Post 1 – Post 2 – Post 4 (Worldbuilding, Campaign & Session Prep) – Post 5 (Running Games)

This is post #3

This was to be the last of three posts, but it would be very long to do in one post, so I broke out the last half about worldbuilding with Obsidian for next time.

An RPG Vault should support Worldbuilding plus Planning and Preparation of Sessions and Adventures, and creation, editing, and finding the information input into Obsidian when it is needed.

Coordination of Information

This is your method for storing your information and retrieving it when you need it. Are you a visual person who needs to see the information or can you just do a search? Or do you need a bit of both?

Will you use a folder structure plus tags, or only rely on tags?

Will you use a Kanban board, a homepage, or both?

Having a top level page or MoC (Map of Content) for your entire vault whether it is all of your RPG information, only your GM information, or only one world, one ends up with a lot of information in just a few sessions of play. Planning a method to organize it for growth and ease of use is beneficial. Also being flexible enough to modify your system as you learn what works best for you.

In my experience, I didn’t know what organizational method would work best for me until I jumped in and used it. Running things in the old days with pen, paper, and notebooks is different from using a computer. Obsidian is so flexible, that I’ve gone through multiple iterations to find what works best for me.

What I have settled on for me is a combination of folders and tags. I use both Kanban Boards and a Landing Page, AKA Home Page. The following headings are the types of things for which I have folders, and possibly tags.

My Home Page is a “master” MoC. It points to the Kanban Boards I use. I have one Kanban for my GM screen for use with play and another Kangan for Session Planning. Each folder has it’s own MoC that I link to from my Home Page, and/or one or both of my Kanban Boards.

In my Session Planning board I have the following lists:

• Long Term
• To Do
• In Progress
• Ready For Session
• Past Session Planning.

For my GM Screen I collect information that is most useful and needed at my fingertips. This includes such things as various random generators for NPC names, ship names, and random encounters. I have a page that is the Party Record that has each PC and which player they belong to in a table to see all their state, saving throws, and other quickly needed information at a glance. I have lists for combat, quick reference, NPCs, and magic items.

I have templates that help me create Session notes, NPCs, Places, Magic Items, Spells, Monsters, etc. I have found that I need more automation so I don’t have to do as much manual edits. I have a MoC of all Places, all Spells, all Magic Items, and all Sessions. After 129 sessions on Roll20 I have a HUGE number of files for my current campaign. It is an open-ended sandbox game, so while there was an initial big plot I set in motion, the party dealt with it, and now they’re going about doing their own thing and finding new challenges.

I created each of these MoCs manually so they are more difficult to update the longer they get. Switching this over to use Dataview queries will make updating these lists automatic.

I Use the Following Plugins with Obsidian:

• Advanced Tables: I use a lot of tables, and its addition of the to my vault was a big help.
• Admonition: I also like callouts and like how this plugin enhances them.
• Advanced Tables: Improves working with Markdown tables.
• Dataview: and the scripts from Nicole van der Hoeven help with automation and creating MoCs.
• New Tab Page: For the tab functionality and Home Page.
• Kanban: Allows setting up multiple Kanban boards. I use one for a GM screen and another for Campaign and Session planning.
• Leaflet: For maps and map pins, although I haven’t done much with it.
• QuickAdd: For automation when combined with Dataview and Templater.
• Timelines: For making timelines.
• Pandoc: For exporting to different file formats. I need to connect it to LaTex to get more power out of it.
• Recent Files: is great for finding the most recent files I worked with. Especially before I implemented a Home Page or before I get it linked to at least one of my MoCs.
• JSON/CSV Importer: To import information from CSV files or spreadsheets.
• Buttons: Make buttons to run scripts.
• Fantasy Calendar: Create a custom calendar or use an existing one. Add links to documents like session notes.

