I'm a brand new DM with zero experience in the field, though I have played a few campaigns as a player. My first campaign is almost finished, at least for the plot/writing/arc parts. My problem now is: how do I set it up at the table?
To make a very long story as short as possible, here's what I wanna do (and don't know how to): I need a software solution for my data back end in session. I don't do online sessions with my group, we're old fashioned that way. My setup is my DM screen, my books, my minis, my props and my laptop. The laptop should be there for notes and tables. And that's where the problem starts.
I need some kind of notation software to manage sessions, to serve as a kind of wiki for my world building, lore, zettelkasten/database for NPCs and to quickly throw a dialogue scene or a random encounter together if needed. All the front end stuff, like dice rolls, initiative tracker and combat stuff I can do manually.
Here's a use case scenario: My party decides to go off the beaten path. At a fork in the road they decide to go neither left nor right, but through the woods in a southern direction. I know that this will lead them into tribe territory. While I let the scout roll for stealth and perception, I wanna quickly look up the lore of the southern faction of the tribespeople that I wrote a few nights earlier into my campaign-wiki. Since the scout rolled really badly, I immediately call for initiative and type the name of the tribe into my software. I pull out some prepared stat blocks for a barbarian, two archers and a druid of said tribe. During combat I choose the appropriate loot table from my templates or improvise. Since all the data is on my laptop, I avoid losing ten minutes skimming trough a few dozen pieces of paper in four different binders and kill the mood of the session while two of the players go outside for a cigarette and another starts a phonecall.
That's the dream. Up until this moment I wasted two weeks trying to learn Obsidian.md, which seemed to offer the perfect solution (interconnected notes, quickly linkable pages/paths, zettelkasten principle, clear data structure,...), but all the tutorial people on YouTube are overshooting my goals by a mile and a half. I need data management and quick accessibility, not a sentient A.I. running online campaigns on it's own on four different monitors (sorry for the exaggerations, it's kinda my thing). I'm no tech genius. I can't code shit.
How do you handle this? Is there already a solution for this problem? Where do I start? How do I keep it simple without losing comfort and versatility?
