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Obsidian can do wild shit like that??? goodbye google docs i no longer need you

galileosballs:

Oh, I promise you, I’ve been using Obsidian daily for almost a year now, and I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface of what it can do. It’s replaced my word processor, pdf reader, DM notes, journal… I use it for practically any application.

And because I’m still wearing my ‘ask me about Obsidian.md’ shirt, let me show you a few! These are some of the ones I use for TTRPGs. I have a whole other set of procedures I use for personal and professional stuff (but I won’t show any of that, since it’s much more identifying)

  1. Worldbuilding Notes

This is the big one. I like to worldbuild thoroughly for my D&D campaign (not because it’s necessary, but because I enjoy it). Obsidian lets me create templates for wiki-type pages for NPCs, towns, dungeons, and anything else. I have it set up so that, when I want to make a new guy, I can just press one button to go from a blank page

A blank page, entitled 'New Guy for Demonstration Purposes'ALT

to a questionnaire that I fill in:

The same page, but with a list of attributes such as gender, location, and age.ALT
The questionnaire, filled in.ALT

Which then immediately generates a page that looks like this:

Bam. That took 10 seconds. I can add an image (say… Fashion Santa) where the 'It is a Mystery Ghost’ is and fill in this Novel Guy’s profile and maybe toss in a statblock, and there you have it: Guy the Novel. The blue text denotes an active link, so you can just click on any of them to bring you to that page.

A wikipedia-style info page for Guy the Novel, Dwarf fighter. He looks like Toronto's infamous Fashion Santa.ALT

2. Statblocks

As the post mentioned, Obsidian can be made to work as a statblock holder. This takes a lot more futzing around (I only just got it to work recently) but it’s pretty cool when it does.

Let’s say I’m planning an encounter. I’ve got my notes open, and I’m writing some stuff that might come up:

A description of an encounter with Crape Myrtle, the Sea Hag.ALT

But if I’m going to use these as my session notes, I better have some statblocks in here. A few clicks later:

Bam. Sea Hag stats. Editable Sea Hag stats.

I have statblocks in this vault from a number of different sources. The plugin comes with the 5e SRD monsters (you can disable them, of course) but I did not find it difficult to locate a github repository of more monsters made for Obsidian. Found a few in a few different systems, too. You can also make your own, though I won’t deny that the interface is a little clunky. But if I wanted too, I could take Myrtle the Hag here, save her as a new creature, and pull her up to torment other adventurers whenever I wanted.

3. Queries

Obsidian can do some really powerful stuff with the right plugins. Have you considered, for instance… a queriable database?

Let’s say I’m running a session. The party is in a location.

A reasonably generic introduction to a D&D session.ALT

They decide 'hey, let’s go talk to some other people outside the bar!’ Now, of course, I’m quite happy to improvise stuff like that. But what if, instead, I wanted to be really sure that everyone they see outside the bar is someone who should be in this city. Well, I can get Obsidian to do that for me. I type up a little query…

And hey presto, it’s every NPC who is currently marked with the correct location.

A list of NPCs who are currently in Zeballos. Oh, isn't it remarkable what kind of names players come up with.ALT

Even our Novel Guy is there!

And that’s just scratching the surface of what this plugin can do. I have it set that every town automatically lists its inhabitants, every faction its members, every country its towns.

What else?

That map feature I think you were referring to in this ask? If you configure it right, it can

4. automatically measure distance

Let’s say I’m looking at my map:

And I want to know the distance between Comox and the Second Narrows Fort.

Well, there you go. This one was, admittedly, a pain in the ass to set up.

And, of course,

5. Refer to rules

Let’s say I’m running a dungeon. Here’s some dungeon flavour text:

A description of the enterance to an ancient goliath magical facility of some kind. The spells 'programmed illusion' and 'wall of force' are invoked in the description.ALT

If I forget what the rules for 'Wall of Force’ are, well, the text is in blue. I have a note for every spell in the game (that I found in some probably illegal github repository, I didn’t type them all out myself) and all I need to do is mouse over it:

The same notes, now displaying a pop up window with the rules for the spell 'Wall of Force'ALT

In essence, this productivity tool turned out to be so useful for worldbuilders and TTRPG players that there’s now a huge community of plugin makers making plugins that do even more of that.

The one real downside here is that you can spend hours just playing around with this program. Even now, I have the urge to go in and muck about with the fonts, despite the fact that I really should be doing something else.

I should also note that, though I’m not a total neophyte when it comes to computers, I’m not a coder and I’m not a power user of any kind. I have no special skills. Everything I know about computers just comes from a youth spent trying to mod more mpreg into The Sims 2. The skill ceiling for this program is leagues above what I’m capable of, but I can still make something incredibly useful with just my limited capabilities.

Oh, and it’s free. It’s all free. I probably should have led with that. Consider this an advertisement.