In response to “Speeding Up Item Management,” Jason pointed out that handling game-related activities over email doesn’t tend to work well for more than about a month. I thought this was a very good point, and it got me to thinking about the perks and pitfalls of using the net for your game.
For day 7 of the Blogging for GMs project, I’d like to pose a two-part open question to GMs: what are some good ways to use the internet for your game — and what are the most common problems that come up?
I’ll start things off with a couple of lists. The first one offers a variety of ways to use the net for your game:
- Play your game entirely online (play by email, play by post, via chat, etc.).
- Run a campaign website or wiki (see “Running a Campaign Website” here on TT for some ideas).
- Have a messageboard (or blog) for your group.
- Schedule game sessions.
- Do research and download material for your game.
- Handle item management between sessions (“Speeding Up Item Management“).
- Post XP and deal with out-of-game activities like levelling up.
- Use generators to create NPCs.
…and the second covers some of the common problems that tend to crop up:
- One or more players doesn’t have regular net access.
- Not everyone checks their email (or visits your site, or board, etc.) regularly.
- Keeping a website or blog up to date for your group can feel more like work (and less like fun).
- It’s easy to spend more time dealing with game-related things online than you expected (or is that just me?).
Most of the problems I can think of are related to the group-oriented activities (like having a campaign website), not to the more individual ones (like doing research). This is largely because while the individual stuff is pretty discretionary — there are lots of ways you can do research without the net — things like keeping up a messageboard involve more buy-in on the part of the whole group to make them worthwhile.
Do you use the net for your game? Which approach (or approaches) do you take? What problems have you encountered, and how have you solved them? And lastly, I’m sure I’ve left things off of both lists (maybe even something blindingly obvious!) — if you have anything to add to either of them, include it in the comments!
Good lists. As I tend to feed off the interest of the players, the more pre- and post-game involvement that happens, the happier and more excited I am to work on the game. Be it answering questions, commenting on backgrounds, or working on nefarious “secret stuff” that happens behind the scenes, that all helps to keep my energy level (and interest) in the campaign high.
Players who you hardly ever hear from online during the course of a week (such as my current group, no offense), really kind of dampen that enthusiasm. I can’t begrudge people for their priorities, however.
In short, I rise to the level of interest dictated by the players; my “online door” is always open. 😉 I’ve spent too much energy trying to foster these types of creative environments in the past — and been subsequently disappointed by turnout — to go down that path again.
As an aside, item management is never a concern for me. I totally handwave that part to focus on the game and why we’re there to play, regardless of the medium.
We use the blog for our group; mostly scheduling game sessions & occassional item management. I know our GM uses online generators (I’ve linked them for his convenience). And many of your second list (limited net access, etc.) concerns have applied to one member or another at some time.
In the past I’ve kept campaign logs (and as a GM had my players do the same); after a few sessions we usually abandon it. (It becomes work.)
So I don’t really contribute anything new, just reaffirming your suspicions. Unfortunately.
As much as I love using the Internet for gaming, most of my players just don’t seem interested enough. As we all live in three different towns, it would make life much, much easier if they could get interested. I have tried to generate interest in them, but it just doesn’t seem to work, and I don’t want to feel like I am forcing them to do it.
I ran a d20 Modern game called Heist where the players were professional thieves. I set the sessions up, so that the first session of a new job, was all recon and intelligence gathering.
Then between the first and second session, the players would meet by email group on Yahoo Groups, and discuss how to plan the heist. This would give them over a week to plan their job.
Then at the next session, they would execute their plan.
It worked great. As the GM, I did not have to sit around at the table as they tried to plan an elaborate heist. Also, the players were not rushed to come up with a plan, they could really work the details out.
In addition in that same campaign, I used the email group to conduct some Player-NPC discussions that I did not think I could do as well face to face.
In the game one of the players (male) had a girlfriend who had dumped him at the opening of the campaign. During the course of the campaign he worked to win her back, and eventually had to confess to her what he did for a living, as well as his newly developed drug habit.
By doing the more serious dialog by email, we were able to keep a much more serious tone, and did not feel uncomfortable trying to do it across the screen.
In my experience email groups work fine, but every now and then you have to kick the conversation back into play, if people loose focus. My best advice for putting some of your game on Internet, is:
1. Only do a little bit of material online. The time it takes to send and receive email, especially if one person is not online during the day, is going to take a while. So only do one small scene a week.
2. Have a deadline for when the online portion will be done. This helps the players focus and they know that they have to get stuff done before the deadline.
When I ran an offline D&D campaign as DM, our group used both a mailing lists and a Wiki.
