Now there were quite a few comments to the post and a fairly good rundown of the different moleskin notebooks out there as they seem to be the tool of choice. Personally I’ve never owned one and don’t plan to buy one as I prefer to use index cards.

I know, I know, I’ve mentioned a number of uses for index cards before but let’s face it they’re cheap (I can get 250 for $1US), fit in your pocket (I typically carry a couple of dozen held by a binder clip) and come in a variety of colors if you choose to color code your notes. For me when I use them, I write down my note and when I transcribe it into my campaign or session planning notes I toss the card out - one less piece of paper and since I’m moving towards an all electronic gaming setup I only have one central repository of information to glean from.

So you have the pen to write with, the paper or index card to write on, so what’s up with the cell phone?

Recently I’ve started using an online service called Jott which allows me to dictate and send myself an email for reminders of action items that I need to accomplish at work, or when I log back online when I get home but then it dawned on me (cue the climatic music) why not use it for gaming notes?

Jott isn’t really intended for long notes but for a short, couple sentence in length, note about a new campaign idea, character personality to play, location to develop, or anything else it’s great. I dial up the service, tell it who I want to Jott, dictate and the email arrives shortly after. Quick, easy, safe for use while driving and best of all it’s already on the computer where I’m going to end up putting it anyway.

You can use the service to send emails to other members of your group, individually or as a group (you can post to your Yahoo group if you use that service as well) which makes it easy to get the word out to everyone of changes of venue or cancellations.

On the whole it’s a pretty useful tool that’s available for free (yes, you read that right, free) and may just get you to “jott” down those notes that you say you’ll remember later but then never do.

Take Jott for a test drive, I’d be interested to know what you think.

May your dice roll well.

Wrong.

My group is slowly becoming more and more electronic in nature. Myself and one other player keep our characters on the laptops we have at the table, the GM keeps his campaign information on his. We have campaign notes on Google Docs, use dice rollers both on and off line, access the SRD (we’re still playing D&D 3.5), routinely perform Google searches for relevant facts and information, the list goes on and on.

Without power, there’s no Internet, no printing of information if needed and after a couple of hours, no laptops. Gaming would grind to a halt.

Now, I know that if you’re using a computer for gaming you’ve got a backup of that material somewhere (you do have a backup don’t you?) but that really doesn’t help if you have no power so I would recommend that you include in your “disaster planning” at least the following:

1. A hard copy of your character sheet
2. A hard copy of campaign notes and information
3. The rule books for your gaming system
4. Dice!
5. Cell phone numbers/corded phone - most wireless phones do not work without power

I know that’s not a complete list but you get the idea. I also know you can’t plan for everything in this life but taking a couple of minutes to print out a character sheet at each level was something I hadn’t really thought about. Of course after I dealt with the questions from my kids on why they couldn’t play the Wii anymore and realizing that game time was a mere two hours away my thought process changed.

Luckily the power did come back on (about 15 minutes before the first arrival) so the power outage didn’t impact the session but it did cause me to start thinking about my own disaster planning.

Do you have back ups in place? Do you have a contingency plan for an event like this? Please share.

May your dice roll well.

So how come I didn’t post about it? Well, first off there are a lot of other bloggers out there that did post about it and I would recommend checking out (if you haven’t already) Gnome Stew’s A GM’s First Impressions of D&D 4e:Looks like Fun as well as Chatty DM’s Game Day post Playing 4e: Initial Thoughts.

The other reason why you didn’t see a post here was the simple fact that I didn’t run out and get a copy of the books - that’s right, I didn’t buy the books. Now I know that that may come to a shock to some but from where I stand I just couldn’t bring myself to do it primarily because my group currently has no plans to move to 4e.

How will this impact what I do here at of Dice and Dragons? That’s hard to say as I’m taking a hard look at why I’m blogging and what I’m blogging about (I know, more self reflection after the Realms postmortem maybe I need professional help). I’ll have a post up concerning those questions and where this blog is going soon.

With that I’ll leave all of you that are moving to 4e to your rule books, those that are GMs to your plotting - I mean planning - and to those that run PCs to your dreams of large treasure hoards.

May your dice roll well.

So far I’ve covered the good, and the bad so now I’m going to cover the ugly. These are the things that I felt went from bad to worse and on some level I think contributed to the ending of the campaign. These are also the items that seemed to come up time and again when the group would discuss the campaign as issues detracting from their enjoyment and let’s face it, if it isn’t fun no one wants to play.

1. Encounter levels

One of the items I truly struggled with as the campaign matured was encounter levels. The campaign was played using 3.5 D&D rules and for the most part things went as expected for the first five or six character levels. I was a “good GM” and followed the charts and tables in the books for determining the level and number of creatures to encounter and managed to keep it all within the flavor of campaign I had designed.

But then it went wrong, horribly wrong.

The campaign initially started out as a low magic, high roleplay campaign and it worked really well and everyone truly enjoyed it. The issue came to light as the party advanced in levels and we started to have more combat encounters - I advanced the opponents but neglected to take into account the lack of magic in the party. I’m not talking just spell casters here I’m talking about there were few magic weapons, armor or items to help with these more powerfully opponents and things got out of hand rapidly. I was suddenly dealing with the need to fudge not only attack rolls but also damage rolls to keep characters alive (a draw back of having character prophecies but we’ll leave that for another time) and more than once the “big baddie” bowed out of a combat for some trumped up reason as opposed to just finishing off the party. Before I even started this campaign the players’ had dubbed it “Scot’s Campaign of PC Death” and it was starting to resemble that.

