like is Obsidian. It allows you to visually have things on a pin board web. You have to be a little tech literate tho.

Comment for the algorithim

check out Obsidian modded for RPGs - its amazing... See Joshua Plunketts vids on here to see how amazing this free software is...

I use worldanvil, it's a great tool for keeping everything organized about a world. Works very similar to your onenote work. I love it as everything on WA is then made into a beautiful site that you can share and link your players to, who can look thru the links and learn all about random stuff from your world.