Wednesday, May 14, 2008

A Great resource for DMs: Gnome Stew

Wanted to give a little link-love to a site I discovered last week. It's called Gnome Stew.

It's a game mastering blog, written by GMs, for GMs. With 10 authors, Gnome Stew delivers system-neutral and system-specific content for game masters.

Here's a bit from a great recent article, 12 Ways To Use Google Apps at the Game Table:

Personally, I think Google Docs is one of the most powerful and useful applications that Google offers. It’s a basic word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program, but with the ability to share documents and have users edit them simultaneously and collaboratively. For instance, one of the simplest ways to use Docs is as a character sheet. Once it’s done, have your players share the character sheet with you and the other players. That way you can always access the most recent version of their characters. Now you can check their current Spot and Listen checks and don’t need to keep pestering them to update the hard copy that’s perpetually two levels behind. If one of your players misses a game, your group has a copy of their character ready to play.

Along a similar vein, you can share hireling and party NPCs among your group so that anyone can pop the sheet open and start running them.

Some more advanced usage might be to keep a collaborative party log. Nobody likes keeping a log, so let your players share the work. Changes to the document are shown in other people’s open documents nearly instantly, so when Suzie types in “Met Orc King,” John can update that to include the King’s name, and you can correct the spelling.

Loot tracking is another task that is sometimes viewed as tedious. A shared party loot tracking spreadsheet can share the load, and prevent the rogue from skimming off the top. (Sure, that’s in character. Jerk.)

If you’re busy (or lazy) you can create a house rules document but make your players do the work of entering the questions, changes and clarifications when they come up at the table.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Shawn! We're closing in on the end of a great first week, with much more to come.

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