Campaign diaries, and online resources for in-person games

[kamikasei]

I'm trying to restart my RL group's campaign, and as we're all colossal nerds, I figure a campaign diary wherein I can summarize the events of sessions, post descriptions of various game world places and things and bits and pieces of news and current events, and help players keep track of their loot, NPCs, handouts etc. would be a good way to sustain immersion and interest between sessions.

I'm seeking the guidance of the board's collective wisdom on two points.

Firstly, what sort of service would you say is best suited to this? A blog? A wiki? Something else again?

And secondly, of the various free services offering the above, are there any that I should avoid for license/T&C reasons? I'd be posting up information on a setting and inhabitants of my own creation; I don't know much about copyright law, especially as it applies on the internet (I myself am not resident in the US, if that's relevant), and while I'm not planning to pitch my ideas to Wizards or anything - it's just a homebrew world for my home game - I would like to at some point systematize it a bit and make it usable for myself in online games or others who might like to play in the sandbox, and have it recognized that I'm the author and it's my creation.

I know a few people here maintain archives of their homebrewing, including wikis, so I guess I'm wondering if I'm stuck getting my own hosting and domain if I don't want to sign away a bunch of control over whatever I want to put up.

[Hal]

I guess it depends on how much information you want your guys to have access to, and how interactive you want that info to be.

I've never done any of the wikis or things like that, but my campaigns have all had regular email contact. When I was DM, I always gave the guys a synopsis of the sessions after we were finished. In games I've played, the DMs like to send important documents, lists of loot, etc. to us between games.

So, email has worked out just fine for me. No need to make it more complicated than it needs to be. Your mileage may vary.

[happyturtle]

I set up a bulletin board for our group, but pretty much me and the DM are the only ones who post in it. My character is the group's scribe, so excerpts from her journal appear on the forum after each session, and the DM tallies up the monsters and such we fought. It's useful for trying to remember what happened three sessions ago (especially as we only meet once a month) but there isn't a lot of interaction there.

[kamikasei]

Interactivity isn't an issue, this would be a place for me to put stuff up and the players to find it. Email is a thought, but I'd prefer to be able to put stuff up here and there as I think of / write it (for the background/setting material), so a site that the players could look up when they feel like it and find a bunch of new stuff to delve into would seem superior to me than a stream of small emails, none individually that interesting, that people would maybe read, discard, and quickly forget.

[Talyn]

Wikis are pure gold for these sorts of things.

They can have more than just campaign diaries - they can have NPC descriptions, chararcter sheets, quest logs, everything you'd want from a computerized RPG at the touch of a finger.

Wetpaint.com is free, easy and fairly functional, though don't expect too many bells and whistles. I cannot recommend the use of a wiki highly enough - my gaming group stumbled upon it a few months ago, and now I can't think how we possibly managed without it.

[Tura]

I would suggest a blog if only the DM writes the diary, and a wiki if all players contribute, but it really depends on what you like best. As for license, I think the best solution is Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) 3.0. In a nutshell :

You are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work


Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.


There is some fine print, which depends on what national laws apply, but that's the idea. It basically means that anyone can play with your material for non-commercial purposes as long as he attributes it to you, and that no one can make money out of it without getting your permission.

[clockwork warrior]

this wetpaint sounds great, i have also tried finding a way to do such things for my games, and i think this will really help

[kamikasei]

As for license, I think the best solution is Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) 3.0.

That's a good idea. I'll use that as my baseline and compare the TOSs of sites to it.

Does anyone know how this interacts with Wizards licensing issues? What sort of things aren't you allowed mention? Other than not publishing non-OGL content I assume I can put up my own homebrew and make liberal reference to the fact that such-and-such has an ability that works just like this-and-that which is found in book X, page Y? I can say that my players fought an illithid on Thursday without fear of reprisal?

[Tura]

That's a good idea. I'll use that as my baseline and compare the TOSs of sites to it.

Does anyone know how this interacts with Wizards licensing issues?
I'm afraid I don't know the specifics. But it goes without saying that Creative Commons applies to your work only. You can't imply there's a CC license behind portions of the SRD. Just for your story and homebrew material.

And illithids should be called squid-thingies, I think. :smallbiggrin:

But seriously. Technically, you can't publish anything about illithids. Practically, no one will bother with your illithids unless you suddenly begin to make loads of money out of them, and even then it's a stretch. A reference in a webcomic or a campaign diary is highly unlikely to bring lawyers to your door. But if you publish and sell a setting with copyrighted material.. that's another thing altogether. :)

[valadil]

My group uses a wiki for the current campaign. Some members are more active than others, but it works pretty well over all. I'm not sure if we'll be keeping it after this game though (this particular game is an experiment wherein we keep our characters but switch DMs after 2 or 3 sessions so it became necessary to have common knowledge documented online somewhere).

[Venerable]

I'll second the use of wikis. The group I play in has used one since (almost) the campaign's start. One person brings a laptop and records sessions in real time. Another has used it to write his character's campaign diary. We record factions we run into, NPCs, character sheets, XP per session, a campaign calendar, Moments of Awesomeness(tm), loot, and players' pizza topping preferences. Even cooler: the wiki maintainer has added the ability to easily link to the SRD (e.g. [monster:wight] or [feat:great cleave]).

That said, there are a few drawbacks. Getting players to use a wiki can be hard (only half my group are regular contributors). You have to maintain & back up the wiki. And email/IM can be better for discussions than wikis.

For my group the wiki is well worth the effort. It's a lot easier to plan a battle when you can look up the other players' character sheets!

[Tsotha-lanti]

I keep a website of my own (hosted on my school's server for the time being, hur hur) for RPG stuff. It's currently full of campaign info and cult write-ups for RuneQuest, with a lot of lorem ipsum in the other games' pages. It's great. As a DM, I actually find it easier to organize information online than in .rtf files.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

My campaign uses G-Mail docs for everything. There's a doc just for everyone's Char sheets, a doc with the GMs idea of WTF is going on, and a doc run by the players with their interpretations. The 2 are humorously different.

[Stormcrow]

My website (http://imbercorvus.com) has a sector of our forums dedicated to Campaign Journals. Including the option of your own forum to post your stuff up in. Beyond that I'd recommend WordPress, you can give each person a log on to it and then filter the entries you want to see based on who wrote them, you can even attach character sheets.