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100% GMing
Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas and a community of GMs helping each other run great games since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.
Online Support for GMs?
Thu. November 16, 2006
How much online support is available for your games of choice? And as a GM, how much mileage do you get out of it?
When I run (or play D&D), I get tons of use out of the online SRD (my version of choice is the one by Sovelior and Sage). I’m also a big fan of having well-designed character sheets — whether official or unoffical — available online. If I were running Burning Wheel, I know I’d be referring back to the Burning Wiki quite often.
Does the presence or absence of online support for a game make a qualitative difference in your enjoyment of GMing that RPG?
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15 Responses to “Online Support for GMs?”
I doubt I’d still be running 3.5 without an online SRD. It just makes my life so much easier.
I also have benefited from the online D20 SRD, although my preferred version is http://www.d20srd.org for being so well hyperlinked. In recent weeks, I’ve taken to bringing my laptop with me to my current game because online resources often on more easily utilized.
For most other games which I’ve run, I find official support to be rather weak. To some extend this reflects the fact that other games aren’t open. Most online support comes from fan sites which generate their own unsupported content.
The best support that can be provided, however, is also the easiest to provide, which is official message boards. Being able to confer with other GMs and players, and occasionally the game designers themselves, is quite helpful in understanding and mastering a game.
Ditto. I don’t think I’d want to run anything other than D&D, except maybe some little indie RPGs where everything’s very simple.
Sovelier & Sage’s SRD used to be my favorite, and it still has its uses (downloading it for when you can’t get online), but I started using d20srd.org when I wasn’t at my computer and didn’t have the S&S one, and I’ve pretty much converted. I think it’s a lot easier to use and better organized.
And having digital versions of products is of extreme importance to me. I have a couple dozen D&D books, but I use my (slightly-less-than-legal) PDFs a whole lot more just because it’s a lot easier for me to juggle the Spell Compendium, PHB 2, Dragon Magic, etc, etc as open PDFs rather than having all those books open on a table and keep jumping between them.
Yeah, online support makes a huge difference. For example, reading the book I had no idea how to play Capes, but the flash demo (with tabs including motivations and the like) really helped me figure it out.
Similarly, throwing out a town for DitV and getting feedback can really take a meh town and add spice to a few NPCs, changing the whole feel of the town.
For D&D, the widespread discussion and support rehabilitated my enjoyment of the game; after discussing hows and whys, I was able to come up with a strategy to enhance my enjoyment of the game. (Basically, learning to avoid the parts that I found tedious– obvious in retrospect.)
So, yes, online support is a huge deal– and I’m fortunate that many of the systems I enjoy have a solid supply of it.
One of the most important components of online support is providing character creation spreadsheets.
I play both 3.5 and True20, and whipping out a batch of NPCs in a few minutes helps cuts down time and mistakes. I cut and paste the stat block info into an adventure outline document, so all the essential info is at hand when I sit down to play. This also frees me up from using a PC at the table.
I agree too. Ars Magica and Chimera both have good online support as well. Hopefully RPG companies realize these days that two of their competitive advantages are their IP and content, and the intarweb makes re-purposing content easy. Wizards’ feats and spells databases are good examples of tools that don’t cannibalize from print product sales but help GMs.
The online revolution has helped companies like WOTC get feedback on what kinds of things their players want to see and actually implement them into their games.
It also makes it viable to test out new products for the public opinion before putting all their effort into doing a print run.
As well as facilitating smaller companies to pull from talented unknowns in the industry. I’ve discovered multiple artists on Deviant art whose art is now in our book, and I’m always looking for new artists and new content writers/editors.
I think the community is always looking for new and fun things to enhance a game. Barring illegal PDF’s of a book, it is very hard to steal a game through the online extra content that might be available. You’re still going to want to have the book available for official errata, and the work it takes to compile the information from multiple sources to get something complete isn’t worth it by any means.
So I say that providing a good online backbone and support structure can only help spread the word and strengthen a gaming system.
