Hello!
This happens to be my first post. Go me for being social, or anti social perhaps,
as I have been here for over a year and never posted before. I know the original post is talking about a dm college,
which is a wonderful idea, but I suspect a number of people are coming here
looking for tips and ideas and he specifically asked how other people run their
games… so I wrote up a bit that someone might be able to use in a lesson. (I looked for a way to spoiler and hide sections of text but
it seems to be lacking on this forum, thus I apologize for length.)
Below are imgur links and descriptions for some things I did
as a dm in Roll20 that I could not do with Maptools or an in person session. Please feel free to use, or ignore, whatever
I have written here. I am certain other people
have done it better and I have liberally ‘borrowed’ from all over the place to
run my game. (Including images and bits
of code and such) This post will mostly be
an overview of how I used the journal entries and forums but would recommend <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1F4eMw3W_rHBfxf9_m1hbw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1F4eMw3W_rHBfxf9_m1hbw</a>
for generic dming ideas and such. His
videos may be a little silly, but I found them rather on point... and silly can
be fun!
I will start off with my favorite part of Roll20 which is
using the journal entries! I have not
seen too much talked about with this area but I really went to town with it and
built out what I affectionately call my “Game Codex” for the last game I ran. This is like in Mass Effect or another game
where the players can access blurbs on parts of the world or characters or
whatever, but many of these handouts the players themselves can edit so as the
game is played they can write out what they find and reference back as a
communal source of knowledge. It took
time to set up but the players seemed to like it.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/a1G5kVs.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/a1G5kVs.jpg</a>
Notes are notes they picked up in the dungeons: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/XjkUxy3.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/XjkUxy3.jpg</a> <a href="http://i.imgur.com/1bg6WJP.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/1bg6WJP.jpg</a>
City Buildings are for the parts used to build out the party’s
settlement.
Races list out the important sentient peoples that the pc’s
have met. These are editable by the PC’s
so they can update the entries for themselves and the other players: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/jypyM0m.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/jypyM0m.jpg</a>
Locations are places like cities and shops:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/kKrbDL8.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/kKrbDL8.jpg</a> For
most items you can just write in what they sell so you do not have to keep copy
pasting what the shop owners are selling.
This saved about 30 minutes every time someone wanted to go
shopping. Little Timmy wants to buy
something? Here’s a link to a shop. You go poke through that while I as DM
entertain everyone else with a dancing pony.
No more stopping the entire game so Little Timmy can shop and decide at
the end he doesn’t actually want to buy anything.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/XBrmoDE.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/XBrmoDE.jpg</a>
I
made a link to a google docs page listing out details for more detailed items
so they don’t have to go look them up in the book (again speeds up shopping). This is for the Kitsune shop owner, see below
for where it leads:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/kZKkd5r.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/kZKkd5r.jpg</a> Kitsune shop.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/uzKcCfE.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/uzKcCfE.jpg</a>
Goblin shop. If you note the prices are different between
the goblin shop and kitsune shop which is both keyed into the excel sheet in
hidden columns to how valuable the items are to that race and how much the shop
keeper does (or does not) like the party.
Owned magic items list out all the magical items what they
do and who owns them since the players tend to forget what the other pcs have. This way the mage which snagged the +2
longsword can be punched by the fighter and told to stop hoarding and hand it
over. The who owns them part is just
part of the title of the handout so it is easy to change who owns the nice
goods.
Characters are the handouts for the non player characters (NPCs)
separated by race. All of these NPCs are
player editable so the PC’s can add notes to the NPC pages. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Z9nHXDV.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Z9nHXDV.jpg</a>
Currency lists out the different currencies used by the
individual sentient races as extra flavor.
