MaJunior says:
I would vote for characters grouped by story arc (or "phase" for longer arcs). In RPG's I generally associate characters with what was happening around the time we interacted. It's never, "Steve was who again?" and is almost always, "Who was the priest we met at that fair in town? The one that got overrun by undead."
I tend to fall into this category as well. When I take notes, I have it filter into a database of all important NPCs and lore, but I tend to find the easiest way to pinpoint an important piece of information is to think about what was going on in the story when it was first encountered and start there in my notes. I use Notion for my D&D notes so it’s easy to link database pages to my session notes and I end up having a log in more than one organization method. For the sake of the forum, I think organizing by chapter of discovery is probably best.