Text Club

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .... ]

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

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!

Yeah, but what about mine

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

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.

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!