D&D Nerd.com

While browsing around Treasure Tables, I ran into a little post about building a GM notebook, which seems to be an excellent way to keep track of what’s going on in your D&D campaign. However, rather just making mention of it, I want to cover bits of the guide I found within that post as I use them.

Keeping Track of All Loot
One of the biggest pains I’ve run into, personally, is keeping track of what players get for loot. Often times, I would just give players a list of what they find, along with how much they’re worth, and what they are exactly. However, doing this makes the Appraise skill useless, as well as any spells that identify items.

One thing I’ve done in the past to alleviate that little problem was to use the Appraise skill as a sort of haggling skill. Generally, the higher the skill, the better a price the PC can get for an item. This can work to a degree, but it’s still not what the Appraise skill is meant to be used for. Furthermore, you may still have players that will want to RP the entire haggling scene, which one of my players tends to do for just about every single little item.

Bringing the Mystery Back to Loot
The Essential Guide to a GM’s Notebook has one section dedicated to helping you, as a DM, keep track of the loot your players take during their adventures. It includes a table that you can print out and use to keep track of each item a player has, and what information about the item they know about. There’s even a column for the price the PCs think the item is when they make a use of the Appraise skill!

I’ve just barely started using this in my own campaign, and so far it seems to be good. The players have a bunch of items, but they have little information about them, aside from what they generally look like. They have no clue what the values are, nor are they aware of any kind of magical properties. One exception to this, though, is the scrolls. It’s rather obvious that scrolls would be magical, given the writings on them (unless you want to be evil, and make those scrolls letters that someone had written in some odd language). Additionally, since I used the DM Tools Treasure Generator, the generated scroll have some flavor descriptions that come with them, such as the kind of paper they’re made from and even the style of the writing.

More to Come!
As I read more into the guide, I’ll write more about what works well. And I’ll also warn you of anything that may not work so well. However, since it’s a collaborative project, I have a good feeling that the whole guide is full of great tips for DMing, whether it be for D&D or for any other roleplaying system.

You can get The Essential Guide to a GM’s Notebook from its original Google Pages site. However, if there’s any case that it ever goes down, I’m going to make The Essential Guide to a GM’s Notebook available here as well.