In the past, I’ve advocated not selling off old gaming books and taking pictures of your sessions. The same goes for your notes.
When it comes to your GMing notes, campaign notes, adventure ideas, half-finished map doodles and other paperwork, be a packrat. Stick them in a folder in a drawer in your garage, suspecting you’ll never need them again, but don’t throw them away.
I miss nearly every pile of campaign notes I’ve ever tossed, and even the drivel has value — if you can recognize that it was drivel, you’ve learned something from it.
AARGH! When will you kids clean your room???? OK, that’s the dad and neat freak in me when I see such comments.
Have you ever had to clean out the house of a dead relative and go through piles and piles of stuff they horded over the years and could never part with?
Save the sanity of your future decendants with these simple steps:
1) Buy a scanner
2) Scan all your precious documents
3) Catalog your documents into a database
4) Put the documents on CD-ROMs or very large storage system
You then know where it is, can search and sort what you’re looking for, and you still have room in the garage for your car.
I lean towards Bento, for the same reasons that I toss potentially useful (but long unused) stuff in real life.
Sure, there may be a cost hit when I duplicate the purchase (or the design effort), but in between, I’ve saved myself a little effort every time I clean. Since that happens much more often and is much less fun… I’ll toss the potentially useful. [Unless I’ve archived it in a useful way… which, if it’s good enough, I do.]
Is there campaign notes stuff I wish I had not tossed? Sure, but only a tiny bit, and that mostly character sheets. Campaign notes of real use I do tend to keep (but I tend not to generate all that much).
I do periodic cleaning of old notes. If a year or two later, there is nothing really intelligible or useful on a sheet of paper, I’ll toss it.
Frank
When a campaign finishes, I go through the two or three, 1 inch binders and consolidate. (That’s an average of one binder per year the campaign runs–each about 75% full.) I often have many pages with one decent sentence on them. It’s a pleasant way to spend a rainy, winter afternoon. By the time I’m done, I’m down to something that fits comfortably in one binder. I have a single box I store those binders in (in the attic), and a single slot on the bookshelf for the most recent one.
I found that when I kept everything, it was useless–because who wants to wade through chicken scratch a decade later? The consolidated version is actually worth keeping.
These are all better solutions than my usual binary system. 0: Throw it all away. 1: Keep everything. 😉