I am a fan of using header levels. Header levels let you collapse the text at that header level. With multiple headers of the same level I can collapse certain sections of my session notes. I do this when running games with the recap of last session, housekeeping, and last session’s XP so I can focus on the bits important for what’s going on in the moment. This will be covered in more detail in my final article.

As I do more with Obsidian and refine how I can get the most out of it for both preparation, planning, and running games I improve optimization for my use case. Using Obsidian at work gives ideas for improving how I use it for gaming and other personal projects and vice versa.

In this series: Post 1 – Post 3 – Post 4 [currently in process] – Post 4 [currently in process]

This is the second of three five articles of my experience with Obsidian. I wrote this a couple of weeks after I started with Obsidian in December, 2021. The program has changed a LOT in almost a year. It went from beta to version 1.3 currently.

Since I wrote this a year ago you will see things I mention here that are no longer the same or no longer an issue. I have indicated these things in square brackets [ ]. What I want to draw your attention to is how easily I moved my existing data in text format into Obsidian*. This is the great power of such a tool that relies on plain text files. It is both easy to work with and easy to maintain your data.

* ^{I had to get data out of other Apps to get it into text format to then put it into Obsidian.}

Obsidian For RPG Campaign & Session Prep

Original Date Written: 2021/12/11

I switched to Obsidian about two weeks ago.

I love the idea of reducing all the different places I store information digitally.

Having multiple “silos” that don’t talk to each other and are not easily accessible to me if the service goes away, such as the end of a free version, or the total end of the service. The only limitation is now power and a working device.

Having it in a format I can read on any device is important. Markdown files are just plain text files that any text editor, like Notepad can edit.

If you are careful, you can even edit the files outside of Obsidian.
You can re-arrange folders and add or delete new files.

DO NOT do this while Obsidian is open, as that might cause a problem like data corruption.

Obsidian reads the data in the folder with the vault and will “re-build” it’s understanding of their relationships, such as links.

This is helpful if you just want to drop in a bunch of text files with the Markdown extension of *.md or image files or PDF files.

So instead of copying each note from Evernote and pasting into a new Obsidian Note, get Evernote exported to Markdown files and just copy them to the Obsidian Vault.

For Evernote export each folder one at a time – ugh! to its format, then import that format into Joplin. Joplin can then export each folder to Markdown files. Use the Markdown with Frontmatter option. [Fontmatter is important to help organize and search for information.]

Obsidian lets you right-click or drag and drop to move files between folders. If you do this in Obsidian, it will update it’s internal database and links, and append 1 to duplicate files.

Within the OS if you move a file, it won’t let you keep two files with the same name, and it won’t preserve any links in the file.

Obsidian has a merge feature, so if you have files with similar content, and perhaps one has a 1 at the end, you can merge. Right-Click the one you want at the bottom of the other note. Be careful, as there is no undoing that. Make a backup before starting and go back to that backup if you make a mistake.

If you have a lot of such files, I suggest using git or other versioning software to make large numbers of updates easily reversible without undoing the ones you want to keep.

Obsidian will not display files that are not PDFs or images or text files with the extension .md. It will let you know a folder isn’t empty if you try to delete it. Right-Click and then Left-Click “Show in System Explorer” and it will open a window with the contents of that folder.

EXIT Obsidian before doing anything with these files outside of Obsidian. You can then evaluate if you want to keep the files or not. If the files are text files and you want the information in Obsidian, just change their extension to .md. If you use Windows and have the default setting that hides extensions, go to the View menu of the Explorer Window and check “File Name Extensions.” Just in case, check “Hidden Items” to verify that you don’t have any files hidden from view.

– Once you have renamed, moved, or deleted files from this folder, re-start Obsidian. Then you can move the files that now show to empty the folder, then you can delete it within Obsidian without issue.

– NOTE: When I did this, Obsidian did not open with the files I had open when I exited. I had a text file I changed to .md and I had an HTML file because I was testing a Pandoc conversion from .md to HTML. I don’t know if Obsidian’s internal database picked up those files and modifying them caused this, or what.

