Looking for campaign/character management tool
I just started a new campaign with the German system The Dark Eye. It's considered to be THE campaign, the epic one all want to play, that many start and few finish. Estimated play time is about five years, there are even groups that have been playing for ten years. The four main adventures are over 1000 pages long and there are numerous side quests about things you need to know and have...
Fortunately I'm not the GM. Pledging myself as a player for these years is big enough, mastering would be beyond me. So it's a major undertaking. Two of us want to work together to keep a log for our chars. We want to combine forces to make keeping an overview easier for us. But how?
I used to do a lot of character management at Epic Words and loved it. It has everything I need and more, I had a paid account (which you don't need for only two or three groups). But let's not beat about the bush: Epic Words is dead. It's not pining for the fjords, it's dead as a door nail. The Admin hasn't been seen for over a year and even for some time before that it was only sporadically. It's a pity because it's great and I would still pay my yearly fee - if I could...
Then there's Obsidian Portal which is everything Epic Words isn't: it's shiny, it's colorful - and it's expensive if you want to have all features. There is a free version but that lacks quite a lot of features I think you need. But 40$ per year? Maybe once I'm a whale ;) (And let's not talk about the discrepancies happening every now and then between what the developers say will happen and what really happens. Or doesn't happen. I heard it got better though - at least the "Campaign of the month" award recipient hasn't be on the front page for half a year.)
You might say if I don't want all the fancy colors of Obsidian Port - what about Campaign Wiki, here an example in English. It's a wiki - you can writ logs, track NPCs and places, even put in a link to maps. But it's still a simple Wiki... Let's put it that way: I did a lot of coding in assembler in the times of the 6502 processor and there are reasons why I don't do that anymore ;)
And, since we play on Roll20 I could use the forum there. It's not great but you could make it work and it would be close to the game. But again the fear I have with Epic Words: I'm dependend on the GM keeping the group alive...
My final idea: Discord. I could start a server for the group, make channels for the char and the log and the loot and the places. Would be neither elegant nor clearly arranged though.
What do you think? Do you know of other possibilities for managing a character and everything around it?
With the right Bot on discord you will have a dice command so you can do quick roles in discord :)
The Forum of Roll 20 was quite good the last time i used it and dont forgett that you can make notes only for special charakters in roll20 itself .
If you're playing DSA 4.1 in German you could check out https://www.helden-software.de/ for character management. It seems alright, even though I'm no fan of DSA and only played a oneshot – our GM seemed to like it though.
For campaign/story log-keeping I'd just suggest that you would use some kind of text-files and that's it. If kept organized it should work out well.
Text files would be difficult to use with two persons.
And of course Helden Software :)
Maybe try Google Docs, or something http://etherpad.org/ for live collaboration?
Or just upload it to a cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. and give your friends access to download and change the files, if you are certain enough that people can behave themselves (i.e. asking before editing), so that there are no conflicts.
I've personally found good luck with Discord, because it's very good at having spontaneous conversations and allowing you to keep things posted.
A lot of people I know who use Discord will supplement it with Roll20 (who I don't particularly care for), Fantasy Grounds, or another tabletop as needed. I don't remember much about combat in TDE, so I can't say whether or not you'd need that, but I personally found that having fairly simple maps that you just upload into Discord can be helpful.
Another thing I've been messing around with is Dungeonfog, which is a map editor plus player combination. It's not quite as feature complete in other ways, but it would be a fine supplement to Discord and I prefer its layout and systems to Roll20; the mapping tools are fantastic.