Hoard of the Dragon Queen on sale!

[damned]

Definitely it takes practice (and feedback) for most of us to get better as GMs.
Playing with other GMs when you can also helps a lot.
And yeah - while GMing is often a lot of work it can be a lot of fun too.

[Zacchaeus]

Doug, is there a definitive FAQ on what updates do to story entries, and how we can stop changes (or in fact include them) on edits we've made per each campaign?

Not as far as I know. What you need to separate in your mind is the difference between a module and a campaign. You can't change a module. So if you take let's say Lost Mines of Phandelver the text of that will never change unless there is an update to that actual module. It will sit in your library and it will only ever change if there's an update to something in it.

If you open that module in a campaign then everything in that module is fixed at the time you open it in that campaign. You can change things, edit them, add new stuff but none of that will ever change the Lost Mines module in your library. All you are changing is the campaign. If you were to open a new campaign and open up Lost Mines none of the changes you have made will be reflected there. Even if Lost Mines gets updated that won't change your campaign automatically. Your campaign will stay the same unless you want to embrace the changes made to the underlying module.

You can do this in two ways; open up your library and find the module and then right click and select 'revert changes'. This will put everything back to what it was; so any changes you made to any story entries, npcs encounters etc will all revert back to what they were at the start of your campaign. The only things which won't change in the campaign are things you have added. So if you added a bunch of new story entries or npcs then they will stay the same - but anything you changed in an existing story will disappear.

The second thing you can do is 'revert changes' on individual story entries, npcs, etc by right clicking on the little story book and pen entry in the dialog. This will only revert any changes to that particular entry not the whole module.

[Moon Wizard]

The only clarification I will make on what Zacchaeus said is that the module is fixed based on what is currently released, not based on the start of the campaign.

If you make edits to the module story text, that will override the module text regardless of which version is installed.

If you want to use the currently released version, use the Revert right menu click option on an on individual record or on the whole module.

Cheers,
JPG