An Obsidian Philosophy for Life

Obsidian won’t last forever. Even their CEO agrees¹. To acknowledge that, Steph proposes a philosophy called file over app. In this article, I’ll propose my own variation to help guide how we use Obsidian for RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons.

An easy way to think about file over app is to focus on writing notes that don’t need Obsidian to be valuable. We can easily take our data elsewhere and still read/edit it. With Obsidian being based on local markdown files, we’re off to a great start.

But some of the power of Obsidian comes at a cost of violating this philosophy. The application extends the usage of basic markdown files through core features and community plugins. These unlock amazing opportunities but present us with a host of problems if we’re not careful.

You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. - Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian

The main issue is that a handful of plugins require adding syntax to our notes which is rendered mostly useless without Obsidian. I love a good keyed map but without Obsidian and the Leaflet plugin, the actual note section required is worthless. Is that really a problem? Not right now for most of us. But what if we want to look back over our notes in a few decades and Obsidian is long gone? This is where I think an extension of the file over app philosophy can help us.

Archival Over Application

For my notes, I want an archive. In the future, I want to be able to look back on and enjoy my setting and stories. Local plain text markdown files help with that. But I want to protect these files from “junk” that I can’t use without Obsidian. These are archival notes. Examples:

• Adventure Logs
• Characters
• Items
• Locations
• Lore

But I’m a fan of a few Obsidian plugins and believe they add value to my games today. I consider notes or files needed for these to be application in nature. These will likely contain some markdown, some syntax required for a plugin, or be entirely in json format. I can appreciate that these help me today but might be relatively useless a decade from now. Examples:

• Dice roller syntax
• GM Screen functionality
• Index files using Dataview queries
• Keyed Maps using Leaflet syntax
• Template files

Archival over application starts with the prioritization of creating archival notes over application notes. But prioritization isn’t enough. Letting application quirks bleed into archival notes will violate our principle. Therefore we need to protect archival notes with a separation of concerns. Application syntax and notes can reference archival notes. Archival notes should not reference application syntax or notes.

This philosophy will guide us and our notes towards maintaining archives for the future while enjoying the power and excitement of Obsidian today. File over app. Archival over application.

Game on.

1. From File over app by Steph Ango on their personal website, 2023 July 1.↩︎