Anybody have recommendations for d20 Modern? For rules reference I just use a PDF copy on my laptop (and let the players use my hardcopy.) I do use a number of online tools during game play, but none for actual rules, more reference and NPC name generation.
For d20 Modern, I like this site. http://www.12tomidnight.com/d20modernsrd/Home.php
I wouldn’t say that online support is as big an issue for me as online resources (being in the tech industry online support has a very specific meaining for myself that might be different from what others think of). If a system has great online resources that I can take advantage of I will definitely give it a closer look. Character generation tools, encounter tools, combat systems, and other types of resources being online tell me a lot about the game system. Plus since I tend to write programs to automate everything that I possibly can all of these types of tools are a major bonus to me because I think “Great! I won’t have to write a program for that!”.
i’d say it does, more so now than even before. online SRDs are a huge improvement over typing in all the potion descriptions from the DMG.
keeping my campaign notes and information online was a big improvement over keeping it in a notebook, because it was easier to reference and use, and my players could refer to it easily as well. and now, of course, i can put it into a wiki instead of writing my own campaign encyclopaedia software, if i wanted.
i tend to make heavy use of random generators and similar tools, to streamline some of the grunt work of being a DM so that i have more time for the fun stuff.
beyond that, of course, there’s the wealth of ideas from fellow DMs, taken from 3rd party d20 system products, usenet, and web sites. it makes hitting my group with stuff from left field a bit easier. yoink.
Heck yes. I DM and play from a laptop, and use some or all of the following online resources:
HeroForge - Many flavors at http://nzcomputers.net/heroforge/default.asp
d20srd.org - Pay the $15 for the downloadable version, then convert the links in the cascading Firefox plugin to use the local files.
PDFs - open in the full Acrobat to copy/paste. (Yes, I buy them. Well, most of them, but I usually have the hardcopy anyway…)
IM and chat - easier to handle paperwork away from the table.
Forums - nobody settles rules questions better and faster than ENWorld.org.
Maps - The 5′ square standard makes finding a map very, very quick and easy.
An online presence for the game. I use Yahoo Groups, but Google’s another option, as is ‘rolling your own’.
“Objects” - funky traps, cool monsters, memorable encounters, NPC ideas, plots, etc. are all available, in varying states of “finished” for D&D.
Canonfire - I run an old-school Greyhawk game using d20 D&D. This is an amazing resource if you don’t want to use the Living Greyhawk version of events.
Treasure Tables - A little-known, but excellent online resource, with a much-higher-than-average readership, and a good signal:noise ratio.
Good links! My bag of online tools continues to grow — thank you.
(Johnn) Hopefully RPG companies realize these days that two of their competitive advantages are their IP and content, and the intarweb makes re-purposing content easy.
Amen to that. I’m always baffled by RPG companies, even small ones, that have a nonexistent, minimal or just plain weird web presence.
Good electronic support — online or off — is essential. As other noted, the SRD is an essential part of my gming workflow, from quick-rule reference at the gaming table to hyperlinked spell and monster descriptions in my Word notes.
Toolks like the d20srd.org’s Encounter Calculator, Spell Filter and Monster filter are critical tools for me.
Offline, I doubt I’d still be running D&D (or at least, creating my own NPCs and organizations) if I didn’t have HeroForge. In fact, if Wizards was smart they’d make sure that they had a kickass character creation tool — complete with statblock generation — the moment 4th edition ships (failing that, sneak a few copies out to the HeroForge crew so they can do it…)
Online name generators, like the ones you find at RPG Inspiration (http://www.rpginspiration.com/) are also essential to my workflow (though less rule-specific)
I agree with Ken. Support, whether online or off, is essential. Let’s face it, if Rock/Paper/Scissors had two monthly magazines, regular hardcovers books from many publishers, .pdf downloads, superb forums and blogs like yours dedicated to it, we’d all be using /that/ as the rules system of choice for our gaming.
It’s the vibrant life in the d20 system that makes it so good - nothing else. And long may it continue!
I use Sovelier & Sage offline on my laptop. I use pcgen for characters and NPCs. I’m a regular at ENWorld’s messageboards. Call it integration if you like; I call it community