A Tool for Fantastical Names

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/18 – 00:00 -

Personally, I’m terrible at generating names. It’s a bit of a chore and I rarely remember the name after I’m done. While TheForge doesn’t help with remembering them it definitely makes coming up with names easy.

“Many times, users are faced with an overwhelming flood of quantity over quality. TheForge eschews this, allowing you to tailor each creation to your exacting specifications. The difference is remarkable, and as many will attest, wholly satisfying.”

The brilliance of the program is subtle at first. You’re presented with options of types of names you want to generate; fantasy names, fantasy beasts, fantasy spells, and fantasy lands. While presently limited to the fantastical TheForge is keen on adding more. Names appear in front of you, and then you start clicking the names you want to change. When you find something you like, lock it. Keep changing everything else until you find something that works. This is where the program really shines; the words all make sense together. It’s not taking two random words and mashing them together it’s artfully combined words that make sense (in a fantastical sense at least). Soon you’ll be throwing the Quartz Form Titans from King’s Crater at your players while they respond by casting Jullavierre’s Weeping Sink to bring crushing despair to their enemies.

With name generating this quick, and keeping track of them in Evernote I may remember the name of the Captain of the Guard longer than he’s present to the players.


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Gaming with Wave or Why I Hate Play-By-Posts

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/16 – 00:00 -

After gushing lovingly about the Savage Mushroom Kingdom, Theron “SlasherEpoch” Seckington of These Dice Look Funny, invited me to partake in a game over Google Wave. Not being one to pass up an opportunity to play the game with the designer himself, and looking for other ways to branch into online play, I began excitedly communicating with him about character ideas. After we began play however I’ve grown a bit of disdain towards Wave as a gaming platform. Theron has been great at corralling all of us together and providing an interesting story so far I can’t but feel a bit far removed from my normal role playing experience. Granted, we’ve only just begun and I do need to give it more time to really sink in, but I couldn’t help but thinking about my experience thus far.

Lack of OOC interaction

What I miss the most is the ability to interact with the other players. While I can have side conversations and engage them out-of-character, it lacks the social aspects of why I love gaming. Even though I do have a great common point with all of them (we all love gaming) I find myself at a loss on how to start a side conversation. The addition of any type of voice chat would definitely add to the interaction level, and facilitate the conversations.  However, getting everyone together would be tough. Granted, if I knew all of them in person and had a chance to play with them before I’m sure this wouldn’t be as big of a deal.

Slow Response Times

One of my biggest complaints with play-by-post games in general is the length it takes for people to respond. I’ve gotten so used to having an immediate response I find myself impatient for things to happen. The reasons of course are simple time, distance, and when we’re on make for slow response times. Unfortunately, it is the nature of the beast and unless we coordinated a time for all of us to be on (which I doubt could be done) there isn’t a way around it. So I stare longingly at my GWave notifier waiting for an update.

Organizational Mess

The Dice of Life has a great post on Gaming with Google Wave which gave some great organizational tips for running your game, like having a table of contents.  The platform however, is still a bit of a mess. What I need are rules of social etiquette.

When should I do an inline reply or when should we start a new wave?

Is it ever OK to edit someone else’s wavelet, or comment in the middle of it?

Most of the etiquette would need to be handled on a per group basis but some guidelines would be appreciated. While so far the game so far has been readable I can easily see it getting out of control. While I look forward to continuing the Savage Mushroom Kingdom game I don’t think I could ever switch to Wave for all of my gaming.

Have you played any games on Wave? Any luck with Savage Worlds or did you find other games worked better?


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Tips for Getting your Game Online

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/09 – 00:00 -

Last Sunday was my first attempt into trying to bring my Savage Worlds game into the 21st Century by moving it online.  Some of my players will be moving out of the state (and one the country) so we were looking to change our play to adapt to the new distance.  While I am big fan of internet technology and generally try to live more and more in the cloud I found the experience frustrating and bit off putting.

Set it all up your stuff a week in advance

It may seem like a bit of a duh but get all of the programs you’ll need to run your game setup well before you play.  I chose to use MapTools for our game as it was free, open source, and generally didn’t annoy me.  That being said it does have some quirks that are not apparently at first, unfortunately, these “quirks “held up the game for an hour while we tried to work them out.

1) Everyone needs to use the same version. Which was something I wasn’t aware of at first; fortunately some of my players also play in another online game and quickly pointed this out to me.  So save some time and use the same version.

2) Just because the program says it can be accessed from the internet doesn’t mean it’s not lying to you. I was never able to host the game.  While the internal tools told me I should be able to host the game no one was ever able to connect.  In the end I had another one of my player’s host the game.  I never figured out why it didn’t work, but I discovered some great port forwarding tutorials at PortForward.com.

3) Careful with maps done in Photoshop. While a minor quibble at this point it was frustrating to put in a map that had been lovingly crafted only to have it not fit the internal grid.  After getting everything is setup, make sure your maps work properly; it’ll really dampen your mood if it doesn’t.

Register all the accounts before hand

Most of my players either didn’t have Skype.  So we spent a good while getting everyone registered, futzing with mics, and generally getting us all on at the same time.  Save yourself some pain and assign some homework to everyone to get the accounts setup and registered well in advance.  Skype has a great built in tool to make sure the mic is on and that you can hear everything.  Use it.  It’ll save you time pretending to be the Verizon wireless guy.  “Can you hear me now?!”