– This is when I found that the PIN option can have a keyboard shortcut set. The fewer mouse clicks for me the better!

A Checklist of My Initial Takeaways:

• [ ] Go easy on the Folders in Obsidian. Less is more.
  • [ ] Obsidian only needs 3 folder: (You can call them whatever you want.)
  • [ ] Notes (The Root folder) – Any other folders would go here, but that just adds complexity, so give it some thought before adding them.
    – In my experience, adding a folder for all the information I have from Evernote lets me review each item and clean up its tags and formatting to match my other files.
    – Another option would be make a new Vault just for Markdown files imported from other software and use Obsidian to clean up that data before copying it to your main Obsidian Vault.
  • [ ] Attachments – Images, PDFs, etc.
  • [ ] Templates
  • [ ] Obsidian is designed to connect information through Tags and Links, and this eliminates the need for folders as organization, since you have multiple ways to find what you want.
  • [ ] I recommend only using folders for topics that have very little overlap with everything else.
    • Such As:
      • Separate Campaigns
        • Separate Games/Rules
        • Separate Projects
    • Some things may be so totally different that it is better to separate them into its own Vault. A good example would be for personal information, so that is separate from game/hobby, work, or other very specialized information.
      • How to link to an Obsidian Vault with a shortcut. It took me a bit to find the correct link and realize what process they meant to create the shortcut, as they did not use the same verbiage as on menus. [NOTE: You can also easily open and switch between vaults in Obsidian with the “Open another Vault” button in the lower left corner. It is the top of the three buttons. It allows switching between vaults and creating new vaults.]
      • Use the method of your OS for creating shortcuts.
        1. In MS-Windows it is Right_Click then Left-Click Create Shortcut.
        2. Type in the link to your Vault with the Obsidian filetype URL: obsidian://vault/VaultName
           1. The Vault name is the name of the Directory (Folder) that contains the .obsidian Directory (Folder).
        3. Give the shortcut a meaningful name, such as the name of the Vault.

Below are screenshots of the process in order:

You will end up with a shortcut like this:

If you Right-Click then Left-Click Properties, it will look like this:

