A Guide to Guides!

We'll put up notes here for people looking to build guides, including suggestions, rules, etc. As they don't really exist yet, this post will be updated often.

1) Only guides relating to RPGs or playing games on Gamers' Plane should be created, including game play, world building, character building, and storytelling.
2) Each guide should take its own thread; each should get its own attention.

Guides for what? Rules systems?

sandchigger, check this thread i made here: http://gamersplane.com/forums/thread/381/ and you'll know what this is about :)

Keleth, addendum to 1:: perhaps general guides for creating worlds or characters with -life- to them would be also in the OK to do, even though they don't pertain to specific games or systems, they could be helpful when people want ideas for flushing out their games // characters.

(last posts on this aren't coming up correctly this before you get into the thread)

So I'm thinking a Guide should have certain criteria so that all of them have a similar look and feel. Consistency will be good for looking over several guides by several different people.

We should come up with a standard template/format possibly. Basically how we want information presented for them, and how we want them to (more or less) look when you open and check one out.

I also think Links to reference material in them can be quire helpful if any are available to use (like d20srd.org or other similar sites for relevant systems).

Thoughts on this?

Nothing to disagree with there.

So what sections, for lack of a better term, would a template have?

Introduction
Core Mechanics
Character Options
World Overview
Creating a Character on GP
Running a Game on GP

??

The more I think about it, I'm not sure there's a standard template for all guides. There would be one for certain things, but in general, I think formatting is more important than the actual template.

More so a formatting template is what i was getting at.
I imagine guides would be specific to a single idea, i.e character creation is a single guide for a single system.

Do we want to start on a guide together? I would suggest that the initial post in a thread remains "the guide", edited as we go, and the remainder of the thread is discussion on what edits should be made to the guide housed in the "initial post".

Also, I would suggest that we ignore formatting for now, but then use the first trial guide to develop a template for follow up guides.

So, if we want to do this together, we need to pick the "guidemaster" i.e., who will be responsible for maintaining the initial post/guide, and what game do we want to build a guide for? I would suggest either Numenera or D&D 5e, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, or Fate Core as the most requested games here. I've skipped D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, which are also popular, but if y'all would prefer one of those, it would be fine with me.

Well, I'm much too dumb to be a guide master, but I like the idea of doing one together. Numenera would be my suggestion.

This could also be a great reason and way to learn a bit about a system "you've" never tried before, possibly. haha

I thought about that, too. I made characters for Numenera and SW:EotE here, having never played either before, and it would have been interesting to journal the learning process for the next person.

i guess the task is finding who all wants to do what systems, and what kind of guide they'd be interested in doing.

Character creation is interesting, because it naturally falls into two distinct categories:
1. The mechanical actions of creating a character (determining attributes, picking skills, etc)
2. Guidelines/experience/best practice for making interesting characters for Play by Post.

The first part is easy, for me. I already make quick char gen guidelines for all the games I play (and some I have only read, like Numenera). So from that perspective, I am ready to post character generation guides right now. But I am a neophyte when it comes to Play by Post, so I can't really say what would be good for that in particular. I get the sense that there is a best practice of collaborating on characters in a dedicated forum thread for each game, where the players post their character concepts and then receive suggestions/feedback from other players. This has the potential to create communally-generated character backgrounds, which is always interesting, as it makes it more likely that characters will have direct ties to one another's stories. But is it universally true that players should decide their backgrounds communally? Is it universally preferable to wait for direction from the GM? I just don't know yet.

This is similar to my experience, in that despite decade of RPG play I'm a complete newb to PBP. I'm not entirely sure what's 'universal' practise, or what's just preference to the community of GP, but it's an ongoing learning experience all the same.

I don't know how I feel about designing backgrounds communally. I understand comparing notes in terms of what's mechanically needed to shore up a party's weaknesses, but I can't help but think a background should be more personal. I don't know, perhaps I'm overthinking it.

Yeah, I agree. I think that this depends so much on system and GM/player preference that there can't be a hard-and-fast Best Practice for how communally characters should be created. I made the comment originally because every game I've played in so far has had a character creation thread (which inherently invites comment and feedback from the group), but on the other hand, I am working on creating a game in which a) I cannot assume that anyone has the rule book, and b) the character generation involves so many decisions of the part of each player that I'm anticipating using PMs quite a bit to avoid filling threads with skill point mathematics specific to each character. There are games like Dungeon World or Fiasco where the character generation is part of the world-building and pretty much HAS to be done communally, and then there's games like Traveller where char gen is so involved that it would be laborious.

Incidentally, with regards to my game I mentioned above, I may poll the group to see if they want to have individual threads for each character's creation; that way, people can follow the process if they want to, but don't have to sift through pages of cruft to get information about their own characters.

Thats definitely the most mature way to go about it, yes. I don't think there's ever an approach where giving players more choice and the opportunity to make informed decisions is a bad thing!

edit - Spelling. What is with my keyboard tonight.

I see this thread was last updated almost five months ago, I'm a bit late to the party, but I like the idea of building guides for GP players and thought I would add a, probably very obvious, suggestion.

Can each game (D&D5E, etc.) have a sub-forum in the Guides section? Then each could have individual threads for the different guides related to it (character creation, rules, etc.).

Perhaps World Building could, in instances where it is appropriate, have sub-forums too. So you could build a shared world which could, potentially at least, be played in several different systems (different D&D editions, Dragon Age, etc).

This is one of those threads/forum sections that will take time and effort to grow, so glad to see you're interested fluglichkeiten!

I considered whether we want subforums, but I'm a bit hesitant to create a bunch of subforums until we see how this forum develops. For now, I think simply labeling a guide with it's system, if it's system specific, is sufficient. As time progresses, we may find that a system only has 2-3 threads that keep evolving, making a subforum unnecessary.

As for world building, that brings up an interesting point, as we also have the Game Development forum. Probably guides to making settings/worlds would go here, discussions about development would go there. It is a bit of a finicky point.