I’d like to say I figured out a way to fix this issue but the reality is that the campaign ended before the balance could be found again. The players had started to correct this issue by asking to create new characters and as those characters came in they were more “magically enhanced” than their predecessors which made the encounters easier.

Lesson learned - pay attention to the relative strength of the party. Most systems give you guidelines for building either high level PCs or NPCs which show you what the system is expecting them to have for gear, ignore this and the party will not be at the right “power level” for what you’re planning.

2. Pace

Ever pick up a book and find that you’re drawn into it and just can’t put it down? That’s the way I think a campaign should be, it draws the players in with a strong storyline and builds on that with timely combat and challenges.

I’d like to think that The Realms started off that way, everyone seemed engaged with the storylines, liked the amount of combat we were having and even enjoyed the puzzles and non-combat challenges presented to them (ok maybe not the mazes). Over the course of time however things started to slow down and eventually stopped. There were a number of factors that led to this and while I’d like to put my finger on one I just can’t.

Some of the factors were external to the game itself, things such as work schedules and family events - we had more that a couple of additions to the extended group during the campaign run. When you couple those with the changing player and character rosters it made it difficult to maintain a consistent schedule which slows down plot progression.

I think the single biggest item that comes to mind from the perspective of slowing things down was combat. This is an area I think that a lot of groups struggle with as it seems that the higher in level the group goes, the longer it takes to get combat resolved. I’m not talking game terms here, I’m talking about real time. The Realms was a D&D campaign and while a number of combats only took a few rounds (less than a minute in game) they lasted for hours in real time. Things like pre-rolling, standardized actions and timers helped but when you spend most of an evening with a single combat it slows things way down.

Lesson learned - keep an eye on fast things are moving. When planning out your campaign try to build in ways to speed things up - is there a scene you can cut? Everyone likes combat but do you really need it this session and if so is there a way you can speed it up? Can things be done via email between sessions (something our groups’ current GM is doing)? Are you getting bogged down at the table with rule lookups? Taking some time to identify those areas where things are slowing moving is the first step in trying to improve them - be sure to get your groups’ input as they may see issues where you don’t.

3. Campaign Died

Looking back over the other items both in this post and the previous one I find that this one item not only contributed to the overall lack of enjoyment of the campaign but is also the result of all the others. A lot of folks will think that statement is a bit strange as since the campaign wasn’t enjoyable it should end and I would agree but unlike the campaign endings mentioned at Treasure Tables or at the Musings of a Chatty DM the Realms didn’t really end, it died on the vine.

To continue the analogy the fruit was there, ready to be picked, great plots, colorful characters and interesting places to visit and explore - trouble was there was too much of it. I know that like my statement above that will sound odd to some but when you have more plot lines than you can count on both hands, a list of named (and potentially important) NPCs that went into triple digits and locations that spanned a continent and two time lines (did I mention I introduced time travel?) it was impossible to handle and became stagnant. My group was great through this, offering suggestions and letting plot lines drop by the wayside but in the end with all the elements, power level and pacing issues it was unsalvageable - not even an attempt at a campaign reboot could save it.

In the end we just stopped playing the game - I even thought foolishly that we would go back to it for a while - and the Realms faded. We still talk about it, I have all the newsletters in a single PDF that I distributed, all my notes (which I should scan) are still intact and there are many things I can use from it for other campaigns in the future - but we never really ended it.

Lesson learned - watch your scope and plan ahead. I know that’s advice that been often quoted and not just in the RPG arena but it rings all too true. Planning out a large scale setting with a lot of elements is great if you use them and they supplement what your group wants but when those elements begin to take all of your creative energies to maintain instead of designing good, solid, interesting and fun sessions it’s time to scale back.

This took a lot longer that I expected to finish and while there were a number of external factors to it I also found that really taking a look at what went on in the campaign and how those parts were related took a fair amount of time as well. I think that’s true of a lot of things, when you’re in the thick of it you miss the cues that something is not going right and only afterwards are you able to see it (that saying “you can’t see the forest through the trees” comes to mind). I hope that you gained at least a few nuggets of value from this short series I know the reflection has helped me.

May your dice roll well.

In case you missed the previous posts:
Realms of Rylon - The Postmortem
Realms of Rylon - The Good
Realms of Rylon - The Bad

As they point out items such as background information, house rules, stats, sessions notes and character journals are all excellent uses for a wiki but the real power is when the group collaborates on these items.

Getting a group to work together on session notes would allow them to have greater depth and detail as well as allow all the players’ viewpoints be expressed. I used a newsletter for my last campaign but it contained only my viewpoint (from the GM chair) which while good could have been better with others contributing to it.

The other major boon to collaborative work for a gaming group, which is also covered, is world building.

During the initial stages of The Realms of Rylon, my home grown campaign I asked my players to come up with background information and I did receive it to varying degrees but one of my players came up with a whole culture and history for his particular clan of kobolds. It was great, NPCs, maps, and interactions with other nearby locations were outlined and while I had it all in front of me the others at the table weren’t able to readily access it. I can only imagine what other ideas could have been spawned from those pages if I had used a wiki at that stage - it did come later but it would have been much more useful at the beginning.

Be sure to take a moment and give their post a read - it’s well worth it.

May your dice roll well.