Go pester him in Z day Radavel, he'll do a dissertation I'm sure.
I wrote about 6 long bleedin' posts on a thread telling anyone who was interested how I do those maps and I just can't find it. Swallowed in the archives and I can't search it.
I wrote about 6 long bleedin' posts on a thread telling anyone who was interested how I do those maps and I just can't find it. Swallowed in the archives and I can't search it.
~shakes my head sadly and makes a "tisk, tisk" noise~ See! Next time save the info to your hard drive. ~grins and runs~
For anyone that doesn't use Adobe commercially or who isn't keen on learning the secrets thereof, Campaign Cartographer 2 looks pretty awesome.
First of all. I have dual display (screenshot is linkified), so I can draw stuff and surf the boards at the same time. This is absolutely essential to PBP mapping. Hehe. A bottle of Heineken and a quiet room can also be very beneficial.
Nice, Kruelaid! I'm trying to plumb the depths of Illustrator, and your work is quite inspiring!
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First of all. I have dual display (screenshot is linkified), so I can draw stuff and surf the boards at the same time. This is absolutely essential to PBP mapping. Hehe. A bottle of Heineken and a quiet room can also be very beneficial.Nice, Kruelaid! I'm trying to plumb the depths of Illustrator, and your work is quite inspiring!
Wow, Lilith, thanks!
For anyone who is trying to learn Adobe software, consider TOTAL TRAINING's DVDs - the lessons for earlier versions are reasonable. I learned Illustrator the hard way, but their Photoshop tutorial saved me months of muddling around.
Also, I've said this a few times, buying earlier versions of Adobe products is fairly easy (Like Illustrator 11 & 12) these days. My new job affords me use of CS3, but I learned on a bootleg copy of 10 then picked up 11 on the cheap in Vancouver a few years later.
The difference between using a graphics illustrator program like Corel Draw or Photoshop or Illustrator, and using Campaign Cartographer 2, is that you are learning to use a program that is incredibly flexible, and the limitations are your skill and desire to learn the tricks, rather than the limitations of the graphic elements in the package.
Anyone who has just started mapping should go here first for advice.
...
Have you seen my PC for Appalachee Jihad? Illustrator.
Which program of adobe? And how much does it cost?
Kruelaid, where do you store your online maps and stuff? I despise Yahoo flikr and Photobucket is causing one of my players problems. I would like a good place to store my maps, handouts, and illustartions that are needed for my PBP games.
Kruelaid, where do you store your online maps and stuff? I despise Yahoo flikr and Photobucket is causing one of my players problems. I would like a good place to store my maps, handouts, and illustartions that are needed for my PBP games.
Photobucket first. Google's Picasa when photobucket is down. There was another one that works well, but I forgot it.
Thanks!
Also, check out this guy's maps. I think that's Campaign Cartographer.
There are also a few other guys who do really nice mapping and post on these boards, so if anyone can link them, please do so. I can't remember where or how to find their stuff.
Thanks!
You can Google for free picture posting sites that are ad funded. Then post something and see if your player can get the links.
Thanks!You can Google for free picture posting sites that are ad funded. Then post something and see if your player can get the links.
I shall do. I really like Photobucket, but it made Chris Mortika's comp go wonkie, so I was looking at alternatives. I think I may like Picasa, but only time will tell.
And for anyone just coming in:
Lilith's awesome site which will be overhauled soon, right Lilith?
