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UnsaltedSaltine
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Hey, Whats goin on!

Post by UnsaltedSaltine » Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:47 am

Hey, I found this site by chance in fact I have no clue how I came about it but. I'm here and this looks promising. So Consider me in. I have a good background in RPGs from Countless hours behind the screen and even more behind the character sheet and keyboard. So... This is right up my alley. Glad to be here. I'm definitely looking forward to gaming with ya folks.

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Brennor
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Post by Brennor » Tue Oct 26, 2004 1:57 pm

Hey there, UnsaltedSaltine. Welcome to the site! :)

I guess our name is spreading, that's cool. We seem to be enjoying ourselves here, so hop on it and have fun. Lotsa stuff to do here!

What types of games do you like to play?

Boy, I really need to get the Introductions place setup, don't I? ;)
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Post by Brennor » Tue Oct 26, 2004 2:18 pm

UnsaltedSaltine wrote:Other sites i've gamed at in the past. Rondaks Portal & Macrays Keep.
Can you tell me any more about these places? How are they to use? What features do they offer?

I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm looking for ways to improve this site! :)
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UnsaltedSaltine
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Post by UnsaltedSaltine » Tue Oct 26, 2004 2:43 pm

Yah, sure. Ok here goes it.

:!: Rondaks Portal-
Good stuff-
:arrow: Dice roller
:arrow: Character sheets in html format
:arrow: Fantasy and other Name builders
:arrow: Chat room accessability
:arrow: Game world selector

Bad stuff-
:arrow: Sort of complicated, unless you can see through html
:arrow: Dice roller was "cursed"
:arrow: Fantasy names where more often than not extremely cheesy Ex: Bromin Vanderhiezen of the brown tower. Or Jad the merry wanderer of smelly fish. Stuff like that.
:arrow: Uh... More of a play by email sort of medium. not so much message boards.. This was a good thing too. 'cause as a DM you could choose what players saw what info.

O.K. Stuff-
:arrow: Once again play by email-ish.
:arrow: Good people - It started to fall apart and get to become select groups got together. Ex. Say you and Van and I liked our style of play. so we would decide to make private games and not give anyone a chance. Then Whine when you notice nobody like you.. lol it was Sort of like that
:arrow: Dm tools - Stuff like damage trackers and such - Very neat


:!: Macrays Keep-

Good stuff-
:arrow: Dark and gloomy looking. heheh
:arrow: Dice rollers
:arrow: On hand Info ( books by pdf )
:arrow: Really fricken cool character tools
:arrow: both play by email and Msg board format.

Bad Stuff-
:arrow: Pay site. and they where unrealistic about their prices. Like 15 dollars a month ... heck i could have a new book every month with that money.
:arrow: Selective. its creepy its like a fricken caste system in there.
:arrow: Games became too powerhouse-y for my taste.
:arrow: dm tools sucked eggs
:arrow: it crashed half the time



- So thats that. hope it helps some!

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Post by Brennor » Tue Oct 26, 2004 2:51 pm

Heh. Thanks for taking the time to do the bullet lists, UnsaltedSaltine. I appreciate it.

I did go looking at those sites, but didn't want to sign up to them from work. Can't see a whole lot about them without signing up, either... Unless you know of a demo way in? I didn't look real hard for one.

I'll take it piece by piece. :)
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Rondaks Portal

Post by Brennor » Tue Oct 26, 2004 3:02 pm

:!: Rondaks Portal-
UnsaltedSaltine wrote: Good stuff-
:arrow: Dice roller
:arrow: Character sheets in html format
:arrow: Fantasy and other Name builders
:arrow: Chat room accessability
:arrow: Game world selector
Dice Roller -- we've discussed that here, a little bit. It's been pushed down the todo list a bit (current functional problems have higher priority, of course. :) ) Would anyone still like the die roller?

Having online character sheets is a big problem here. We've got PDFs and DOCs, and have been having to email them to people. Pretty cool idea. I hadn't really thought of doing online character sheets. May have to investigate this in the future. I've already got the database backend. Shouldn't be too too hard to add in a character sheet database type thingy.

Did their chatroom work better than ours? This chatroom is a tottering pile to put it mildly. What did they use for a chatroom?

