Tragic Tales wrote:Does anyone have a recommendation for a game with a good layout? Something to help me organize a game.
I do hope other DMs (as there are a lot of excellent ones here) will also chime in with their thoughts and recommendations, but here are my thoughts.
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As for what's important in your game, it can vary, but you'll want to consider what are some of the more important details you'll eventually share in your game. Some ideas:
Game Setup
- Someplace for your players to post their character sheets.
- A dedicated spot where you post all your house rules and character creation rules.
- You'll want a place outside of your main action threads for your players to post out-of-character chatter, or OOC.
- It often underutilized, but a place for your players to post if they know they're going to be missing for a stretch of time could be helpful. The higher the posting frequency in your game, the more important this might be.
- Given how relatively slow play-by-post games can be, it might be helpful to set up topics where you share background details about your game; or where you share maps or geographic information. A place to detail any non-player character information could be helpful, too.
In my games, I like to create a Table of Contents post (like
here), saved as an 'Announcement' type post, which, as a ToC is meant to do, serves as a single location you/your players can go to find links to all the important pages used in your game.
Game Organization
One other suggestion I could make would be to track important game details in a "footer" section at the bottom of all your important game updates. What you contain in this "footer" section can vary greatly, and you can include as little or as much detail as you'd like. Keeping a constantly updated list of important details your characters might want to always know (e.g. health status of the characters, weather conditions, spells or unusual conditions in effect, time of day, etc....) is really helpful.
For me (
example), I like to provide a LOT of details. Especially when you consider the information hidden in spoiler tags beneath each character. It's not always the easiest to keep everything perfectly detailed (e.g. I may forget to update hit points, or spells used, or the time of day) in one post, but if it's something you maintain consistently, there's always a history of what the "before" values were.
The effort (to me) is worth it as:
- I use it as a reference myself (e.g. how many hit points or open spell slots does a character have left);
- I almost never get questions from players wondering about these common details.
