West Marches 4 - Organisation
Creating a resource to document your adventure.
I had a slight break in schedule this month. I was a part of a playwriting development program this month and we were whisked away to the Adelaide Fringe Festival. We got to watch shows, hang out with artists, writers, and producers, and we got to sit about write things. All round good times. You can read some of my mad scrawling here.
TTRPG Admin
Nothing like a little admin to get you excited about playing RPGs, yeah?
Well, you’re in luck. Cause that’s what this is all about. The way I have been organising all the information for this little experiment.
The whole idea here is that I do not need to be the holder of information, the loremaster that holds all the answers. I really want the players to take on that role and become curious and engaged and WANT to explore the world that is available to them.
The major issue that I have had, and I imagine many GMs have experienced this as well, is players not taking notes or remembering key information. This can be particularly frustrating when you’ve spent weeks setting up a big reveal and when you describe the NPC that strides into the room and, and, and… No one recognises them.
Sigh.
So, scrap that shit. It’s on the players to take notes. It’s up to the players to manage their maps. It’s up to the players to decide what they’re going to do. It’s up to the players to collect and collate their information. And there’s probably a lot of it. The Ars Ludi blog discusses the importance of this, however back when they ran their game they used email lists. Which is peak 2007. We, however, live in the future and have some more options available to us.
Such as Discord!
I really like Discord and it seemed to me to be the best option to allow for easy communication, storage of information, and organising games. And so far it has done that. However, it did take quite a lot of time to set up, probably the most time for anything in this campaign. But look at it!
Below are all the channels available to players and GMs to use. I tried to keep it as straightforward as possible, but as time went on I added more and more.A
Template
I’ve made a discord template based on the server we created for our game, you can grab that here.
#start-here
There are currently 9 players and 2 GMs and there are more to come. It’s a lot of people to give a spiel to and quite frankly don’t spiel too good. So, the #start-here section contains all the basics a new player needs to get a feel for what this space is all about. However, it is just a starting place and the subsequent channels elaborate more on what is available to them. You can see the information I gave them below.
This has worked quite well so far, most players have been able to create characters and get a feel for the type of game before coming to the table. There have been a few clarifications and a few missteps but ultimately everything has run quite smoothly. However, as players are known to do a few were getting very invested in the creation and backstory of their character. This is great but I needed to clarify how dangerous this world will be so this little addition was added to the #start-here channel.
#the-mess-hall: This became an in character chat room. Players would discuss past and future adventures.
#the-map-room: the shared map is maintained by the players and all iterations of it were uploaded it. It also become a space where players discussed the details of it and what they thought might be found where.
#the-temple: Players could buy scrolls or have higher level spells cast here.
#rules-questions: Any questions about game, character creation, or setting rules.
#character-options-unlocked: As the players explored they unlocked spieces, races, classed, and other options that they could use in character creation. This led to a constant flow of new level 1 characters. This was also aided by a high death rate.
The Chronicle
Players are rewarded for entering information into The Chronicle. I will outline how we did this in next weeks post. The Chronicle is the record of the players adventures and it is then used for adventure preparation for the GM.
My players took varied approaches to this documentation. Some wrote simple dot pointed overviews that highlighted what they thought was most important. Others wrote highly detailed in character journals. These journals become some of the most important tools for building the world. Each one highlighted what the character, and therefore the player, was most interested in exploring during the game.
Logistically, we started with using one channel for each location but they quickly became hard to follow. The Goblin Cave, for example, had four adventures in it. Each one vastly different from the one before which made for an extremely convoluted and confusing to follow. So, we changed to each adventure got it’s own channel and this worked much better for the players, but also for me. These channels became the tool I used most when preparing for adventures.
Closing thoughts
For me, this sort of game doesn’t work if the players are not invested in the world. It is their drive and interest that is most important to maintaining the momentum of the campaign. It also becomes solely about their the elements they’re interested in.
Long days and pleasant nights.
Stuart.