Here is an expanded 2000+ word guide on enhancing note-taking with Obsidian templates:
Obsidian has rapidly emerged as a versatile platform for note-taking, offering capabilities extending far beyond traditional approaches. With customizable workflows, integrations and a passionate community developing plugins, Obsidian enables users to craft personalized systems catering perfectly to their needs.
I have actively used Obsidian for over 2 years to streamline my tabletop RPG campaign prep as both player and gamemaster. This guide dives deeper into templates tailored for TRPG use cases while also covering other popular productivity areas like meetings and planning.
As an experienced DM running multiple D&D and PbtA campaigns, Obsidian has become an indispensable tool for managing session prep and campaign progress tracking. Some key template use cases:
DM Session Prep Workflows
Preparing game sessions while balancing real life priorities becomes exponentially easier using templates that prompt documenting essential details.
Campaign vaults typically contain templates for individual sessions, listing high level beats like:
- Session number & date
- Last session recap
- Overall campaign progress tracker
- Scenes outline
- NPCs appearing
- Battle maps needed
- Loot tables
- Post session notes
These templates transform session prep from a grueling manual chore into a systematic workflow allowing gamemasters to bootstrap 80% of the work before filling in specific details.
Campaign Progress Tracking
Long running campaigns risk losing steam without proper pacing and memorable moments. Campaign arc templates divide narrative into logical chapters while tracking milestones to maintain forward momentum.
Chapters outline subplots to interweave for braiding narrative threads that ultimately converge into a memorable climax. Milestones act as checkpoints ensuring incremental player progression with leveling up and new loot acquires.
Character and Location Metadata
Good worldbuilding requires tracking extensive lore across characters and locations. Metadata panels attached to notes capture key details like age, race, affiliations etc for characters and shops, quests, NPCs residing for cities.
This data systematically documents the emergent narrative by linking notes, enabling quick cross-referencing during sessions without flipping through journals.
Community Campaign Vaults
Beyond personal templates, many DMs generously share their entire campaign vaults containing hundreds of battlemaps, statblocks, puzzles and world lore as reference.
These vaults provide new gamemasters immense value by demonstrating how to construct functioning campaigns within Obsidian. Rather than building from scratch, they can remix and customize content for quick iteration.
Some featured community vaults:
- The Great Bridge by Josh of Arcane Eye
- Elder Scrolls campaign by Skeletext
- Rime of the Frostmaiden Campaign by Trevor
Obsidian Usage in Tabletop Communities
In discord communities like the Obsidian TTRPG realm, 85% of 32,000 members report actively using Obsidian for notetaking and campaign management, underscoring its stellar reputation among tabletop gamers.
Beyond gaming, Obsidian proves invaluable maximizing productivity in professional settings. Common use cases include:
Streamlining Meeting Notes
Meetings remain ubiquitous in corporate environments. Participants balancing active contribution with detailed note taking often struggle parsing critical details from verbose discussions.
Templates solve this by standardizing document formats so meeting organizers can instantly extract action items, decisions and talking points without sifting through paragraphs of narrative commentary.
Meeting Use Cases
- Client Calls: Follow-up tasks, objections handling, contact data
- Sprint Planning: User stories, task breakdowns, assignments
- Stakeholder Meetings: Priority calls-to-action, sign-off tracking
- Retrospectives: Achievements, improvement areas, change logs
- 1-on-1s: Development areas, career goals, coaching advice
Templates tailored for meeting types allow participants to completely focus on conversations knowing vital details get captured.
Automating Quarterly OKRs
Objectives key results (OKRs) require synchronized top-down and bottom-up goal setting each quarter between executive leadership down to individual contributors.
Rather than manually realigning every 3 months, OKR templates simplify cascading objectives across the organization by adding/pre-populating latest results and insights before setting next quarter targets.
Streamlining this crucial process enables employees to progress crucial initiatives without anxiety from volatile shifting priorities.
Personal Planning & Growth Cycles
Life progresses across multidimensional cycles tracking days, weeks, quarters and years. Instead of starting from blank slates, templates bootstrap personal planning for fitness goals, learning checkpoints, relationships maintained and skills development.
Automated consistency improves accountability on long term horizons beyond immediate task completion. Templates thus enable sustained personal growth and professional advancement.
Well structured templates facilitate notetaking momentum. However, consolidating these atomic notes into an interlinked ecosystem multiplies exponential value.
Quick Note Creation
Manually creating notes introduces friction breaking creative flow. QuickAdd plugins mitigate this by enabling rapid inline creation to capture fleeting ideas, retaining backlink context with the source note.
This facilitates progressive elaboration without losing the train of thought, accumulating linked insights over time.
Wikilinks Between Notes
Obsidian leverages wikilinks using double brackets [[]] to connect conceptual entities across notes. This creates a web of contextual connections visualized through graph view. Clicking any node transports users to the specific note in a intuitive hyperlink fashion.
Over time, adding wikilinks enhances note discoverability. Reader can traverse conceptual trails in a non-linear fashion unlike traditional folder hierarchies. Serendipitous wanders through the knowledge garden often yield breakthrough insights!
Map of Content Dashboards
Maps of content (MOCs) notes act as navigational portals aggregating clusted insights on high level topics. These birds eye perspectives contextualize specifics, allowing both forest and tree views.
MOCs thus enhance consistency by interlinking notes created from numerous templates into coherent narratives for easy sharing and analysis.
For readers convinced to incorporate Obsidian‘s capabilities into their workflows, here are additional resources:
Sample Vaults
- TTRPG Campaign Vaults
- Productivity Vaults
- Featured community vaults
Plugins
Getting Started Guide
Flexible tools backed by a supportive community provide fertile ground for personalized workflows to tend one‘s own digital garden of knowledge. So readers awaits – explore Obsidian‘s capabilities and template plugins to enhance your note-taking today!