Absolutely. When I devoted a lot of time to my campaign website, I was jazzed about it when people enjoyed it, and not very jazzed about it when they didn’t seem interested. I know that’s not quite what you’re getting at, but for me part of the reward of the extra work — the site — was seeing people use it.

The group is a bit unusual when it comes to internet access though: All of the players are minors (ages from 10-14), so they don’t have unfettered access to the internet under any circumstance, and most of them have little or no access to email.

The mailing list I use to communicate with the parents of the players, so the traffic is low volume and deals primarily with scheduling and reminders for who’s bringing snacks. I use the website to provide general information about role-playing and the game, and a mostly-running history of events in the game world (with contributions from the kids, encouraged using experience points). The wiki is currently private, and I use it to make my notes about the world. Notes are simply easier to keep those in a hypertext where links are easy to create and information can be added incrementally. Having it online makes it really easy for me since I often use different computers, and most don’t have my software of choice installed. Maps remain on paper for now.

Were the players not minors, I’d probably have a second wiki instead of the conventional website, and let them update it directly (and I’d probably not need to push the experience-for-writing so much).

On the whole, I think the current arrangement has been a success. It has been a lot of work, even though I was already running a web server, mostly because there was a lot of content that I thought needed to be written. On the other hand, I’ve now set up and customized a wiki, so I know a bit more how to get things done with the software I chose for that.

http://www.pathguy.com/acheron.htm

The guy is a incredibly deep mine of ideas and I found much more useful stuff here then the Manual of the Planes for “coloring in” the outer realms.

Sorry I forgot that in my original post.

Martin: Our group happens to use a Yahoo group as it’s primarly “internet presence”. We use this as a place to house game files, both document and images, as well as emailing. I love using images to sometimes convey a person or setting. On that note, Google image search is the best thing since sliced bread. If your interested, I could direct you to our group to see it’s layout.

I find that playing online in our group just doesn’t work. The social factor is key, and it’s just not the same virtually. I do play the excellent World of Warcraft with a few of the players time to time, but obviously this is apples to oranges as comparisons go. I feel bad for one player who really loved D&D but moved 150 miles away. He’s always asking me to champion a online D&D game, but I know it wont work as it doesnt even compel me to try it.

We have like 6 active players in our group, and this gives us the full spectrum of users of email. At one end we have 2 players that respond to each and every email, usually in short order. On the other is one guy who never checks, and beyond that, a guy who *can’t check because his work blocks all emails from @yahoo. We could get around this, but don’t want to cause trouble at his work (they read emails).

Before my work locked down Instant Messaging (thank you, hackers of the world) I would communicate with one or two of the players during the work day In fact, we would carry out detailed conversations in character on many occasions. It was a fun diversion in the dreary realm of programming/maintaining tax processing systems.

Other resources I use from the Web:
http://www.20000-names.com Need some NPC names? This site has got countless ones sorted by ethnicity. Weather your running a game in ancient Egypt or Medieval Denmark, you can find some authentic names. Be sure to have your pop-blocker running before going tho.

You can cache pages of interest from the web and save them for the game. (Cut n paste works too). I like to keep useful articles minimized on the task bar to pop them up during the game. When the game starts, I load them all up and just minimize them till later.

I also use the web to mine for occasional sound effects.

This is all on top of the usual sites like this one, EnWorld, and others.

I also discovered that the list was useful for managing certain less fascinating aspects of the game. It was a good forum for discussing requests for rules tweaks, questions about the setting, and character development. While this can all be done in person, having a written forum allowed for us all to organize our thoughts in such a way that we felt we were better communicating.

I’ve given thought to running a campaign website, but I honestly don’t see myself having the proper level of committment.

We rotate DM’s in one of the groups I’m in and I put together a site for my homebrew with much info in nicely hyperlinked pages. It didn’t get a lot of hits so I wound up not maintaining it for any real length of time.

So mostly the internet helps my game by being a souce of discussion with other GMs/Players

Back when I was writing session logs (which I always think of as “campaign journals”), it usually took me as long to write each one as it did to play one session — about 6 hours. In the end, too much work — but I learned a lot about how I would do it differently, if I were to do it again.

So since 2000, whenever I’ve been GM, I’ve posted the session logs to the Web. The players have, overall, enjoyed the logs–especially as something to read while bored at work. Sometimes the logs have been useful in catching up new players to the current situation. (Of course, reading about someone else’s adventure is never as fun as reading about your own.)

Keeping the session logs up to date has been a challenge. It’s *work* to recall the significant parts of what happened and write it up in a somewhat interesting/at-least-readable fashion. I’ve found, though, that if I combine the log writing for last week with the preparation for this week, I can get both done in a reasonable timeframe.

I’m not GM-ing right now as I’m enjoying one of the rare chances I get to be a player, but when I do start running again, I’ve decided I will use a combination of Wiki and blog. I’ve become very comfortable with those technologies over the past year, and can see how they would be great for campaign organization.

-David