NPCs galore (Thanks Patrick)
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My experiences with PbP are mostly positive although I have to agree that it really depends on the commitment of the DM and players to post and see it through. My gaming group play mainly on a small site called d20 Universe, which I found when I was trying to organize my first PbP. Since then, our group (who often find it hard to meet up regularly) have shifted most of our gaming online, and while I still prefer face-to-face games, there have been definite improvements in play as a result of switching to PbP. As is often noticed, there is a big boost in roleplay online, especially from my more roleplay-shy, power-game happy players. The specialized forum software at d20 gives us a few simple tools like mapboards, private forums, and an inbuilt dice roller which make it really easy to DM and the looser time constraints of PbP has resulted in almost every member of our group trying their hand at running games, rather than our tabletop meetings where I wind up DMing 90% of the time. This variety of DMs has lead to an even wider variety of game ideas, with DMs running exactly what they want producing everything from the relatively mundane monster party to Mutants and Masterminds, homebrew post-apocalyptica d20, Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia. While the PbP games do have a roughly 60% failure rate (overall that is; it has been found that some people are chronically unable to get their games onto the third page...) the players are always ready to try the next crazy campaign idea and the games that do live haven't stopped rolling yet, even 2 1/2 years later.
While we have met few players from outside our weekly gaming group and they usually only join a campaign or two, they are accepted well and help provide even more incentive to roleplay properly. Beyond this, I have used the accessible-from home/school/work and anonymously secure nature of the PbP games to lure in many new players, including several female friends who were somewhat reluctant to venture into the often-uncomfortable tabletop environment of pizza crumbs, manuals everywhere, and laughing gamers (because we can only maintain one regular game, our average party size is 8 characters, often with up to 10 players...). The majority of these "inductees" have graduated to our face-to-face games, and even those who haven't continue to enjoy their online roleplaying.
Recently I've started experimenting with different types of PbP, especially the concept of Player-vs-Player or multi-party games, which our online group seems obsessed with, to the point where it is now widespread to have games where each player keeps to their own private forum, communicating with other players through the DM. Because the players are largely unaware of which characters are PCs or NPCs, there is an even higher level of roleplay and alot of individual character development as well as PC-NPC relationships (you can be alot more well-mannered with your fighter henchman when he could well be your best friend). The PbP premise has even been shown to stand up well when used to run homebrew Turn-Based Strategy games and I have even started a "Living" campaign set in my homebrew world where players from about 10 different face-to-face, PbP and play-by-email games are involved in a single "instance" of the world, starting scattered across a large continent and gradually knocking sparks off/teaming up with each other as the game progresses, with some well-trusted players running higher-level solo games as adventurer-organizing Guildmasters (ala Gandalf) and "Evil Overlords". Having an imaginative and sadistic player organize your BBEG's plans for you takes away a bunch of work and makes sure he's a match for the many parties of players. That game, while it suffers more than most from the occasional case of critical-player-interest-collapse, is still going strong and being able to watch my formerly-united players scheming against each other is a reward all of itself. The bulk of PbP games though, are just traditional homebrew d20 fantasy games with 3-6 players, and while they do take a [u]long[/u] time to move through roleplay interactions, the policy seems to be that if you join enough games (I'm running about 7 PbPs in addition to playing in 5 or so) there will almost always be something to post on, even if 5 of them go dormant or dead. Recently I even managed to get into a game here at Paizo, Sharoth's Castle Whiterock, and that has provided me a (very) welcome break from my familiar group of players and let me hang out with a bunch of people who inspire me to improve my PC roleplaying, something which has sat dormant during long stretches as DM. Despite difficulty getting useful stuff like maps onto the boards, Sharoth has done an awesome job at scouting out the resources and I'm loving that game so far.
So yeah, PbP is assuredly a different beast from traditional games, but it often enables fresh roleplay, Dming, or participation from those who normally wouldn't or couldn't do so, and it gives you and others the oppurtunity to explore fresh and wacky campaign ideas without being hampered by real-life logistics.
TWB
EDIT: *inspects post*... talk about tl;dr. Sorry folks.
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I GM a PbP game over on ENWorld. It is Burnt Offerings, and had initially 5 players. We are down now to 4 players, after about 6 months of play. The player that fell away had a really interesting character concept that I enjoyed, but one day he just stopped posting.