What's a "Game world selector" ?
UnsaltedSaltine wrote: Bad stuff-
:arrow: Sort of complicated, unless you can see through html
:arrow: Dice roller was "cursed"
:arrow: Fantasy names where more often than not extremely cheesy Ex: Bromin Vanderhiezen of the brown tower. Or Jad the merry wanderer of smelly fish. Stuff like that.
:arrow: Uh... More of a play by email sort of medium. not so much message boards.. This was a good thing too. 'cause as a DM you could choose what players saw what info.
Does that site have a rough presentation or something, where things didn't quite line up right and you had to read the html source of it to get the information? If so, yikes.

Heh. Most computer dice rollers are 'cursed'... has to do with the pseudo randomness of most rollers (ie: random() function isn't very random). We'll have that problem here too when the dice roller module/block gets created.

Funny names.

Actually considered PBeM when first thinking about this site. What you see now though isn't what it was originally intended to be. This was originally setup to just be a small area where my RL Shadowrun players could communicate and we could put the storylines of the games... Boy have things changed! ;)

How did the PBeMs work out for you guys? All of the PBeMs I've been involved in have died fiery, painful deaths after varying amounts of time. I've probably just had bad luck with them. I can see PbP games having the same types of problems though, but I've got no other experience with them than what is here...

I take it that Rondak's Place is more of a way to get GMs & Players together to play in a PBeM?

You are right about the DM being able to control what the player's see. A similar method exists here too. Private Messages can be sent to specific players with private data. So far, I haven't seen any OOC to IC information bleed through yet. Players here have been really good about keeping to what their characters would know. We've been lucky in that regard! :)
UnsaltedSaltine wrote: O.K. Stuff-
:arrow: Once again play by email-ish.
:arrow: Good people - It started to fall apart and get to become select groups got together. Ex. Say you and Van and I liked our style of play. so we would decide to make private games and not give anyone a chance. Then Whine when you notice nobody like you.. lol it was Sort of like that
:arrow: Dm tools - Stuff like damage trackers and such - Very neat
Hopefully we won't have the clique-ish problems here. I've seen that happen before with PBeMs too. I'm sure it can happen in a PbP setting as well. Hopefully we get lucky there too.

Seeing as you've been through it, do you have any ideas on how to combat the grouping problem?

DM Tools... Hmm. Damage Trackers. Another interesting idea. Haven't thought of that previously either. Should be able to set that up too. It would kind of go hand-in-hand with an online character database, wouldn't it?
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Macrays Keep

Post by Brennor » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:03 pm

:!: Macrays Keep-
UnsaltedSaltine wrote:Good stuff-
:arrow: Dark and gloomy looking. heheh
:arrow: Dice rollers
:arrow: On hand Info ( books by pdf )
:arrow: Really fricken cool character tools
:arrow: both play by email and Msg board format.
Heh. Dark and gloomy. That's funny. Does anyone want different themes that are currently listed here? That shouldn't be too hard to do. Although making the themes work right is a different matter.

Books by PDF? Did they have their own system they were running? Did they get permission from companies to provide the books? I'd LOVE to be able to do that (provide the books used in conjunction with this site), but don't want to get the legal smackdown by gaming companies. In fact, there used to be a few books available here (you might see links to them in some posts or references to them), but they got removed when it was mentioned that it wasn't quite legal. I'm more curious about this point, because if someone else managed to get permission to host the books, I might be able to take the same path and get permission as well. That'd be cool! :)

How fricken cool were the character tools? What'd they allow you to do?

Did it allow for the same game to be played both by email and by PbP? Or did it allow for games to be played in either medium, but not mix between the two?
UnsaltedSaltine wrote: Bad Stuff-
:arrow: Pay site. and they where unrealistic about their prices. Like 15 dollars a month ... heck i could have a new book every month with that money.
:arrow: Selective. its creepy its like a fricken caste system in there.
:arrow: Games became too powerhouse-y for my taste.
:arrow: dm tools sucked eggs
:arrow: it crashed half the time
Pay? Wow. How'd they do? I won't ever go to a pay site format, unless perhaps that'd be a way to allow for some PDFs of game books to be hosted here, but then, it'd be pay only to access that section, the areas of the site where the games are played will always be free (well, aside from registration).

Now, donations, that's another story. I'll accept donations to help pay for bandwidth costs and the new server, etc... ;)

I hope we never encounter the clique problem here, but who knows. So far, I think we've avoided it pretty well, and hopefully we'll be able to continue to.

