New to OP

Matt123

Matt123

Hi, I am new to GMing in this kind of format. I am wondering if people can give me some tips for using this great tool. First questions that pop to mind are:

1) How do people handle conversations?

2) How do people handle combat?

As in, what tool do people use for these things (e.g. a wiki page, or the forum...)? What works or has worked best?

Thanks very much.

--Matt

FemmeLegion

I can't resist...

Welcome, Matt!

Anyway, for my part, the campaign wiki is an online archive of a face-to-face session. So conversations and results of combat go in the Adventure Log.

"The Vale":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/424 has been rife with private conversations, because one of the PCs (Seraph) has an Oracle that visits him in his dreams. So what's usually happened there is that a conversation was played out over email, and then all the emails were strung together and edited for flow, then posted as their own entry in the Adventure Log.

Mowgli

Hi, Matt!

I'm running my first game using OP. I've found the thread configuration at ENWorld more conducive to actual online gaming, so "sessions" are taking place on ENWorld in their In Character and Out Of Character threads, but everything else is taken care of here. Actually, even a lot of the Out of Character stuff is on here as well.

Probably the best way to get a feel for which tools work best for which purpose is to look around at some other campaigns, then jump in and experiment!

Figment

In my current campaign we're playing in person. Combat uses "a deck of cards known as the Fate Deck":http://philippe.tromeur.free.fr/marvel/What_Is_Saga.html. Inbetween game sessions some of the players have been utilizing the campaign forums, while others have been utilizing the private messaging system, while still others have been discussing things via phone calls. As we've only had one organizing session thus far, it's too early to tell what has worked best.

Duskreign

Matt, welcome to the coolest place for roleplayers like us!

1) I have only just begun my first campaign since finding Obsidian Portal, and so far I have only used these tools as a way to archive our regular sessions (normal in-person pen-and-paper gaming). This isn't so much a virtual game table as it is a place to archive your campaign, put up profiles of your NPCs and PCs, maps, timelines, etc. However, I have seen campaign pages where people are using this site to run pretty much their whole game over the interwebs!

2) Combat would be tricky in a dice game without some sort of virtual dice roller that can display the results to everyone playing in realtime. There are virtual game table sites that have that feature, but besides the simple dice widget on the OP front page, we don't really have anything like that here that I know of. I would love for OP to have a voice chat room with a virtual dice roller and maybe even a little drawing board like on http://www.iscribble.net/draw.html

No matter what you choose to do, have fun! If you need a hand or some advice, or just want a friend on OP, drop me a line anytime!

- Duskreign