• [ ] Files and Folders sort alphabetically just like on your computer. Punctuation and Numbers come before letters. You can use this to force the folders for attachments and templates to the bottom so that they are out of sight, unless you need to look at them.
• [ ] Customizable Keyboard Commands. Nearly everything has the ability to have a Key Combination.
  • [ ] Templates – Have to add it
  • [ ] Toggle Pin – Have to add it. (Keeps file open when open more files.)
• [ ] Review Tags in the tag pane to eliminate invalid tags, such as if you use # as an abbreviation for Number. I had a tag S because I had #S, so I had to prefix with \ so that it was \#S so that in preview it looks like #S. This then removed the bogus tag from my tag list.
  • [ ] Group Tags. For example, RPGs, Campaign, Play, GM, Notes could all be tied to RPGs, so instead of separate tags, created separate RPG sub-tags (IF it works for you.):
    • [ ] #RPGs/Campaign #RPGs/Play #RPGs/GM #RPGs/Notes
      • [ ] This separates RPG Notes from general Notes. For personal notes in the same vault, you may want a more specific tag like:
        • [ ] #Notes/Personal #Notes/Finances #Notes/Car #Notes/House
    • [ ] Look out for similar or identical Acronyms. For example OBS is used for both OBS Studio and One Book Shelf, I can’t just use OBS as a tag, because in 6 months I won’t know which tag has the information I need.
    • [ ] I suggest a tag for each note indicating it’s source, such as:
      – Sticky Note (Physical or the M$ App)
      – Evernote or similar program
      – Text File
      – Index Card
      – Notebook
      – Loose Papers
      – etc.
      This will aid you in organizing and future proofing (AKA frustration proofing) your information.
• [ ] Templates. There is no limit to how many you can have. I recommend naming them so that the one you use most is at the top. If you only have one template, the keyboard shortcut you set up will just load it. It is only when you have multiple templates that you have to pick one.
• [ ] List of plugins and how they might apply
  – Better Word Count – Displays word count of the focused Note in the lower right of the Obsidian screen.
  – Calendar – This can be placed wherever works for you.
  – Periodic Notes – Same author as Calendar – Create notes for each day, week, month, and year. It is best to have a folder for these notes to keep separated from all others.
  – Kanban – Good for projects, can use to make a GM screen NOTE: if you pin a Kanban to keep open, then the links don’t work. Use the back button (is there a KB shortcut?)
  – Recent Files – If you want to go back to a file but don’t know its exact name.
  – Sliding Panes – If you want to squeeze in multiple open notes. NOTE: With Version 1.0 of Obsidian the general features of this plugin were added to Obsidian, so the plugin no longer works.
• [ ] CTRL+E for toggling between edit and preview. Be careful as if you hit CTRL+W in error, it will close the pane with the focus. This is because Obsidian uses browser code for a base, and CTRL+W closes a tab, or closes the browser if there is only one tab open.
  • [ ] You can either change the toggle for going between edit and preview, or change the key combo for closing panes, or just don’t make mistakes 😉
• [ ] Resizing and placing bits where you want them. Each pane can be dragged to place above, below or beside another. The possibilities are endless.
• [ ] Linking panes for a two-pane view with one for edit and the other for live preview. Emulates WYSIWYG editors.
• [ ] BACKUP plan!!! You need a plan to backup your notes and your settings, just in case.
  • [ ] Saving or syncing to DropBox or Google or M$ OneDrive is NOT a backup if it is your live data.
  • [ ] Regularly zip up the Vault directory and save it off, perhaps once a month and twice a year. Some use Git to hold it, then they have versioning.
    • [ ] You want a back up plan that isn’t hosed when the free service goes away, or the limit to free space shrinks, etc.
• [ ] Phone app. I haven’t gotten my vault working for sharing with the app. {This is still on my list to figure out.]
  • [ ] I don’t really look up info on my phone when I used Joplin, I had it for Just in case.
  • [ ] I just use Google Keep for short notes that I can add later to my Obsidian Vault, then delete the note.
• [ ] If you are a Realmworks user looking for how to preserve all your hard work, and still be able to use it, there is an export tool, and a series of YT videos by Josh Plunket for Realmworks users migrating to Obsidian.
  – The sound on a his early videos has some sort of background noise or artifact. He has lots of interesting information, even for those who don’t use Realmworks.
  – He also started a FB group for using Obsidian for RPG campaigns. It is focused on Realmworks users, but also has lots of questions and answers that you might find useful. [The focus has shifter from Realmworks to getting the most out of Obsidian for use in TTRPGs.]

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Spellcheck Isn’t The Same As A Year Ago

[Spelling was crude back then, but now it works as you would expect. Obsidian now uses the Chrome spellcheck and additions to the dictionary are stored in the file “Custom Dictionary.txt.”

On a Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/Custom Dictionary.txt

On Windows: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\obsidian\Custom Dictionary.txt

I deleted all of my original notes from this article on the spellcheck feature as it no longer matters what the issues were. It works very well and as I expect it should.]

A quick note about text files.

I added this to help remove confusion about what a plain text file is. If you don’t need to know the difference for other reasons, you may not know this.

A plain text file is what I mean by text file. This is a file that one can open in Notepad or other TEXT editor and it is displayed normally. The extension of a file does not make it a text file, but the file FORMAT. This means that files with extensions such as CSV, HTML, CSS, MD, etc. can all be opened in a text editor and one can make sense of them.

RTF ( Rich Text Format) files are NOT plain text. The term RICH gives it away. Instead of wrapping text in symbols like two asterisks either side of a word it uses program code that the special format of the file and an editor like MS-Word or Libre Office or MS-Wordpad can read. Open an RTF file in Notepad and you will see characters that aren’t what you want.

