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View Full Version : DM Help Best place to play-by-post? Looking at Obsidian Portal.



SpaceBadger
2014-06-04, 07:51 AM
Need some space for a new campaign, mostly for Wiki and campaign notes and maps to store and organize campaign stuff for our face-to-face games, but we also have one player who is only able to be here occasionally (less during the school year), two former players now in the Army, various friends who live elsewhere but might want to play, so we want to be flexible to try some other things, maybe as a parallel campaign in the same world, or just different PC group in same campaign, either using PbP or Skype or some other tools.

I would love to be able to use the Citizens of the Imperium forums + Traveller Wiki as those have proved a great combination for my SBRD campaign (http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/forumdisplay.php?f=141) (SBRD wiki (http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Campaign:SBRD)), but this other campaign isn't Traveller or even close, so I can't run it there. (Actually this one will be sort of an E6 version of the Conan RPG, with some borrowings from Pathfinder; not using Gnorman's actual E6 classes, but inspired by his style of class design.)

Looking at Obsidian Portal. Ascendant Membership for the main GM adds a lot of nice features (including ability to allow co-GMs who are not Ascendant). I've mostly looked at it once a couple years ago as a player for a planned campaign in which the GM bailed out at the last minute, then some again recently, but have never actually played a game there.

Any comments about Obsidian Portal (based on experience, please) either pro or con? Any suggestions for good alternatives w similar features (or better)?

SpaceBadger
2014-06-05, 03:47 AM
Another possibility we are looking at is RPoL.net, either alone or in conjunction with Obsidian Portal as campaign data repository.

Or I suppose we could play our PbP bits here at GitP, with campaign data at Obsidian Portal.

Anybody have experiences, pro or con, with either of those campaign methods?

What about running some parts live, either by chat or Skype? Combat in particular just really drags in PbP, and I've often thought of trying to get everyone scheduled for some real-time on those. Experiences? Hints?

Either that or simplify PbP combat by having Players state their basic intentions for the next round, then I as GM do all die rolls and write the scene of results, lather rinse repeat.

I've GMed lots of face-to-face games of various systems, but SBRD is my first experience as an online GM, and although it has been going about ten months now it is far from perfect, so I'd appreciate any tips from those of you that have done more of this.