West Marches Style: Bringing Us Together

Thanks so much Keleth!

What do you need from us Keleth?

Seconded, let us know what you need from the GMs, Apex and I can brainstorm it.

Nope, got it. Welcome to the chaos.

The first and foremost question is: how is Gamers' Plane getting in the way of something like this.

Second: as you all have experience with GP, if you could add any feature to add to GP right this second to improve this project's ease of use, what would it be?

They may end up being the same answer, but I hope you see what I'm getting at. We can take it to a different thread/location if we want to keep this just for new players.

A new thread could work. Better to leave this for the new players.

Thanks Keleth!

Is there a central West Marshes game? Maybe with a GM/admin forum?

I created a sub game for myself where I detail the adventure and pre write some interactions. Mostly it's for notes. It's a private game since no one else needs access.

We do have a section for the GMs set aside inside the game as well, where the GMs communicate.

Ok, we'll figure something out. Maybe we should have a central West Marches game, that's more communication and centralizing than anything else. And it could lead to a few potential features I'm thinking of.

Can you access the game, Keleth? If not we could add you as a DM so you could look around yourself, if that’d be helpful.

One thing that makes it tough for players is that the game's forums are always highlighted since there is always people posting. I'd like if the forum could indicate specifically that the threads I've subscribed to were active. Like maybe the red dot is a different color if my subscribed threads are active.

I am lord and master of the site! I go where I want! ... with people's permission, most of the time.

Just send me a DM with the link to the game? I'll go in there and make a thread as appropriate.

Here are some things I've been thinking about:
GMs have access to everything, possibly creating a sub type of GM as temp to allow access to specific things
-- sub to above -- GMs can play games but notes appear automatically for all threads
best avenue for retiring adventures
possibly a day/time tracker as adventures occur inside the same game.
creating maps and additional image support for players maintaining a map of the area.

In the upgrade, I'm going to have a "View subscribed threads" list, like there is for new posts. That should help, and we can refine that to improve it.

I like this time tracker idea. Maybe have it floating on the thread at the top or bottom somewhere.

I would also love, and I know this has been said before, a section under the character's image to display; AC, HP, race, class. It would make it easier as I have to keep or reopen a lot of extra windows.

One thing that would be very useful for a game of this size is a revamp to the character bar. As it is right now, characters in the game are displayed by username of their creator in descending alphabetical order when the "Characters" tab is opened at the bottom of a screen in-game. However, in a game like Venatus, there are literally 50 characters, which means only people with usernames at the end of the alphabet will be able to see their characters. If scrolling/a search bar could be added so that you can access the characters you need by name/username of creator, that'd be incredibly helpful for trying to find a character sheet easily in-game.
On that same note, the "Character" tab at the top of the page could use a revamp as well, at least, in my opinion. As it is right now, clicking on it drops down a short list of characters, which are the first 5 or so of your character list, which is arranged in alphabetical order. After that is a tab "All Characters", which you have to click on to see the rest of your characters. But for someone like me (I've created 42 characters and Apexwolf, for example, has created 53), seeing the five characters that we created whose names happened to start with A is rarely helpful. If instead we could favorite character sheets to appear in that drop down tab, that'd be much more helpful. Does that make sense? That way we could access the characters we use the most quickly, instead of having to take the multiple steps to go into our character list and find them.
These things will make having a game with 50+ people in it run just that much more smoothly.

The only problem with this is that the adventures are going to move at a different pace, right? So while Adventure Group 1 quickly RPs through 2 days of exploring a desert within a week RL time, Adventure Group 2 might spend that week to RP their vicious battle with goblins during Night 1. Am I making sense?

Really like the second idea though.

Yes, that is the problem and why the tracker would be nice for the GMs. So when we go into an adventure there is a way to know where people are in terms of the time line.

Right now we manage that in a forum post where we are keeping a list of each thread with a day count next to it.

So group 1 goes out and spends 5 days (2 days IRL time) in the desert and returns to town.
We cant' have them show up before group 2 who has spent 2 days fighting in the swamp and returns to town (1 week IRL time)

we also have people in the town trying to do things like form groups.

We are also trying to maintain cohesion between events that would effect all groups like weather. Maybe trying to maintain all this continuity is pointless and just more work for us then we need to spend, but it makes the world a little more consistent which I think is the point of west marches.

No I like the cohesion it brings and I agree that the tracker would be useful. I think my comment was more about the implementation and I may have been confused by wording.