Have you tried to make the transition to online play? What successes or failures have you had?


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Organizing your Hooks

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/02 – 00:00 -

Adventure hooks are a must have for every GM’s arsenal.  A list of quick plots to get you going is amazing when used at the right time, but how do you organize such a beast?  In this digital age everything needs to be categorized, tagable, and searchable.  Take this blog for example, you can search by tag, category or words contained in the post to find what you need.  Google has spoiled us in quickly finding the information we need.  So what is a GM to do? Use Evernote.

Evernote is a powerful note system that is easily accessible from not only your computer but from any mobile device.  This means any time you think of a hook or idea for your game you can quickly note it to access it later.  It makes everything searchable, allowing you to easily find everything.   Organization is a snap, just make a new note and place it under the notebook you want it to be under.

Personally I organize my plot hooks under a simple notebook called “plot hooks” I tag them with monsters that appear in the hook, the system, and some words that might describe it.  As Evernote also allows you to add images, I include pictures of the monsters.  I also link to websites I may need to reference for the hook to work.  This allows me to dump in everything I need to run quick encounter.  Add in another notebook for prebuilt characters and I’m ready to go anytime.

While this is an ideal solution for most organizational needs there is one small snag that you can only upload 40mb a month.  While this is rather paltry in size it does allow for quite a bit of text, just go easy on the pictures.

Overall this product has been great at helping me organize my games and may consider getting a premium account for more upload space.

What tools do you use to organize your games? Pen & Notecards or do you have something a little more digital?


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On a Side Note: How to talk Out-of-Character

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2009/12/03 – 08:00 -

Character voice is the most important tool in a roleplayer’s arsenal. Their speech patterns and vocabulary help create the character at the table, but what happens when you want a snack? How can you signify you are no longer talking as Grognar, mighty chief of the half-orc tribe, but as you the player?

Simple, take your index and middle finger, and place them gently next to your temple.

This now signifies to the rest of the table that you are speaking out-of-character. Hence forth, until you remove your fingers from your temple, anything you say is out of character.

This technique allows for further immersion into the game because everything you say is what your character is saying. The action of speaking out of character reminds everyone at the table that anything else is in character. Since we started using this at our table we have found that people are apt to speak in character more often, and interactions between characters become more commonplace. The Game Master may use this to further his immersion, as he may restrict himself to responding only to what characters specifically say or do, tracking the conversation and narrating appropriately. This rule may also be applied to the GM, as anytime he speaks without using the gesture he is speaking for any present NPC’s. This will force him to focus on his own roleplaying and immersion, as well as that of the players.

Personally I have found this method brings me to a blurry line where players seem to become the character, fully embracing their characters actions and mannerisms, and have become disrupted when players choose to speak out-of-character.

This rule should be enforced to taste, as some of you may be more hardcore about it than others.

How do you signify out-of-character speech?


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Plan Your Next Campaign with a Wiki

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2009/11/04 – 10:00 -

You have this huge idea for a campaign. You’ve spent countless hours jotting down notes and fleshing out NPCs and now you’ve begun play. Your players love it and stories and characters flow forth mightily. You are filling countless notebooks with ideas and stories!

Now how do you keep track of this mess of paper? What if you want to share some notes with another gamemaster to get their feedback? How could your players contribute to the notes that you’ve created? Better yet, how could they contribute to the world you’ve been building?

Create a wiki.

With a wiki you can gather all of your notes, characters, locations, and world building and make whatever you need available to the players for easy reference.

  • It’ll be a place for all your notes. Personally I have a terrible time keeping track of notebooks. I can usually hang on to one long enough to finish a game session, but then it’s misplaced. Using a wiki, I can bring my laptop to the table and make a reference to all notes on the campaign.
  • It’ll be a place for their notes. If your players love to write back-stories for their characters, this will be an excellent place for them to put it. It will allow other players to read it at their leisure and allow you to have a source of inspiration for tailoring adventures to their needs. Plus, it allows a place to keep a character backup.
  • It allows the players to add to the world. As great of a GM as you are (since you are reading our blog, it’s a given) you can’t think of everything. The best way to expand the world you’ve created is to allow your players to add to it. You are going to be surprised with what your players can come up with.
  • It creates one place for all your house rules. Whether as a player or gamemaster, we are forgetful. The question, “How did we decide to run X rule again?”, comes up in every game I play that has house rules. Creating one place to put all your house rules makes dealing with these questions a snap.
  • Webservers are cheap. For a couple of bucks a month you can have your own wiki out there for your players to add to between gaming sessions. And really, isn’t that worth it? If it’s not in your budget you can try setting one up on your personal PC. Lifehacker has a great article on how to get one setup on your personal computer. The draw back to this is that some ISPs do not allow you to run home servers, so you’ll need to check the terms of service for your ISP before setting it up. If that’s the case you can run the server locally, but it does take away the players ability to post to the wiki without being on your personal network. Additionally, you can use a site like WikiSpaces, which will host your wiki for you.

Which wiki software you use is up to you. At Apathy Games we use MediaWiki which works great for us, but if sharing your wiki isn’t important, you may also consider WikidPad, which is open source personal wiki software.

Call to Action: Do you have a favorite program you use to organize your campagin? Got experience using this medium? Let us know in the comments!


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