Anyway, my observations are as follows:
Player Involvement As GM you need to force the game a bit more, and that can mean that you define very clearly the required player involvement (e.g. all players must be able to post once per day during the working week, with any absences to be posted to the OOC thread). Then, if they don't post, you need to take control of their character for that day, trying to keep them faithful to the way the player has been controlling them. You cannot wait. If you have 3 good posters waiting on 1 bad, or even if the failed poster rotates randomly, you could easily double the time it takes to get the game going. So, when there is a gap, take control, and move things on.
Making Decisions You can easily lose a few days just waiting for the party to come to an agreement of which door to open next. Avoid this by stating that you need a decision soon, and will take the first decision if no consensus is reached within the day. Players do not want to wait for all four people to agree that room C is the next room on the list. They want to burst in there and get roleplaying or fighting with the next challenge.
Keep it Interesting Player's input can wane on occassion, but the best way to avoid this is to keep the game interesting. Make sure your own posts are reasonably descriptive. Include challenges that test all of the players in different ways. Tie them into the story. In ours, we have a barbarian who is in lust with an NPC and is pretty much trying to save the town to impress her (and get her father's permission to pursue). We have another who was a scallywag, always in trouble with the law, who is now revelling in his new-found fame. He loves nothing more that walking around town with his...
Thanx that helps a lot.
If one of you players haven't posted in a long time at what point should you start looking for new player(s)?
After a couple of weeks, the clock starts ticking for me.
This seems like the best place to put this.
Visit the World Serpent Inn!
Originally intended to merely bring a campaign together, I believe, it has continued long after the original guys left. It is now referred to as the 'Thread of Misfit PCs'. If you have any character which you'll never be able to use, take it to the Serpent!
Thanks for the link KC. I think the DM for one of my games might have bailed, so it's good to have something I can do with that character after I spent all that time typing in stats.:)
It's a lot of fun there too. We even sometimes fight in the pit (the WSI has a DR10 for everyone as well as Fast Heal in effect) we've also played darts, had metaphysical discourses, all sorts of stuff.
Thanks for the link KC. I think the DM for one of my games might have bailed, so it's good to have something I can do with that character after I spent all that time typing in stats.:)
Easy to find replacement players. Hard to find replacement DMs.
Pbps just allow for so much roleplaying application! Right now I'm DMing two and am a Pc in another, and ther is just so much RPing!
Right now the sorcerer in my hallows eve pbp has poasted that he is searching for signs of sorcery in the kid they just saved because a pair of warlocks were using his dreams to create anrako(I made the stats for Alien but it didn't work to well for the anrako), and I'm not sure whether to to have this happen or make him a favored soul.
But what ever happens, will happen and it is going to be fun!
For what it's worth, RPOL.net does as well.
Does anyone have a list of pbp sites that offer additional functionality? Right now the only one I know of is Myth-Weavers.
I actually created my own board on zetaboards, which was remarkably easy. Some of the pros: creating as many forums/threads as you want, being able to post images directly into threads, and a personal message system. The only con I've seen so far as that a profile can't have an alias, but it's really no biggy, since everyone just has one character.
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I'm 42 years old and have played RPG's for most of my life, and D&D has remained a constant favorite. My love of the game has really always been about role-playing. That's not to say that I don't occasionally like to knock some heads, but as I've matured, I've found it more challenging and enjoyable to use finesse in order to avoid the usual pitfall that might befall the novice gamer.
The problem I've always found with table top gaming, is that while it's great for the social atmosphere, it doesn't really lend itself to a deeper more realistic campaign. I mean secrets are really hard to keep, and your obviously up to something if you are the suspected thief in the party, and always in hushed sessions with the DM. There's simply no mystery to it, no basis for a rich enough story to keep me intrigued. Throw the realities of life into the mix, like favored adventuring friends moving away, family life, and countless other responsibilities that consume us in a day, and it's kind of difficult to make it happen.