Word Processors are NOT text editors. Yes, they can edit text files and save them in plain text format, but one usually doesn’t do that. Save a text file as a Word Document and then open it in Notepad and you’ll see all these funky control characters.

In this series: Post 2 – Post 3 – Post 4 – Post 5 (Article In Process)

I started using Obsidian about a year ago. At first, I was interested in moving my data from other programs into a text format so they would be less likely to be lost to a vendor’s idea of what is “best” for my data.

I soon discovered it was a great tool for organizing and planning TTRPG campaigns and sessions.

This is the first of three articles about My Journey with Obsidian.

Past Tools

NoteTab Pro – This is a programmable tabbed text editor that works with text formats. It has it’s own scripting language called Clipcode, each “macro” is called a Clip. Clips are gathered in Clip Libraries. There are in an outline format that mirrors the outline format of its Outline file format. Outline files are text files with the *.OTL extension and header lines of code that indicate the start of each topic in the Outline. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s showing it’s age. I got started with it in the late 90’s. It really only highlights HTML, which makes it difficult for things to stand out.

I first used NoteTab to deal with text files at work and implemented it into my personal projects. I was so involved with beta testing that I got my name listed in the help file.

Evernote – I’ve used it since the free version had a lot of options, maybe even before it became a paid service. I kept general notes, things I thought of while away from my computer, my shopping list, etc.

Cherry Tree – A proprietary text outliner. I had different outlines for different things, like my AD&D campaign, and personal stuff.

Campaignwiki.org – I use it for my online campaign notes for my players. It is free, easy to get the data out, and my players can add to it. It supports Markdown. I have more than one campaign in it.

Joplin – I had found it a couple years ago and really liked it, but it was not as easy to use as I’d like. I put a lot of time into it. I mirrored my Campaignwiki in it, but the syntax was a bit different and it wasn’t as easy to add notes. It was dead simple to synchronize with the phone app and it is free.

OneNote – I’ve used it off and on for personal stuff, but don’t like that my information is stuck in it and copy and paste seems to be the only way to get it out. At my day job we’re a Microsoft Partner so it’s MS-Office and OneNote. I don’t like that the program is tied to the cloud and you have to login to OneDrive for it to work. It has limited utility offline.

Obsidian – I stumbled into Obsidian about a year ago in November, 2021. I dove right in and decided I liked it enough that I was soon looking to make a switch. I was motivated by a combination of frustration with Evernote and looking for a way to get my notes out. Joplin was another frustration, plus information in Cherry Tree, and elsewhere motivated me to simplify.

First I found that I could easily get information out of Cherry Tree and Joplin and get it into Obsidian. Exporting from Campaignwiki was also very simple to get working in Obsidian. Evernote was the big headache. I finally found a tool that let me import an Evernote export into Joplin.

Now I had my Evernote, Cherry Tree, and Joplin information in Obsidian, along with a copy of my Campaignwiki campaigns. No longer needing the other programs I uninstalled Evernote from my PC, cell, and deleted my account. I also uninstalls Joplin from my PC and cell, and also uninstalled Cherry Tree.

I still use NoteTab at home and work, but am slowly moving my data over to Obsidian. I keep working to build a set of Clips in NoteTab to help get my data into a format I’m happy with into Obsidian to minimize further editing. The ease of programming Clips to do what I want has made it difficult to move to something else. While Obsidian can’t do all the things NoteTab can do, Obsidian can display data close to that way plus even more. The various Obsidian plugins add so many options.

The one thing I have yet to crack is a way to get my OneNote out in a bulk method. I haven’t looked in the past year to see if perhaps there is a tool, but I hope to find one when I am ready to get that information.

My Obsidian Experience

On discovering Obsidian it was in reference to the Zettelkasten concept. It’s an idea I liked and the tool is awesome!