(Also let me have exchange rates between settlements… yay ECONOMICS!) <a href="http://i.imgur.com/17p3mJ6.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/17p3mJ6.jpg</a>
Player Characters are the journal entries for the player characters
so they can fill out information everyone can see on themselves along with a
sub folder for “Personal Journal Pages” which is just a page only the individual
player can see to keep notes for themselves on the game. Example of part of a personal journal page
written by a player: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/hEp7bUD.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/hEp7bUD.jpg</a>
Non Combat feats was for players who just wanted to play sim
city and make things since the 4 th edition of d&d doesn’t do
crafting well. (I know 4 th
edition isn’t well liked, but it is really easy for me to run games in and I
get super confused between D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, and pathfinder and make in
my opinion an unacceptable number of errors trying to remember which rules go
with which system. I have never tried
D&D 5.0)
Session Notes and goals for the DM’s was so I could write
down what I wanted to happen on a week by week basis to keep things moving and
my co DM at the time could follow suit.
(He got busy and I couldn’t run twice a week so the game had to stop… I
can talk about how we split work load if people want to know.)
Rules of the game lists out the starter stats and a link to
a dropbox sharing rules. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/plL6BtB.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/plL6BtB.jpg</a>
Current party objectives is a player editable journal page
where they can write down what they want to do as a group. All the players could see and edit this which
helped them keep track of.. whatever they wanted to keep track of.
At the bottom you can see Characters and Monsters which are
outside of the codex and not visible to the PCs and was where the character
pages for the NPCs are kept instead of the handout versions of the NPC’s listed
above. (I did not want the players to
see the npc’s stats so I had to make a character page and handout for each NPC. PC’s can see and edit the handouts, but not
the character page)
Moving beyond the journal pages to general ideas….
This is an example of the goblin city, I added the title/job
to the NPC in the cities since most people should be able to have an idea what
someone does by looking at them (blacksmith/begger/noble/etc) to try and spark
interest in the NPC. When they talk to
them I add the NPC handout to all players viewable and editable so the pcs
never have to ask ‘who was that person we talked to..?’ they can just look at
the right under the Game Codex. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/uogjZ0E.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/uogjZ0E.jpg</a>
This links to an image of my game’s forum. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/DhAORdq.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/DhAORdq.jpg</a> At the bottom one of the players made an
entry to talk about party composition, but most the rest of them are either
side rps or copies of game sessions. I
labeled them as year month then day of the rp with a memorable synopsis of
what happened inside and ripped the text right out of the game’s chat log. Why not just go through the chat log someone
might ask? Because my players are lazy
and I am forgetful. I would also sometimes
make a forum post of something that was happening in the area so people could
interact in the middle of the week, or paste in side rps that happened between
an NPC and PC… because players tend to be horrible at sharing information and I
wanted to see if this would help with the narrative portion of the game.
It really kind of didn’t help much and made more work for me...
then again people read each entry so perhaps it did help and I did not notice?
This link: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/ntGV9wd.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/ntGV9wd.jpg</a>
leads to the page I set everyone to at
the end of the session. The map is
mostly blacked out for them (thus why some area is darker than others) but they
could explore the map as they played and I would update it with the names of
places and interesting things as they did so while clearing away the black
space. To the right they could choose
what their person was doing in between game sessions and at the bottom was a
list of objectives and sometimes things people could do. That way people could log in and decide what
it was they wanted to do and I could check the day before game and not be
surprised that instead of adventuring they all wanted to go shopping in Diana’s
Library.
At the very bottom you will see buttons for Elf language and
dwarf language. This like the end of session page I stole from another tips poster but it was so good I want to share it with you
here!
If you make a
character with the name of the language only some of the party knows and under
abilities make a post like: “ /me talks
in a fanciful language /w elf ?(message)
”
You can set it up to be added to the bottom of the page like
that and so that any player that you give the right to edit “elf” will receive
whatever is typed in when someone clicks the language button! I put in the /me talks in a fanciful language
so that the rest of the party knows they are saying something, but do not know
what! Antics!
For those who are confused see imgur link: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/6qZbj8z.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/6qZbj8z.jpg</a>
Again I apologize for the length, but hopefully someone will
get some ideas for their games out of this!
