Labour-saving Tools That Aren't

The scan-and-shred exercise reached a new and annoying phase at the weekend - I found myself dealing with the materials generated by a Vampire chronicle I ran in the early 2000's called "Shades of Black". It was actually quite a good campaign, and quite fun revisiting the old character sheets.

But what was so annoying about this one was that, unlike many of the others, I had generated all of my campaign materials, including a great many NPC stats, on a PC in the first place. So the scanning effort should have been minimal - note any changes, and then get rid of a big pile of paper.

Unfortunately, where it went wrong was that I had generated all those notes using an old electronic tool for V:tM that White Wolf put out at the time. That was a decade and a half, and two PCs, ago. And the problem was that the tool saved the generated files at some random location on my hard drive in some custom format... and of course the files were therefore lost when that PC was retired. (I have no idea if the tools would even work with my new PC, or if they're dependent on something in an old Windows that has now been retired. Funnily enough, I have no burning desire to find out.)

The upshot of this is that the "labour-saving" tool generated an additional job for me to do. Great.

(In fairness, I think it did save me some effort at the time, in that the notes were easier to generate and format using the tool. Slightly.)

I also spent a little time scanning character sheets from a run-through of "The Sunless Citadel" that I ran when 3e first came out. These, similarly, were generated by an electronic tool that again saved the files in an arbitrary location and in a custom format - and so were also lost in a PC transition.

The upshot is that I've more or less come to the conclusion that the best tools for RPG use on PCs are pretty much just Word for campaign notes, editable PDF forms for PC storage, and PDFs of the books for viewing. Anything that uses a custom format is just more hassle than it's worth - even if you can just print the resulting data straight to PDF, in doing so you probably lose the ability to easily edit the resulting file.

There's no great underlying point to all this, of course. Mostly it's just a rant.