A mailing lists are mainly used by DM for notification of playing schedule, requests for discussion on Wiki.
A Wiki is used for logging of campaign plays, PC/NPC data and description, notification of house rules, discussion. Wiki is a very useful tool to run a campaign. If some players writes frequently, it becomes much more useful.
Of course some members did not write mails/Wiki frequently, and it was an irritating issue.
Other topics. Online SRD is useful to quote rules to answer the question about rules. Some random charts on internet are also useful for DM. I also made some such kind of tools (see my webpage).
Both my wife and I run games (my own is home-brewed and her’s Eberron). Mine has been put off for a while so that I could play in hers.
I created the websites for both and I also have a blog and we are all on an email list.
We use email for creating a weekly meeting schedule and handing out XP. The Blog is used for quick links to new items on the webpages, as it is hard to have all the players checking all the parts of the sites regularly. I enjoy keeping my websites up to date, so I add stuff all the time.
To mirror Takashi’s comment, the online SRDs out there are great for everyone to have for a quick reference of basic rules. I also have links to all house rules and game history (each game is summerized and posted). Two of the four players, and the DM, have laptops at the table so it easy to check things on these sites.
Though it is hard to keep the players checking this stuff all the time (priorities and all), if you keep all new stuff easy to access, the players won’t find themselves digging through the big pile for little bits of info.
I think using all the technology you have access to is the best way to play, in my opinion. We want to get the most of the little time we have to play, and being informed and prepared is the best way to do it.
Sorry about my lack of response on this one — our internet connection has been down all weekend (boooo!). The irony of not being able to respond to comments about using the internet for your game because I can’t go online isn’t lost on me, either. 😉
Don: With groups that are less interested in doing gaming stuff online, have you come up with any tricks to increase their interest that worked partivularly well?
Phil, the two tips at the end of your comment seem to match up pretty well with Scott’s problem of keeping campaign logs seeming like work after awhile. I’ve run into that same problem in the past, and your advice would have been very helpful to me.
(EK) I have tried to generate interest in them, but it just doesn’t seem to work, and I don’t want to feel like I am forcing them to do it.
I think this is the right approach on your part (don’t force things) — and that there’s no good solution to this problem. The only thing I’ve come up with that had any success was offering in-game rewards, and even that didn’t motivate everyone.
Takashi: I tried to visit your site, and the link comes back 404’d — can you post the URL in a comment?
Douglas: Your suggestion about using one blog to point your groups to your campaign sites is excellent. 🙂
Cayzle: Good links, thank you!
I actually started doing session logs in the 1990’s as a way to keep track of who the party had offended/befriended and what equipment they had accumulated. The logs were a GM tracking tool, basically, done with MS Word. Discovering old logs, though, proved entertaining, and so I decided to make the logs available to the players via the Web.
So since 2000, whenever I’ve been GM, I’ve posted the session logs to the Web. The players have, overall, enjoyed the logs–especially as something to read while bored at work. Sometimes the logs have been useful in catching up new players to the current situation. (Of course, reading about someone else’s adventure is never as fun as reading about your own.)
Keeping the session logs up to date has been a challenge. It’s *work* to recall the significant parts of what happened and write it up in a somewhat interesting/at-least-readable fashion. I’ve found, though, that if I combine the log writing for last week with the preparation for this week, I can get both done in a reasonable timeframe.
I’m not GM-ing right now as I’m enjoying one of the rare chances I get to be a player, but when I do start running again, I’ve decided I will use a combination of Wiki and blog. I’ve become very comfortable with those technologies over the past year, and can see how they would be great for campaign organization.
-David
(David) Keeping the session logs up to date has been a challenge. It’s *work* to recall the significant parts of what happened and write it up in a somewhat interesting/at-least-readable fashion. I’ve found, though, that if I combine the log writing for last week with the preparation for this week, I can get both done in a reasonable timeframe.
Back when I was writing session logs (which I always think of as “campaign journals”), it usually took me as long to write each one as it did to play one session — about 6 hours. In the end, too much work — but I learned a lot about how I would do it differently, if I were to do it again.
Right now, I maintain 3 mailing lists for the 3 different games I play in. Those are used to communicate with the group.
We rotate DM’s in one of the groups I’m in and I put together a site for my homebrew with much info in nicely hyperlinked pages. It didn’t get a lot of hits so I wound up not maintaining it for any real length of time.
So mostly the internet helps my game by being a souce of discussion with other GMs/Players
I have used mailing lists to organize the games I’ve run. Following an adventure, I would make a short “Previously, on D&D” summary that hit the highlights and send it out to everyone. I found that it was useful for keeping players focused.
