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I'm GMing a campaign with some friends who have, over the years, end up spread over 3 timezones. We use maptools and ventrilo for our interface and we've been using Obsidian portal (thanks to the suggestion of some board users) for all campaign related stuff.
One problem we haven't yet overcome is treasure. How do people keep track of treasure? I want the players to do it (I have enough to do) but it's a struggle to get someone to volunteer to be the treasurer and keep track, though right now we have an obsidian portal page for treasure and it's working pretty well.
The other side of the coin is PC inventory and gear. It would be nice to have everything recorded in one place but player A likes to keep an inventory in maptools, player B likes to use a sheet of paper, player C uses google docs, Player D uses an excel spreadsheet. Does anyone have a suggestion for a system of keeping track of PC gear so it's all in one place, easy for the DM to read and easy for the PCs to use?
Your problem is that you're struggling to have one player be the person doing the tracking. Solve that, and they can do it using whatever their preferred method is.
Personally I'd record group treasure on my character sheet, if it were me. No different to an in-person game.
I assume you mean a paper character sheet. The problem with keeping it on each character's character sheet is that the DM (me) can't easily see what is on each sheet. Around a tabletop, the DM could just say look at their character sheet. Online I can't.
It also becomes a problem when not everyone can make it to a game. How does another player know what is on their character sheet? Plus, if everyone is keeping track of group gear and treasure, I can easily see it getting confusing "I have 500 gp written down here. I don't remember when we got it but it's on my character sheet" when really that money is already spent, just 1 person forgot to mark it off their sheet.
Avatar - How do you keep track of where treasure goes when you find it during an adventure? Do you have any "group treasure" or do you split everything equally when you find it. Splitting everything down the middle immediately would be simple for keeping track but then what happens when you find a cool magic item? Do you just automatically sell it so everyone gets equal gold? Just curious. I'm open to lots of ideas because I'm sick of always hearing "Wait how much gold did we have?" or "I don't know how much gold I have but it's probably enough to afford this" at the beginning of every session.
Thanks!
Our GM created a Google Doc spreadsheet too. It works fantastically well. All the info is there for anyone to see and stuff like encumberance and its penalties are calculated automatically.
I guess I've never had a problem not being able to see the players' sheets. When we run online games (which we've been doing with various systems for several years now) everyone tracks their stuff separately and if I need to know something I ask. Either you're doing "party funds" or "personal funds" and either way it just seems easy to track to me without the need for a bunch of extra documents.
Then again, I'm a very free-form player/DM. For example we never use maps, it's all "minds-eye" with the DM arbitrating positioning issues.