This is the support area for the unsung heroes of gaming: The Gamemaster. Share tips, vent, discuss effective ways to perform the most crucial role in any successful game.

Sharing Tips!

Here is one. You remember the old school Dungeons & Dragons modules that had the grey boxes with text that you read to the characters? Why not add something like that to RPOL, to make Important posts stand out to the players. The Code is included, just add your own text in the ??? area. Below the code in an example.

<table border="4" width="100%"><tr><td><center>???</center></td></tr></table>

I have a "noticed" thread (i.e. it stays at the top) of all named NPC's that the characters have run into, including the ones that they invent (such as merchants that they made up a name in order to role-play a brief conversation).  If it is just a passing mention, then the name goes in the top note in the thread with the one-line description/identity.  If the character becomes significant, I add a post for him/her.  If I generate stats and skills for the character, I put it in his post in a private line to myself.  I have had characters that the players make up become important later, and it makes for a nice continuity to the world.

I hate tracking XP.  I mean really, really hate it.

What I normally do in my games is divide the adventure up into "Chapters" - Chapter 1 encompasses a small story arc with a series of encounters, Chapter 2 is the direct follow-up to Chapter 1, and so on.  At the end of each chapter, everyone goes up a level and can re-equip their characters with an amount of money based upon the "Wealth for Higher Level Characters" chart (within reason, of course).

I find a good answer to tracking XP is just to hand out levels at the completion of important story goals, like finishing a dungeon. That way you can adjust it to the speed of your campaign as you like without having to be hung up on the XP math.

Recently my group has decided to Schedule sessions. We have chosen Sunday for our back to back posting block. Starting around 8:00pm, and ending early into the next morning, 4:00am to 5:00am. During the week, the game goes normal as PbP should. But we have all agreed that getting online at a scheduled time makes it more like a real session, We've done this now twice, and so far its worked great, 50+ posts back to back, during that time. When during the week we get 3-5 from each person. Its still a small game that just is starting out. But the Scheduled block of time is a great idea. We just load up Yahoo Messenger and all enter a Conference chat. Once there we can quickly answer OOC questions, and tactical combat issues. Dice are kept to RPOL, and all RPing and Text. Its been fun so far.

This how someone in my party described my gming lol no worries, we all have fun at the table, just thought it was perfect:

http://penny-arcade.smugmug.co...0/L/i-kF3N9SG-XL.jpg

Zag24, I like your NPC thread idea! I was considering doing a Game Notes type thread. One thing I want to do is a timeline - I want to track dates, since I'm running Kingmaker and game time could run through several years. I think it might be fun for players to look at the timeline and see a history of what they did and how far they've come.

Another thing I'm doing is using <a href="http://www.mathemagician.net/Weather.html">this site</a> as suggested on the Paizo boards to generate weather. (I think this weather generator uses 3rd or 3.5 rules; I forget in what ways exactly Pathfinder weather rules differ.) I'm generating weather 30 days at a time.