This is a spoiler free thread
Hi, I have a lvl 1 Inquisitor who just showed up in Ravengro last Sunday. Carrion Crown looks like a nice AP with a lot of interactions and investigation. I really like this aspect of the game but I'm afraid it can be easy to lose some details of the story during the game — temporary distraction, tiredness, missing a session are inevitably part of the gaming experience; and, in my experience, when a plot becomes too complicated for the average player these distractions tend to increase, leading to a loss of interest in the plot itself; people stop to use their head and the game becomes less satisfactory. I'm planning to build something to help all the players to keep track of the NPCs, the locations, the investigation details and the mysteries in Ravengro and beyond. I need your help to evaluate the ideas I had today and I'd love to hear some suggestions too, I'm sure many people here came up with good thoughts concerning the same issue.
Ideas so far:
- A Players Communal Binder containing all the data we find during the sessions: I already planned to put maps, notes, letters, NPC faces, a timeline, a calendar and party funds in it. Every player will have access to it when he will need to remember something, add some details, check the inventory or just give a look at the past. I'm planning to build my own NPCs face cards with pictures from the AP that can be found on google. I may even teach my master how to build them in advance and give them to us when we meet new people — he already knows about it. These cards will be stored in cards sheets (like those for Magic the gathering). During the investigation the cards will be put on…
- A magnetic board on the wall: All suspects faces may be put here with magnetic pins, along with every information we need. In the current situation one player has the job to keep track of these things, but he does it in his personal diary which is obviously inaccessible to the others. Keeping everything in sight may really improve participation and rational thinking for everyone.
Any other ideas? Has anybody already implemented something similar? Did you face any problems keeping track all the informations the path give to the players?
I like your communal binder idea and I'm probably going to borrow aspects of it.
Everyone in my group is on Facebook (and we're all friends) so I created a closed/hidden group and added them to it. Every week after game I look through my notes, post an abridged version of them to the group, and update the party inventory. I pinned our party inventory so that it's the first thing which comes up on the page. We also have a group chat on Facebook, which we use to relay information.
Having extra hardcopies is particularly nice for something which comes up later in the campaign, because you might want to be able to reference and annotate quickly.
Nice job Helaman. We already have a website, taccuinodigaleazzo.it but we mainly use it to write stories about characters. I will ask the GM if he would like to have a Wiki though, it may be useful (I'm the webmaster). The website is perfect to read outside the session, what I am looking for right now is something more useful during the session.
Having run the whole of Carrion Crown for my players, let me just say that I would have deeply appreciated someone taking your initiative, as this AP benefits greatly from keeping a record of details and having someone maintain an overall focus.
Off the top of my head, a map of the whole of Ustalav as you have planned for the binder will be of significant use.
Our group has a shared Dropbox folder that we store all kinds of "party" information in.