I had my information for my AD&D campaign organized into folders and made use of tags. I discovered the Kanban plugin and used it for my GM screen and my Campaign & Session Planning. I used the Stacked Tabs plugin and Pinned notes along with the Recent Files template to keep track of information. Someone I know online mentioned they used Obsidian for RPGs and did a couple videos on it. I thought to do some, but then I stumbled upon Josh Plunkett’s Obsidian videos. I took a bit of what he mentioned in his early videos, but soon was doing my own thing.

The way I was using things was NOT optimal. When I ran my Roll20 games on Sunday, I had Discord on my second monitor (we use voice and chat only, no video), Roll20 in my browser, NoteTab open with a list of weather, my AD&D PDFs open, and Obsidian open and frantically jumping around trying to find information that I knew was in there.

Over the summer I was on hiatus for my Sunday game as I travelled around the Western United States. I did keep playing in a Wednesday night Roll20 game and I used Obsidian to take notes. As a player I have a similar setup, Discord on my second screen, and Roll20 and Obsidian on my main screen. It was much less hectic, but still sometimes things got lost. During the Summer, I had my laptop with a single screen and I made it work.

I was plugging away with the usual workflow when suddenly one day, “BAM!” the Obsidian 1.0 update appeared and broke my workflow. I tended to have a LOT of tabs open in my GM vault and with so many, I couldn’t get them to display so I could read them.

I was NOT happy. I ended up closing all my tabs and getting a new workflow figured out, after ranting about it on the Obsidian TTRPG discord and the Obsidian Forums. I slowly started figuring out how to get a new workflow back. I re-watched a few of Josh Plunkett’s older videos and many of his newer ones. I also came across Nicole van der Hoeven’s videos and between the two of them and the Plugins they demonstrated and Nicole’s cool scripts she showed, I soon had a much improved RPG workflow.

I’m Glad That Obsidian 1.0 broke My Workflow

I still use Kanban boards or a GM screen and campaign and session planning, but I’ve added the homepage option of the Default New Tab Plugin. There are a long list of plugins that I use.

My Plugins:

• Kanban
• Default New Tab Plugin
• Recent Files
• Advanced Tables
• Leaflet
• Admonition
• JSON/CSV Importer
• Templater
• Dataview
• Quickadd
• Buttons

There are also the plugins for TTRPG Statblocks, monsters, and the dice roller. At the moment, I’m not using them for more than seeing what they do.

The biggest new additions are Templater, Dataview, and the JSON/CSV Importer. I was able to get the information from the PDF of the AD&D Monster Manual into a CSV that I was able to import into my Obsidian RPG vault. I also figured out how to do the same with the Cleric Spells from the Players Handbook after I had already gotten all (All levels for Cleric, Druid, Magic-User, and Illusionist) of them in by hand.

I did use NoteTab to make a clip to format the text of each spell I copied and then copy it to Obsidian. The problem is, I didn't make some tags that I should have as I went, so I couldn't do some of the things I knew I could do with Dataview. So I'm still using NoteTab, but more for its ability to manipulate text than to store information.

