Confessions of an Online GM

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Since this was linked to from a more recent thread, thought I'd add a few more thoughts on running fights/pacing.

 

As a GM, I institute a time limit for posting the action of the next in line - depends on the posting rate of the game of course. I use 3 days as a guideline. If the next person in line to act doesn't post within that timeframe, they're assumed to be holding their action. The player can of course drop in anytime and use that held action, or if appropriate the GM may do a defensive action on their behalf.

 

Speaking of defensive actions - the way posting and the dieroller work, it seems to work out smoother to let people 'abort' to defensive actions even after seeing the to hit rolls, etc. It's a bit gamey and peels some of the uncertainty away, but makes things go much smoother and faster IMO. And of course it works for the villains too.

[Fedifensor]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

One thing I'm curious about - how many people is it feasible to handle in a single game. I usually want 4 to 6 people in a face to face game, but with playing at such a slow pace I'm not sure if more people would help or hinder things...

[Kevin Schultz]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

One thing I'm curious about - how many people is it feasible to handle in a single game. I usually want 4 to 6 people in a face to face game' date=' but with playing at such a slow pace I'm not sure if more people would help or hinder things...[/quote']

 

The fastest games I've seen are solo ones, with one player and one GM. In my experience, the more people you have, the more likely someone is to not respond, thus slowing the game down.

[Checkmate]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Kevin Schultz is right. There are some advantages to larger groups, such as increased interaction and makes a bit less work on the GM as they don't have to post as often, but it does slow things down considerably.

 

Some other things I've learned is that while it seems like separating the group would be easier with an online game, it has some inherent problems just like a FtF game if you want to keep the characters on the same timeline it can be incredibly difficult.

 

For combats I cannot recommend maps enough. Even if you just have a bmp that you edit with Microsoft Paint.

[Tom]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

One thing I'm curious about - how many people is it feasible to handle in a single game. I usually want 4 to 6 people in a face to face game' date=' but with playing at such a slow pace I'm not sure if more people would help or hinder things...[/quote']

It really depends on the players. Get a bunch of addicts.. errrr, serious players.. online at the same time and things can move along faster than you might think.

 

Biggest problem with multiple players can be if they don't remember to pace themselves to the GM or a slower poster, and then keeping up becomes an issue...

 

Having said that, solo games tend to be the smoothest overall. But a smoothly meshed group can accomplish a lot with minimal fuss.

[matrix3]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

For combats I cannot recommend maps enough. Even if you just have a bmp that you edit with Microsoft Paint.

 

 

How do people do maps on HeroCentral? Is there some functionality that you can use, or is it really a BMP edited with mspaint?

[mvoncannon]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Or other graphic format. That is about it. You can attach it to a post or put it in your file area of you CP and then link to it.

 

An alternative would be to schedule some time and you all meet up in the chat room. Then you could us something like Screen Monkey or other system similar and do that way.

[Tom]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

How do people do maps on HeroCentral? Is there some functionality that you can use' date=' or is it really a BMP edited with mspaint?[/quote']

You can upload images with a post, but they only remain for two weeks -- which is more than long enough for my purposes as a rule. Or you can link externally.

 

Personally, I use AutoREALM (it's free, but it has a bit of a learning curve) for mapping. However, I've also used basic Paint images too.

 

I'll link an example of one of the maps from a combat I did once...

[Fedifensor]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

This is probably the wrong thread (and maybe the wrong board), but is there a guide on how to use HERO Central, sign up for campaigns, etc? It would be nice to get into an online Champions campaign, but I'd want to know what I'm getting into first...

[Tom]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

This is probably the wrong thread (and maybe the wrong board)' date=' but is there a guide on how to use HERO Central, sign up for campaigns, etc? It would be nice to get into an online Champions campaign, but I'd want to know what I'm getting into first...[/quote']

Dan's put up a good FAQ on HeroCentral, and you can usually find someone in chat there who's willing to answer questions...

 

You can get a pretty good idea how the games run just by lurking through the existing campaigns. Joining a game is pretty easy mechanically, though finding a game that's open can be a bit more challenging. There are always new games starting and older games needing new blood, so persistence pays off in the end...