I also discovered that the list was useful for managing certain less fascinating aspects of the game. It was a good forum for discussing requests for rules tweaks, questions about the setting, and character development. While this can all be done in person, having a written forum allowed for us all to organize our thoughts in such a way that we felt we were better communicating.
I’ve given thought to running a campaign website, but I honestly don’t see myself having the proper level of committment.
For those of you who’ve mentioned mailing lists, how do you think they stack up to, say, creating a Google or Yahoo! group for your game? I’ve never had sufficient player interest to try that approach, but I’ve always been curious about it.
I can’t believe I overlooked this thread, as I consider myself to be a “modern DM” and have much to add. In fact, one of my DM screens is the back of my laptop.
Martin: Our group happens to use a Yahoo group as it’s primarly “internet presence”. We use this as a place to house game files, both document and images, as well as emailing. I love using images to sometimes convey a person or setting. On that note, Google image search is the best thing since sliced bread. If your interested, I could direct you to our group to see it’s layout.
I find that playing online in our group just doesn’t work. The social factor is key, and it’s just not the same virtually. I do play the excellent World of Warcraft with a few of the players time to time, but obviously this is apples to oranges as comparisons go. I feel bad for one player who really loved D&D but moved 150 miles away. He’s always asking me to champion a online D&D game, but I know it wont work as it doesnt even compel me to try it.
We have like 6 active players in our group, and this gives us the full spectrum of users of email. At one end we have 2 players that respond to each and every email, usually in short order. On the other is one guy who never checks, and beyond that, a guy who *can’t check because his work blocks all emails from @yahoo. We could get around this, but don’t want to cause trouble at his work (they read emails).
Before my work locked down Instant Messaging (thank you, hackers of the world) I would communicate with one or two of the players during the work day 🙂 In fact, we would carry out detailed conversations in character on many occasions. It was a fun diversion in the dreary realm of programming/maintaining tax processing systems.
Other resources I use from the Web:
http://www.20000-names.com Need some NPC names? This site has got countless ones sorted by ethnicity. Weather your running a game in ancient Egypt or Medieval Denmark, you can find some authentic names. Be sure to have your pop-blocker running before going tho.
You can cache pages of interest from the web and save them for the game. (Cut n paste works too). I like to keep useful articles minimized on the task bar to pop them up during the game. When the game starts, I load them all up and just minimize them till later.
I also use the web to mine for occasional sound effects.
This is all on top of the usual sites like this one, EnWorld, and others. 🙂
That 20,000 names site looks like a great resource, Judas — thanks!
For the group I’m running, we’re using a mailing list, a website, and a wiki for a fantasy d20 game.
The group is a bit unusual when it comes to internet access though: All of the players are minors (ages from 10-14), so they don’t have unfettered access to the internet under any circumstance, and most of them have little or no access to email.
The mailing list I use to communicate with the parents of the players, so the traffic is low volume and deals primarily with scheduling and reminders for who’s bringing snacks. I use the website to provide general information about role-playing and the game, and a mostly-running history of events in the game world (with contributions from the kids, encouraged using experience points). The wiki is currently private, and I use it to make my notes about the world. Notes are simply easier to keep those in a hypertext where links are easy to create and information can be added incrementally. Having it online makes it really easy for me since I often use different computers, and most don’t have my software of choice installed. Maps remain on paper for now.
Were the players not minors, I’d probably have a second wiki instead of the conventional website, and let them update it directly (and I’d probably not need to push the experience-for-writing so much).
On the whole, I think the current arrangement has been a success. It has been a lot of work, even though I was already running a web server, mostly because there was a lot of content that I thought needed to be written. On the other hand, I’ve now set up and customized a wiki, so I know a bit more how to get things done with the software I chose for that.
That’s an unusual situation, Fred, and it definitely sounds like a lot of work!
Indeed. On the other hand, it’s given me an excuse to come back to gaming even though I’m “one of the old ones” now. I’d been away for 25 years, and now that my oldest child is old enough to play, I’m getting to build a new world and do things with it that I’d not a clue about when I was playing the first time. The work does pay off when I see the kids having fun and get into their characters.
(Fred) The work does pay off when I see the kids having fun and get into their characters.
Absolutely. When I devoted a lot of time to my campaign website, I was jazzed about it when people enjoyed it, and not very jazzed about it when they didn’t seem interested. I know that’s not quite what you’re getting at, but for me part of the reward of the extra work — the site — was seeing people use it.