For the last few years, I've been researching and designing a play by post campaign. I looked around at what had been done, researched other attempts, and decided what was available, and in wide use...was in need of a mighty big kick in the arse.
Don't get me wrong, there are some remarkable games running out there, with some exceptionally committed DM's. But damn, the games just seem so lackluster. Where are the battle maps, where are the fully editable character sheets and for some of those sites running multiple campaigns that do supply character sheets, why the hell is it that everyone else can see them?
I am really surprised at how un-advanced the play by post field of RPG gaming appears to be, granted I've only been studying it for the last couple of years, but Google it and what you find is usually the same. Bulletin boards or blog based Play by Post campaigns that for me, just don't seem to be making use of the available tools that the Internet is providing.
There are some phenomenal tools out there and yet so few people seem to be taking advantage of them. Now granted, I have paid a small fortune exploring those tools, but it seems to me that I'm probably not the only one who has. What I've found, is that you can provide, as a DM, an incredibly rich environment. To do this, you have to be single and have absolutely no care in the world, or you need a place where a group of people, a community of gamers, have united and created a template that anyone can use.
What I have done in the two, actually three years that I have been kicking this can around, is to design a web site that could contain this vision. I have explored all avenues and have arrived at something which I believe provides most of the tools that any Player of the Game could desire, and any DM, could use to organize and facilitate a perfect game setting, for a Play by Post milieu.
The structure of the web site is simple and organized, it takes advantage of password protection so only the players (and the DM of course) can see their own character sheets. The players have their own mini site character locations, and allows them access to dynamic character sheets that are fully editable. These mini site locations provide access to knowledge or items that only they would have or know, like maps, a history of who they are, their motivations, and the ability to go back and review game rounds that only they were a part of. This provides them with the basis of who they are and allows them, actually gives them what they crave the most, an air of mystery.
My favorite use of these character sites is that it allows me to run mini side adventures when party members split up. I love to take advantage of supplying each character with a separate map during an action round that shows them the scene as only they would perceive it. I mean how and why should everyone have the exact same picture of any scene as it unfolds, some will have infra-vision and some will not. Let's just hope that the ones with infra-vision can perceive who it is they're attacking - friend or foe? Oh yeah - I do love the confusion, it makes it so...damn fun!
I use a fantastic set of tools as the DM, we have two forums we take advantage of, thanks to Google Groups. One of the forums is just for kick's, while the other is designed for and used as a means of communicating in the game environment, either to the group as a whole or in secret... ;)
I use Hamete Virtual Dice Server to keep everyone honest, well almost everyone - the DM's got to have some perks! The characters make their dice rolls and the results get instantly Emailed to the DM, it totally rocks.
I use, and highly recommend learning how to use Campaign Cartographer, it is by far the best of the map designers available. It's not easy to learn, if your tech skills are like mine, you will have moments where you lose all sanity, but trust me - it's totally worth it!
Last week I discovered that people had actually created dynamic character sheets that could be edited on line! This was a feature I'd been trying to figure out for a while, and in its absence had been forced to make every little annoying change to each character sheet, from hit points, to gold pieces! Oh man, I was so damn happy to find Myth Weavers!
Lastly, I found a site that gives access to 3.5 game rules, Hypertext d20 SRD, is just an absolutely fantastic source for everyone to use.
So here's the thing, I've done a little work on this, created what I think is a new vision for the Play by Post/Email genre, and I would be more than happy to help others do the same. I think Paizo is the perfect community to make this sort of thing happen.
Stop by the campaign web site at http://www.wog-campaign.com, take a stroll, and let me know what you think.
Thought I'd drop by and comment.
started a game as a player originally and then took it as DM. Runs on a great site called PBPMap, http://www.pbpmap.com/index.php .
The board has an integrated Dice roller along with other things. But the best is an integrated map for each game. Or more than one if necessary. I generally make mine via photoshop, but the map has its own set of tiles for those that do not create that way. Each game can have as many Topics or Subtopics as desired.