[teh bunneh]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Arise, arise oh dread thread and terrorize the living! Mwa ha ha![/necromancy]

 

My confession of today... Not really a confession. Not really a rant, either, though that's a bit closer. Just sort of a grouse, I guess. First, a bit of history:

 

In my Avengers: The Next Generation game, I originally signed up to be a player. Created a fun character -- Arachne, the teenaged daughter of Peter Parker. She inherited not just his powers, but also his bad luck, his uncertainty, and his angst (based pretty much off Ultimate Spider-Man, since that's the only SM I'm reading these days). I thought she'd be a larf to play -- fun personality, lotsa plot hooks, and a classic power set.

 

But, as fate would have it, the original GM vanished and I stepped up to the plate. I do enjoy running the game and all, but... gosh, I'm sad that I never got the chance to play Mary Parker. I mean, she's still around as a GMPC, but I don't feel like I can really play her.

 

The games that I run are about my players, not about me. I've been in too many games where the GM's pet character took over, and the rest of us just followed him around watching how cool he was. So I don't do that. My GMPCs can be competant, but they can't be the hero; I won't let them steal the show from my players. Arachne won't ever come up with The Big Brilliant Idea That Saves The Day, because that's the players' job. Her job is to be there, in the background, when the players need her.

 

Which is good -- that's the way it should be IMHO. But sometimes I wish I could just let Arachne cut loose, play her the way I would've wanted to. Normally it's not a big deal, but the reason this comes up right now is I was reading one of the "WWYCD" threads, and I thought, "I know exactly what Arachne would do in this situation. She'd call Banner or Hornet or Iron Girl and ask them to work it out." Silly, huh?

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Hopefully when we get the crossovers going you'll have a chance to play her more directly. Won't be as often as being a regular player, but hey, better than nothing.

 

Aside from...[ominous]other things[/ominous]...in the works, I've got a "Marvel Team Up" Arachne/Electron story that's been floating around in the back of my head. And maybe she'll get to guest-star sometime when the X-Men go to the Savage Land or something.

 

All is not lost! It's just in our other pants.

[teh bunneh]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Hopefully when we get the crossovers going you'll have a chance to play her more directly. Won't be as often as being a regular player' date=' but hey, better than nothing. [/quote']

 

That'll be fun.

 

Aside from...[ominous]other things[/ominous]...in the works, I've got a "Marvel Team Up" Arachne/Electron story that's been floating around in the back of my head. And maybe she'll get to guest-star sometime when the X-Men go to the Savage Land or something.

 

 

OK, yeah. I'm going to That Special Hell now.

[Vondy]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

OK, yeah. I'm going to That Special Hell now.

 

 

You talk during movies?

[MilkmanDan]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Aha! My first chance to post in this thread as an online GM!

 

First thought--being an online GM is a hell of a lot harder than I thought. I mean, I tend to think of myself as a writer and as someone who can sit down and knock something out without too much trouble. Problem is, in an online campaign, there's a more or less inherent schedule to that. I feel like I need to do something every day; I know a lot of play-by-post goes slower than that, but I don't want to; I want to write something every day. In some ways, it's good, as it forces me to write on a regular basis, but the simple fact is that some days I just don't feel like it. I'm a "streaky" writer (which is why I don't write creatively for a living). I write when the proverbial muse makes a visit. I'm enough of a self-critic that I get pissed at myself when it isn't up to my alleged standards.

 

Two, being an online GM is hard because, well, there are times you just don't feel like it. I've got a job and a wife and two young kids and soccer to go to and dinner to cook and laundry and yard work and cleaning and reading with kids and bedtime stories and trying to decompress and then there's this online campaign I need to be paying attention to. I recall a PM I sent to teh bunneh when we were discussing an online GM that had vanished and I threw out the line "With great power comes great responsibility, but with insignificant power also comes insignificant responsibility". By taking on the job of online GM, you're saying to the other players "I'm going to devote the time to make this fun for you". It's often hard to find that time.

 

When things get a bit stressful and busy (like the last few weeks) my online posting suffers (both as a GM and a player; the Electron/Arachne confrontation in the T-Bolts campaign just didn't go like I wanted it to, but couldn't find the mental acuity to polish it like I wanted), but that's just how it is. In a face-to-face game, it's easy to just say "Uh . . . I punch the bad guy", but, in play-by-post, I feel the need to actually write something definitive and "worthy" and there's less leeway.

 

Add to that I started playing in my first face-to-face game in four years a couple months ago, so I'm rusty, and the X-Men: TNG game is the first GMing of any sort I've done in probably a good 15 years and, well, it's hard to get in the groove. I've started minor plot bits I've dropped mid-adventure, neglected people's actions, railroaded the plot somewhat, and stumbled in multiple ways, but, well, I figure that's the way it goes.

