this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Discussion of table top roleplaying games.

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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by paddirn@lemmy.world to c/rpg@lemmy.ml
 

I've been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven't really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I've looked at has some sort of weird thing that's off about it that doesn't seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here's what I've looked at so far:

  • Folder system: This is what I'm already using and it's serviceable (PC), but it really doesn't give me any tagging function and so it's hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go.

  • Calibre: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I'm not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app).

  • Jellyfin: Really not geared towards books in general, it's functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can't get anything else working.

  • Kavita: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me.

  • Komga: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn't work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder.

  • Ubooquity: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn't seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn't seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn't particularly care for it.

  • Zotero: It's actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it's not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn't display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can't just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional 'Book' object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven't figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a 'Journal Article' and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I've already gotten most file names where I want them.

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TagSpaces is a cross-platform file browser that operates very similarly to a regular file browser except it supports tags

If you're just using Windows files.community does something similar with a tighter integration with Windows

The benefit of both is that all their organization features sit on top of the regular file system so you can continue using the organization you have already

[–] tenebrisnox 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have you considered keeping (or tweaking) your current folder system and putting it in an Obsidian vault?

The advantages are that you’d still be able to keep your pdfs as they but also tag and link them. (And if you doing like Obsidian you keep your files untouched.) Obsidian has lots of plugins that would help. Plus the Obsidian community has lots of TTRPG-ers who do some amazing things in Obsidian. And it’s all free.

[–] paddirn@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I actually did try doing it through Obsidian for awhile, but the add-ons I tried using with it somehow made it slow to a crawl (literally +10 minutes on start-up) and I couldn't get it to work well.

[–] tenebrisnox 1 points 10 months ago

I’ve had that happen to me. Usually a sign that one of the plugins hasn’t been updated for a newer version of Obsidian.

I’m interested in what you ended up choosing to do (if you have).

[–] wordman@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I use Leap (https://ironicsoftware.com/leap/). One of its better features is that it works great on top of any “folder system”, or even multiple folder systems. Also uses the metadata/tagging system of the OS, so plays nice with other tools.

[–] paddirn@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Unless I'm seeing it wrong, it appears to only work on macOS? It looks nice and I use a mac for work, but all my personal stuff is on a PC. That's one other stipulation I probably should've mentioned.

[–] Dagamant@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Depending on your technical know how, a personal cloud storage solution like nextcloud or own cloud might be a good option. I run nextcloud in a docker container with the storage mounted in my home directory and it lets me easily search, organize, and store hundreds of Ttrpg PDFs and I can give players access to books when needed.