Stumbling into the realm of video. We’re starting off with a quick run through of what FreeMind looks like and how you can use it for effective brainstorming.
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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I’ve been planning my campaign with FreeMind for about two years now, and it’s great. It beats to shame all other toos I tried to use: handwriting in a pad, Word documents, bulleted lists, whatever.
I find it really makes it easy to first lay out the general structure of the campaign and then delve into greater detail, up to the point you have the complete campaign notes.
Besides campaign planning, I find it very handy for reference while running games. It’s easy to hide all branches unrelated to the session you’re currently running, so that you have onscreen the full information about the current session (story parts, NPC stats, tips about what to do if players react in different ways, etc).
With Freemind and InitTool, it makes me wonder how could I ever have been gamemastering before getting my first laptop.
amatrain, welcome to the site!
For some reason, I never use FreeMind for running sessions from. I usually port my initial brainstorm into The Journal and store everything there. But this diversity of approach is just another symbol of why it’s a great tool. You can use FreeMind any number of ways. And still get great use of it.
InitTool I have yet to use, but I’m going to be trying that very soon.
Thanks for sharing!
Good example of how to use mind-mapping for brainstorming/game prep.
Personally, I prefer Conceptdraw to Freemind.
Thanks for stopping by Stuart! I haven’t used ConceptDraw at all, but that’s yet another cool piece of software to add to my growing list of RPG tools.
Is there any way of making the video full screen, because I can barely see it and my resolution is at 800×600.
I’ll look into this. I’m n00b with FLV, but I’ll pick it up fast, promise!
Oh, it’s a flash video, well then I’m set personally, because I have DownloadHelper extension that lets me grab FLVs from YouTube and elsewhere, and VLC player to play them full screen.