 

Still, it's loads of fun. It does force me to write creatively and, at best, it's really satisfying (as a player, the "Electron being angsty about her past" and "Ms. Marvel II confesses to Kitty Pryde" bits in particular I'm proud of), so it's worth it, but I really kind of figured I'd start a campaign, dump out posts, and it wouldn't be much effort. The big difference between online GMing and face-to-face GMing, as far as I can tell, is that face-to-face requires you to be on your toes every week or two weeks or whatever, while online is pretty much every day.

[teh bunneh]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Today's confession is in re: The West Coast Avengers game on HeroCentral.

 

(It's probably OK if my players read this. If they haven't figured out what's going on by now then I should probably just come out and tell them).

 

The characters have just been introduced and are standing around chatting. I get the impression that they're wondering when the adventure is going to begin (or more likely, I'm just impatient), so I start casting around for an idea.

 

Yeah, that's right. I started the game with no idea what the first adventure was gonna be. Anyway...

 

So I'm looking at the characters' disads list. Rivalries, hunteds, psych lims, backgrounds... I'm thinking, "Mad scientist. Mecha. Yeah, we're on the West Coast. Shogun Warriors! Except Red Ronin already showed up in the Thunderbolts game, and that would be a total ripoff. Hmm... Ooh! Godzilla! Perfect!"

 

So Godzilla shows up and starts tromping on downtown LA.

 

OK, so now what the hell do I do? Godzilla is a hurricane, a force of nature, not a supervillain. You can't punch him and make him go away. So I need to come up with a good reason why he's here.

 

(Keep in mind that the adventure has already started -- I've already introduced the Big G into the scenario, with no idea of why he's there or what he's doing or anything).

 

Looking back on what I had already written, I see that I heralded Godzilla's arrival with an earthquake. Did the quake wake up Godzilla? Did it summon him somehow? No. Again, I need someone for my heroes to punch, and an earthquake isn't any good for that.

 

So I bounce this back and forth in my head for a while.

 

Ah ha! There's an old Marvel villain named Moses Magnum who could cause earthquakes. He got his power overcharged by Apokalypse so now any time he sets foot on solid ground, he causes earthquakes. He's also a wealthy industrialist and arms-dealer.

 

Now we're getting somewhere!

 

OK, Magnum has lured 'Zilla here using a sonic ray that causes the big lizard pain. Godzilla isn't so much attacking LA as he's just looking for the thing that's hurting his ears. Why?

 

Magnum. Earthquake powers. Overcharged. Hey, maybe his powers are so overcharged that even getting near land causes earthquakes now! That's what caused the tremblor that heralded Godzilla's arrival! So he's looking for a way to control his powers.

 

Great! There's a lab here in LA that's working on creating a device to suppress earthquakes. It's heavily guarded by SHIELD. Magnum tried to buy it but they wouldn't sell, so now he's going to steal it. But he needs to distract the guards, so he stages a huge disaster (cue 300 foot tall radioactive lizard). The guards leave in order to do damage control, he walks in and takes the device.

 

Score! Now I have a plot!

 

(And only two+ weeks after the game began...)

 

So I tell my wife my brilliant idea and she's like, "So he lures Godzilla halfway across the Pacific just to distract some guards?"

 

Yeah, OK, it's far-fetched. But it's the Jim Shooter (as interpreted by Bunneh) Marvel Universe! What do you expect?

 

My hope is that, reading this, my players will say "Oh my god, I had no idea you were just making this up as you went. I assumed you had this all planned out from the beginning!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, that's my hope, anyway.

[Vanguard00]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Just an afterthought...yeah, maybe he lured Godzilla over to LA to distract the guards, and maybe he did it to hide his presence in the area. A 60'-tall lizard makes a big boom with every step. Seismographs are goin' haywire as it is. Who'd notice a trembler here and there as Moses Magnum does his thing? Plus power outages, superhero distractions, major emergency procedures...it all works in his favor. It's a good idea (if a bit after the fact).

 

By the way, do you know where the sonic ray is located? Make it Hollywood if you haven't already...

[MilkmanDan]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

What? You started an adventure without a clear idea where it was going? I'd never do that.

 

Um . . .