My Takeaways Using Obsidian

1. Organization is key. This is true for TTRPGs as well as personal and work projects. PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) is all about capturing information and being able to find it when you want it. Understanding the ability to use folders which other applications have ingrained in us and can be used just fine in Obsidian, but the true power comes with having a good understanding of tags and how they can help you find your information later. A poor implementation of tags shows its weakness when you can’t do fancy manipulations with the Dataview plugin.
   1. Frontmatter matters. Having a solid plan and structure to the frontmatter of our files includes a consistent use of tags. Having those things in place makes finding and manipulating the information into useful formats so much easier. This gives Dataview even more power with a well thought out structure for tags and frontmatter.
2. Limit the number of vaults. Too many vaults become cumbersome and every time there is a plugin update you have to update all the plugins. Granted, you don’t have to do it right away, but to avoid things breaking you need to remember to update themes and plugins if you haven’t used a particular vault for awhile. The key is to split out information so different you wouldn’t want it mixed, such as your work and your campaign if you used one computer for work and personal. For personal, multiple campaigns in one vault may not make sense, or be confusing. Also personal projects like a personal journal or a hobby like genealogy may not be conducive to good work. A demo vault to try things out is a good idea to avoid breaking things in your active vaults.
   1. Related to this is don’t try to put too many projects in to vaults until you know what you need out of Obsidian to make it do what you want. Part of this is exporting the data from old tools with helpful tags to minimize additional editing once you have it in Obsidian.
   2. I have information in multiple vaults that makes sense to only have in one vault. This leads to know being able to find something as I can’t recall which vault it is in.
3. Don’t be afraid to start over. After seeing the possibilities after revising my Obsidian workflow and organization, I am also inspired by watching videos of how others are handling things in their own TTRPG, work, and personal vaults. I am working on an article to help me clarify my thoughts on RPG Vault Structure. So far, it is just me writing out my thoughts, roughly organized. It looks at how the vault structure chosen should work whether one does Top-Down or Bottom-Up worldbuilding. It’ from the perspective of if I made a new campaign, what vault structure would I want or need based on my years of playing RPGs and my experience and new learnings with Obsidian. I hope to share this along with the final version of my Worldbuilding Cheatsheet on Cheatography.
4. Find a good text editor that can help you with editing the files in your vault(s) if you need to make mass edits. I can do this with NoteTab, but it requires a few more steps do do a mass search and replace on all the files in a directory.
   1. I’ve worked with Vim and Gvim over the years, but their power is also several more steps to access.
   2. I downloaded Atom from Github last year, and finally put it through its paces recently. It can open an entire directory of text files as a “project” and do a search across all files and find something with amazing speed. Similarly one can do a replace across many files.
      This suggests mass editing tags and other parts of frontmatter.
5. Automation prevents typos and other data storage blunders. Nicole van der Hoeven has demonstrated the power of the Dataview plugin combined with a few javascripts to autoupdate filenames and headers and get notes into the appropriate folder with Templater and Quickadd.
6. There are so many options with Obsidian, it is best to start small and figure out what you can do with Obsidian. Learn Markdown if you don’t know it, figure out Obsidian options and watch YouTube videos to see what others are doing. Build a demo vault to play with so you don’t mess with any of your data.
7. Backup. As always it doesn’t matter what your system is, if you don’t have a way to recover when your computer or hard drive fails, you will have much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
8. Syncing data between my computer and phone is one thing I haven’t cracked for Obsidian. I haven’t tried again since I did about a year ago. I’m also considering syncing one or more of by vaults with Github. I can keep GM notes in a private vault, but how to separate GM from Player visible notes?
9. It is easy to get data in and out of Obsidian. Getting data into Obsidian is as easy as copying text files into a folder and renaming the .txt extension to .md. It is recommended that you have some frontmatter to track what system/program the data came from, and other helpful front matter and tags for ease of use going forward.
   Similarly, one can copy or even delete files from an Obsidian vault (folder). However, one should not do that when Obsidian is running on the vault you are moving or deleting files through the OS rather than with Obsidian features.

Definitions:
AD&D - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
D&D - Dungeons & Dragons
Frontmatter - Text at the beginning of a Markdown file that is used to define certain parameters of the file. It is places between a row of three dashes before and after.
RPG - Role Playing Game
TTRPG - Table Top Role Playing Game (To distinguish from computer RPGs, even though pen & paper, AKA Table Top RPGs came first.)
CSV - Comma Separated Value file
JSON - JavaScript Object Notation a data format in text files.

NOTE: I wrote this blogpost in Obsidian and it took very little editing to get it onto my website.

Some links in this post contain Affiliate Links.