Comments

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  arsheesh

  Posts: 850 November 2010

  Well welcome to the forums Mandolyn, glad you decided to move beyond the "lurker" stage. I've only taken a brief foray into the White Wolf system myself, but I enjoyed it. Like yourself, it was largely due to seeing allot of the amazing campaigns out there that I decided to became inspired to take a more active role in the forums and try to improve the layout of my own site. If you have any questions about the technical side of building your site, this is the place to ask them. We've got a terrifically helpful community here. Also, if you are looking for any feedback on your site so far then I'd encourage you to throw up a link. At any rate, welcome and look forward to seeing more of you here at the forums.
  
  Cheers,
  -Arsheesh
• 

  Mandolyn

  Posts: 6 November 2010

  Thanks Arsheesh, for the welcome! Yeah, I suppose I have questions on layouts, I'd love to get some "WANTED" poster like things going for the character pages, or at least some neat border work. Coding isn't a strong suit of mine, but stuff on GMing in general would be awesome since I'm doing my first one.
  
  http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/werewolf-for-the-love-of-life
  
  I'd recommend more White Wolf d10s. It was the first system I was ever exposed to, and was a simpler rolling and character gen than jumping straight into D&D (which I did next, a good old fashioned Forgotten Realms setting).
  Might be a bit biased, however, since oldWoD was my first system, heh.
• 

  arsheesh

  Posts: 850 November 2010

  Werewolves in the Wild West huh, I like that premise. If you have any specific questions regarding DMing, feel free to ask. Otherwise, I recommend perusing the threads here at the forum since allot of them are on various topics related to DMing.
  
  As for for "WANTED" poster character templates, I think that's a marvelous idea! Creating a custom dynamic character sheet template is a _ton_ of work and requires a bit of knowledge about HTML and/or CSS, but it is doable. My players and I adapted one of "chainsaw's HTML Templates":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/sanction/wikis/templates-and-tools to do just that, however it was allot of work. If you are ambitious enough though I say go for it. There are tons of free wanted poster templates available on the web (here's what a Google search for "Wanted Poster Templates":http://www.google.com/images?q=wanted+poster+template&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=3kvXTK7KG5O6sAOSqpSNCw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CC4QsAQwAA&biw=1366&bih=575 brought up). You could always start with one of those templates, or create your own from scratch using a graphics program such as Photoshop or "GIMP":http://www.gimp.org/ (a free program which you can download online).
  
  Course if creating dynamic HTML character sheets seems a bit too complicated, another idea is to simply create a wanted poster banner for each character.
  
  Cheers,
  -Arsheesh
• 

  RaseCidraen

  Posts: 890 November 2010

  Welcome to the portal!
  
  An alternative idea may be to mock up a character sheet image, and to have specially located text boxes where items can be entered in. Although the wanted poster banner would probably be much easier :)
• 

  Mandolyn

  Posts: 6 November 2010

  Wow, thanks a lot for the links and the GIMP download mirror. I had no idea that program even existed, gonna have some fun with that once I paw through the instructions for a couple days. Rase, thanks for the welcome! A mockup character sheet was sort of an idea (similar to MrGone's Scion Character Sheet PDFs, only on the webpage itself), but I might go with banners and similar things like that first. Baby steps for this coding noob. :D
  
  I DID have one sort of bookkeeping question. Adventure logs seem to have the strange capacity to get ponderous. Are there any tips to keep an information and action heavy session down to a bearable length once logged? My main concern is that I'll either miss something or accidentally highlight something I wanted the players to figure out more on their own by bulletpointing things.
• 

  Alatheon

  Posts: 35 November 2010

  I reward my players for writing the summaries themselves, "in character":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/dragonbone-kingdoms/adventure-log/to-shale-creek if possible. This keeps them more interesting than just a bullet-pointed recitation of events, so a bit of length isn't a problem (for me anyway, others may feel different). Then, I can just go in and add detail if necessary, or make notes in the GM only area if they breezed over something they will need to remember later, or if they missed it completely in game.
• 

  arsheesh

  Posts: 850 November 2010

  Hey glad you found the link to GIMP helpful. I use GIMP for all of the graphics works on my site and absolutely love it. It is the poor man's Photoshop. I agree with Alatheon. I encourage my players to keep an adventure journal as well. I write a brief adventure synopsis and then post links to each of the character journals written for that session/adventure beneath the synopsis. In terms of rewards, everyone has there own method of rewarding players. Some DM's hand out extra experience. I use a reward system known as "Prestige Points":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/tales-of-darkmoon-vale/wikis/prestige-points in which players are awarded points for contributing to the campaign site in some way (usually by writing campaign journals), and then can trade these in for some sort of long-term or short term benefit. I also suggest having something like a "Loot Tracker" that keeps track of loot gained each session.
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  gaaran

  Posts: 740 November 2010

  I wish to offer a late welcome as well Mandolyn! I have adopteda combination of Arsheesh's prestige point system, and writing my own adventure logs. What we've been doing, I write the main journal for each session, because they're as much for my records as anything else, and then the players write character journals about what happened, or little asides, or whatever else they wish. It's been working quite well so far. If your concern is how much space they take up on the adventure log page, you can use the tag to hide everything after it when you're looking at the list of logs.
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  twiggyleaf

  Posts: 2,012 November 2010

  Mandolyn, a late welcome also from me, Twiggyleaf. As you have already seen, there is no shortage of friendly advice on this site. The wikis are excellent and I am sure you will get more out of your dungeon designs than ever before!!!!

  "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

  CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

  Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

  Inner Council Member
• 

  Duskreign

  Posts: 1,085 November 2010

  Hello, Mandolyn, and welcome to Obsidian Portal's forums!
  
  Any assistance you need, I would be happy to oblige. Just sent me a message.
  
  
  "Duskreign":http://www.obsidianportal.com/profile/Duskreign
  
  "Wyrmshadow Campaign Setting":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/wyrmshadow
  
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