 

OK, I knew where it was going, I just wasn't sure how to get there. Looking back on the first X-Men adventure, I started various plot points that I never really resolved, introduced characters then dropped them utterly, didn't tie up loose ends . . . then again, I guess I'm trying to recreate the Claremont days, and that's pretty much what he did. He just did it better.

 

Then again, one of the big curveballs for me was I had really only planned half of the adventure--it never occurred to me that PCs were going to split into two groups. I had plenty of things planned in the castle, then, suddenly, I had a bunch of PCs sneaking up underwater and no idea what to do with them. So . . . I know, a cybernetic shark! I'm sure future adventures will not feature PCs screwing up my plans, because that never happens.

[Jalinth]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

I am so glad that I am not the only GM who doesn't wing things in PBP games.

 

Most of my PBP have me flying by the seat of my pants. At least with that format, you can take six hours to think things over. Kinda hard to do that in a FtF session.

[Tom]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Planning too far in advance is almost more effort than it's worth. The tighter you plot the adventure, the more likely your players are to do something completely off the beaten path. Even online, I try to think more in terms of 'who' and 'why' -- with only a real general idea of 'how' based on the villains' capabilities...

 

I worry about specifics once the players start looking for them. (though I try to have a couple or three possibilities in the back of my mind based on what I know the PCs can do -- trying to guess what they will do tends to give me a headache... ;D)

 

And yeah, I had Moses Magnum looking for a way to control his powers on my list of possibilities... As for Godzilla as a distraction, as I once had an NPC tell a PC worrying about why a villain was acting the way he had: "Sanity is not normally a defining characteristic of supervillains"...

 

(though the hiding Magnum's presence from seismographs isn't a half bad idea, though I'd almost have to assume that Magnum 'happened' upon where Godzilla was snoozing while doing his 'man w/o a country' impersonation and took advantage of the opportunity...)

[Fedifensor]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Then again' date=' one of the big curveballs for me was I had really only planned half of the adventure--it never occurred to me that PCs were going to split into two groups. I had plenty of things planned in the castle, then, suddenly, I had a bunch of PCs sneaking up underwater and no idea what to do with them. So . . . I know, a cybernetic shark![/quote']

Isn't that one of the rules of GMing? If you don't know what to do, throw a random combat at the characters to give you time to figure things out?

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

Isn't that one of the rules of GMing? If you don't know what to do' date=' throw a random combat at the characters to give you time to figure things out? [/quote']

 

It is. Based on the old Raymond Chandler line, "When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

 

In the HeroCentral stuff, I generally try to have a general idea of where things will go - who's involved, what their plans are, etc. But it doesn't always work out that way of course. Case in point Doom's solo arc has gone in directions I never imagined. The fledgling solo stories teh bunneh took over for me also ended up going places I never imagined when I first set them in motion.

 

But sometimes it's fun to throw something out there and then try to make it make sense.

 

Plus, sometimes I think I tend to see that the end I had in mind is in reach so I'll move towards it faster then I should.

[Fedifensor]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

So, any more confessions from the various online GMs?

 

I guess I'll chime in with my own lesson learned - avoid linking real world time to the game world in any way, shape, or form. Better yet, don't mention a month or year unless absolutely necessary (such as the obligatory Christmas adventure). If you say it's 2009...you may find yourself one week forward in game time after a year has passed in the real world.

[teh bunneh]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

So' date=' any more confessions from the various online GMs?[/quote']

 

No new confessions, but I can reiterate this one:

 

Yeah, that's right. I started the game with no idea what the first adventure was gonna be. Anyway...

 

My hope is that, reading this, my players will say "Oh my god, I had no idea you were just making this up as you went. I assumed you had this all planned out from the beginning!"

 

Yeah, the current storyline with the West Coast Avengers in hell? Lady Pandemonia? Yeah. Came up with that brilliant idea yesterday... weeks after the adventure started.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Confessions of an Online GM

 

I guess I'll chime in with my own lesson learned - avoid linking real world time to the game world in any way' date=' shape, or form. Better yet, don't mention a month or year unless absolutely necessary (such as the obligatory Christmas adventure). If you say it's 2009...you may find yourself one week forward in game time after a year has passed in the real world.[/quote']

 

We have one campaign that runs in real time, has for almost 15 years. We keep a pretty meticulous calendar, as well as measure down time in months. Which also helps to establish patterns of "normal" vs "world shattering" which makes for some nice balance.