Some powerhouse games would be okay, as long as not every game is that way. I could see some higher powered games being run here. There are some power level differences between the games in play already. Almost has to be expected that a game that runs for a long time gains in power -- unless the players are 'reset' every once in a while (forced to retire old, higher powered, characters and start new, lower powered, ones). That'd actually be an interesting idea to see take shape. Especially if the higher powered characters show up in the story again. I think we need to be a little bit older for games to be advanced enough to do that (still < 1 year old).

What did the DM tools provide? Character trackers, damage trackers, game trackers, dice rollers?

Did the server hosting that place crash alot? Is that what the last means? Or that there was database corruption and stuff like that?

We've been pretty lucky so far, but there have been a couple of outages. Mostly power related, but a couple of big ISP dumps (the last one allowed for the server transition -- big speed increase).

Thanks for all your comments/ideas! :)
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UnsaltedSaltine
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Post by UnsaltedSaltine » Tue Oct 26, 2004 10:04 pm

UnsaltedSaltine wrote: :arrow: On hand Info ( books by pdf )
Yah.. good point. Come to think of it i do think it was more of an unofficial place to get info. one of the members had it on his webspace and it was just sort of understood that it sorta belonged to the site but wasnt affiliated with or legaly bound to the site. So.. iunno about thehost of the pdf files and such, but it was definitely a bonus. And i would LOVE to have pdf books on hand and, would be willing to pay for access. Hell it beats buying each one individualy. So Im not sure about the legality and i personaly wouldnt want to have my site host something i wasnt sure about. I really dont think it would be fun having WotC down my throght.

But yah, I think if there was a way to write WotC and ask for consent, then charge a small fee for access, that would be more than acceptable.



- Character sheets.
There's the easy way. which is kinda unjust. and sort of plagerism. ( snag the Code from another site )

Or You/we could sit down and figure out the coding ourselves. it's a really basic idea if you have a firm grasp of html. Just fields and blanks that you fill in while making your character. Then it uses a sort of Template to incorperate the sheet and your information. Its pretty simple. Then those of you whom want to get nifty, can use , or not use the template to you advantage via Html coding. (Colored text helps alot .. lol)

... More to come have to go tho lol.

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Brennor
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Re: Hey, Whats goin on!

Post by Brennor » Tue Oct 26, 2004 10:24 pm

UnsaltedSaltine wrote:iunno about thehost of the pdf files and such, but it was definitely a bonus. And i would LOVE to have pdf books on hand and, would be willing to pay for access. Hell it beats buying each one individualy. So Im not sure about the legality and i personaly wouldnt want to have my site host something i wasnt sure about. I really dont think it would be fun having WotC down my throght.
I agree. Would be very cool to have access to all the books required for playing in the games, available from the same place as the games themselves. That'd be really cool. It'd be like virtually bringing your books to the gaming table.

I definitely can't afford any gaming company coming after me for doing anything like that. We are probably riding a fine line right now anyways, because some of the rules for some games systems are 'published' on this site. I think that particular point is definitely arguable though.
UnsaltedSaltine wrote:But yah, I think if there was a way to write WotC and ask for consent, then charge a small fee for access, that would be more than acceptable.
Yeah. I agree. I'm not sure how to approach this matter though. That's why I was kinda hoping that someone else had already broached the topic.
UnsaltedSaltine wrote:Or You/we could sit down and figure out the coding ourselves. it's a really basic idea if you have a firm grasp of html. Just fields and blanks that you fill in while making your character. Then it uses a sort of Template to incorperate the sheet and your information. Its pretty simple. Then those of you whom want to get nifty, can use , or not use the template to you advantage via Html coding. (Colored text helps alot .. lol)
The coding itself more than likely wouldn't be a big problem.
And, actually, I'd take it a step further than that. I create a templating system that lies on top of the database, and then an additional table that actually stores the character data. That additional table would point to the template section to determine how to parse the data.

Of course, that would take longer to implement, and so it a future idea. Stop-gap measure would be to quickly create some usuable HTML files. And then from there move onto forms which would write into the database, and then move onto the fully templated version. That all requires time though.

Do you know of any HTML character sheets out in the open right now?
UnsaltedSaltine wrote:... More to come have to go tho lol.
Heh. Don't think you expect to get this much in the way of text thrown at you immediately, eh? ;)

Thanks for all the ideas so far.
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