The creator of the site is great. If your interested in the possibilities, check it out, or just stop by and check our Hidden Riders of Tomorrow, which is the game I run.
Just curious - how many people lurk on a PbP thread just to read the ongoing story? I tried doing it with a couple and sort of lost the thread somewhat.
I know that terraleon reads the threads running Wolfgang Baur's patronage adventures. Anyone else?
Just curious - how many people lurk on a PbP thread just to read the ongoing story? I tried doing it with a couple and sort of lost the thread somewhat.
I know that terraleon reads the threads running Wolfgang Baur's patronage adventures. Anyone else?
Yep, i follow your pbp, Rev Roseys, Heathy's & Aubreys.
All brilliant and all have different styles of play and storytelling. Sometimes i leave them to lapse, just so i can catch up on a couple of hundred posts. I find this especially useful for dramatic fights or some complex plot exposition, as it increases tension/ makes the story easier to follow.Although it is sad when some pbp's fall apart, like 'JSL RotRL'possibly my favourite pbp for pure storytelling. I must say well done to all DM's and players for the entertainment.
Thanks :)
I can't tell you how flattered I am to be mentioned in the same breath as Fabes, Heathy and Aubrey. It's good to know you're enjoying the stories. Agreed on JSL's game. That was enormous fun to read.
Just curious - how many people lurk on a PbP thread just to read the ongoing story? I tried doing it with a couple and sort of lost the thread somewhat.
I wouldn't try to follow one from day to day (as you say, sometimes you lose the thread), but I have read through one or two in my time.
Just curious - how many people lurk on a PbP thread just to read the ongoing story? I tried doing it with a couple and sort of lost the thread somewhat.
I know that terraleon reads the threads running Wolfgang Baur's patronage adventures. Anyone else?
Yep, i follow your pbp, Rev Roseys, Heathy's & Aubreys.
All brilliant and all have different styles of play and storytelling. Sometimes i leave them to lapse, just so i can catch up on a couple of hundred posts. I find this especially useful for dramatic fights or some complex plot exposition, as it increases tension/ makes the story easier to follow.Although it is sad when some pbp's fall apart, like 'JSL RotRL'possibly my favourite pbp for pure storytelling. I must say well done to all DM's and players for the entertainment.
Thanks :)
I was sad when JSL's Runelords folded, as the player of Ehlissa. Thank you for reading the pbps I'm running (which ones by the way? ;D ). Flattered to be in such illustrious company. I always enjoy dipping into Heathy's Saltmarsh, as the PCs and plot are so bonkers.
I just end up with Scottish accents in every single one of my PbPs. That and pirates.
I just end up with Scottish accents in every single one of my PbPs. That and pirates.
You have a penchant for crazy old men as well.
I just end up with Scottish accents in every single one of my PbPs. That and pirates.You have a penchant for crazy old men as well.
And quote-spitting Xaositects
I just discovered a great way to save myself all the typing involved in writing out my fighter's iterative attacks in Heathansson's campaign.
I'm using a free program called AutoHotKey, which I've been using for another purpose entirely.
Anyway, if there's a fight brewing, all I have to do is activate the hotkey by clikcing on its icon, then whenever I hit the linked keystrokes it will execute my script.
The result it that I can get the following post:
In about 2 seconds.
Next I'll do my pbp initiative lists....
So, if anyone is interested in using this the one trick is that the plus key has to be scripted like this"{Shift}+=" because ordinarily "+" links keystrokes in AHKs scripting language.
Good lord that would be so useful.
I just end up with Scottish accents in every single one of my PbPs. That and pirates.
As a' fowk nooz, ef et ainae Scottish et's guff.
awa' en bile yer heid!
awa' en bile yer heid!
Ye gantin' haggis. Gang en buck a sheep en th' crease, ye limp wristet heelain girse munchah.
Please, gentlemen....I'm American. I'm here to help.