Blog Comments

*lol*
Well, I'm usually too busy during the weekdays. As long as the worshipping starts by late afternoon Friday I can live with that

interesting thank you "LindseyFan"

Originally Posted by LindseyFan

... I get mixed up as to which of them I am worshipping during the current week.

That's OK, there's room for both Lord E and myself to be worshiped - I suggest Mondays-through-Fridays for me and Saturdays-throught-Sundays for Lord E - I think that's fair, don't you? <distant threatening rumble of... thunder?>

Seriously, I enjoy reading your Blog and posts - well done!

Yes, you are right.. it was LordEntrails... I get mixed up as to which of them I am worshipping during the current week.

I love PBP too. That's one of the systems I used before discovering FG. I still PBP but not as often anymore with so many exciting games here. I have completely dropped the chat text games, for FG however.

Thanks for catching my attribution error!

I think you are doing Lord Entrails an injustice there, he was the one who suggested a training module, not Dulux-oz,

On my thoughts with regards to Text-based gaming, my only experience is pbp (play by post). I find pbp to be quite the outlet for the budding writer, giving yourself a liberal amount of time to craft the perfect post. The only issue with pbp is it takes forever to do anything.

With respect to your version of text adventuring, maybe I will have a chance during FGCon. From what I have read, you do a great job of it.

I also had my first text only experience recently and it was awesome. I loved how Lindsey gave life to the monsters. That is one of the many things I would love to do when I DM.

Great tips, Gunnar! You are certainly one of the excellent text DMs I try to emulate. One good thing about FG is that scrolling text box for when you do end up with 7 players. At first it seems crazy, but then you realize that all your players get to talk at once without feeling interrupted by any other. I savor when my players get to feel like the hero; letting them be heard at the table goes a long way towards that.

Making sure you do not have too many players as a GM is also important. With Text Only, the chat window can fill up, and scroll pretty fast. The good thing is you can scroll back up and recheck to make sure you didn't miss anything instead of asking again while wondering who said what. It's best to get as much content into chat frames in your story and other sections to reduce the amount of typing you as a GM has to do.

Oh wow! Great idea! That's the perfect idea! I can even just hit those chats as we gone along to make sure they get to try each step before the next one. That would be much easier.

Thank you. They need a rep button in blogs!

If you want to stay text only. Make an instructions module.

Start a new campaign. Take a few screen grabs and then in your favorite graphics program circle or make arrows to the parts of the UI that you often want to refer to. Then make story entries with chat entries (ctrl-3) on different topics with links to your maps. Then export into a module.

Then you can load this module when you want, and share the images as needed with players. You can also quickly throw into chat the pre-typed entries from your story entries.

You could even then share this module so that other text-only GM's could use it too

Just remember to update it in the original campaign and re-export.

I remember time when text games was favourite. Continue "LindseyFan"

To those that didn't get the joke.. I was speaking of Dulux-Oz's videos. They are very comprehensive. Very.

Yeah, but what about mine

Most are pretty good about watching them, but there is still the application of that learning. Still I suppose I am actually already saving a fair amount of time through those videos.

And of course there is a certain person's videos I highly recommend as they are what trained me starting out!

Training, whether with voice or text, is an issue for a lot of activities - both in hobbies and in business. There's a whole industry around training in the workplace (this is post-university/technical college).

That's one of the main reasons I put together my FG Tutorial Videos - I was sick of training people, so I did it once and recorded it.

I know you said you tell people about vids, but perhaps you need to tell them a little more strongly - or alternatively loose all feeling in the ends of you digits

And having just finished a text-only adventure this afternoon, I can recommend it highly. My own view is that actually enhances roll-playing. People don't talk over one another, and it helps everyone quickly get over the shyness factor. I think it also strongly fosters the 'theatre of the mind' element of the game, at least for those hardwired with a literary bent to them. I'd never played this way before until last Thursday, but went into it with an open mind. I'm now of the view that, for me and my own style, it's my preferred way to play. Just my 2 cents .... [This was not a paid announcement .... ]

Oh sure, Phystus, there are a million various pros for voice, for those that use it. This blog isn't about that - it's only about dealing with and loving text-only.

Another nice thing about having voice is that you have a backup communication channel in case FG crashes, you lose power or internet, and so forth. You can tell everyone what's up and give them an ETA on the fix. Awhile back we lost power during a game. I was able to connect to the voice server via cell phone to let everyone know that we were going to be down for a while. If we didn't have a backup communication such as that they all would have been left wondering whether to try to reconnect.

You're right, I would recommend that to other text-only DMs now. That's not to say don't train anyone at all if you are unable to voice, but voice training is recommended with our newest players/family.

For training I'd use voice - it is so much easier for Q&A, ad-hoc descriptions, etc.. Even if your end game will be in text, I'd still do voice for training and maybe even OOC Q&A in your first couple of sessions.