Hello from Belgium

TessaD

TessaD

Hi all, my name is Tessa and I'm from Belgium. I've been into gaming for 10 years or so, on an off, starting with The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge), Vampire: the Masquerade, World of Warcraft, Shadowrun 3rd, DnD 3.0, 3.5 and finally 4th edition.

I'm currently dm'ing a Viking D&D 4ed campaign called Arkenhold, for which I'm using Obsidian Portal. We will start this Friday with the first session.

What I like about our weekly sessions is organising the game in a way the players like to play it. For me, that is the true challenge of the game. Especially because everyone in our group has a different choice of game: linear or open, short or long, dungeons, wilderness, urban,... so many options! And my choice of game as a player is often not what the majority of the group likes. As a dm however, I like being flexible.

Obsidian Portal attracted me for one reason: the journal. In our former campaign I used a word document to track progress and send this with the date-and-time-email to my players. They really liked this and I found, for the first time in 6 years, people knew at least some of the basics of the plot (my players were never very attentive, in any game we played and with any dm).

With Arkenhold I'm going for open play, so I want the players to be informed on the choices they made in the past and on the npc's they encountered. The plot and politics I usually develop in my campaigns will be kept to a minimal, to make sure they know what's going on, don't forget it and don't need to read too much. Ideally, I would want some input from my players... But this might be hoping in vane.

Edit: appart from some writing in dutch, I'm not an artist at all. Any creative input on my campaign is appreciated.

FemmeLegion

Hi Tessa!

I ended up being the "memory bank" for one campaign, and discovered this site in the middle of it. I wasn't about to try and dump everything here, but as soon as the new campaign started, I promptly created a wiki for it (I'm not the GM, but OP thinks I am, 'cause I was the one who had time to update it).

One trick that's been bandied about in the past is giving small bonuses to players who keep in-character journals or otherwise help to maintain the wiki. The character journals would be your best source of player input, in that they should talk about what stood out for them (it's what they'll write about) and hopefully give some clue as to what they want in the future (even if it's just to never have to deal with Lord Boringpants ever again).