Advice for GMs on Elliquiy

[AndyZ]

I figured I’d start this out with a little about me.

As of this writing, I’m just over forty.  I’ve spent over half my life roleplaying in various ways.  Of the time before I started with tabletop, I’ve spent more than half my life playing RPG video games like Final Fantasy.  Of the time before that, I spent more than half my life reading.  I could read before I was three.

Does that make me an expert on GMing games?  Nope.  I doubt anyone is a true expert.  An expert has delved into the lore on a subject, read all sorts of stuff on the matter, had heavy debates, consulted with other experts, and has a reason to be appreciated in the field.  Nobody has that.

I find out all the time that there’s still stuff I can’t do and don’t know about.  Anyone reading this will too.  If there were any three hundred year old vampires that already know everything, they’d know better than to reveal themselves to me because I’d inundate them with questions.

We’re all on a journey of figuring this all out, but there’s no real guide to how to GM games on Elliquiy.  I hope to change that, and I expect that anything I say with which people can convincingly disagree will be corrected and thus make be and others better in the process.

I have a link here for the Companion Thread where people can ask me questions and give feedback: https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=358489.0

Note that I can’t possibly know what everyone already knows, so I intend to try to do this with basic explanations that some may not need.  If there’s a better way to handle that, I’ll figure it out as I go.

[AndyZ]

History and Fundamentals

I figured I would get straight into talking about some of my own experiences and give some of the basic lessons I learned in the process.

When I was very early into Elliquiy, I got very lucky very early on and had a game jump in popularity straight into Big Game Status.  Without going into too much detail, there were two groups, humans and aliens.  All the humans were dumped into one room with one theme, I had an NPC explain how the alien technology worked, and then the aliens brought humans into different rooms for NSFW.  It was very basic and people had fun but it burned out when people ran out of stuff to do, although there were various reboots.

Thinking I’d mastered making games, I went far more elaborate, only to have game after game after game die.  It was baffling at the time, but I’ve come to understand a few fundamentals to Gaming Elliquiy games that I want to share.

1.) The vision of the setting

With the Big Game that worked, I was very clear on the room in which the humans spent their free time when not with an alien.  I described it in as much detail as I could, I drew a map in Paint, and when people had questions about the alien technology, I did my best to answer, as well as explaining the general theme.  Weapons weren’t allowed to be made for the humans for obvious reasons, but one player had the idea that armor would come across as cosplay.

I also had absolutely no plans for the aliens, which bothered some players, who wanted to be doing all sorts of alien stuff even when not interacting with the humans.

As the GM, it’s your job not only to create as much of the setting as vividly as possible so that players all have a communal vision of the setting.  It’s also your job to be the moderator who looks at all the cool ideas your players have, which may or may not fit what you’re thinking, and to help inspire them to build along with you.

If players have questions for how things work and you don’t know, you don’t need to have an answer.  You can talk to them about what they’re thinking and what they’d like to accomplish, and make sure this general overall theme is understood.

If you have an idea for a game, but it’s not clear enough to make a communal setting even without your stepping in, make sure to get assistance in making it clear for everyone.

This is less important in small group system games like having 4-5 players for D&D, but here’s the thing about that in the next post.

2.) Two per scene is ideal.

We all want to start one of those huge group games that has a whole bunch of people.  However, if you look into those games, the vast majority of scenes going on have just two people split off from the group and handling various things.

When you have two players, they can post at whatever speed they like.  When you have three, the scene will move at the slowest of the three.  The more players are added, the slower things get, exponentially magnifying the issue.

This is anathema to various system games in which people are told never to split the party, but it’s why system games fail so often.

Not only do you have the issue of people being very slow but you also have the issue of ghosting.

3.) Ghosting will happen

We live in a society where people don’t always feel comfortable giving feedback.  Give feedback and make sure you can receive it, but it’s not your fault when someone vanishes from the game.  It could be anything.

If things fall into a quagmire where nobody’s posting, it can help as GM to ask if anyone wants to do anything and get ready to move things along.  You’re the only one who can, and if you don’t, the game dies because nobody is posting.

4.) Feedback

One of the fundamentals of any relationship is getting open and honest communication, and it’s a lot harder on a forum than it is with roleplaying with people you know.  You can see people you know and tell when something is wrong.

If you’re not familiar with Lines and Veils, it’s something to look into.  Most games are clearly delineated by category, but there will still be things with which people are not comfortable.

Especially when you start a game, it can be a good idea to get the feel with new players to know what they like and what interests them.  Some people may hate when a character is written as being grabbed, rather than writing as attempting the grab.  In other games, writing straight as grabbing can be implied during a scene where one character has significant power over the other.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions to others to ensure everyone is on the same wavelength, and let them ask you as well.

There are no truly stupid questions, but problems arise when people feel they’d be stupid for asking.

5.) Save what works

When you’re just starting out, you might have a horde of ideas, and expect them to keep coming just as easily.  They sometimes don’t.  You’ll end up with a setting you really love and enjoy and then the game will crash.

It’s totally okay to reuse things.  Some people reuse entire characters.  Personally, I’m more apt to take sections of something, keep those, discard the rest, and put a new flavor on an idea.  Quite a few characters I make have the same first or last name because I want to incorporate aspects of that personality, where the character isn’t exactly the same but isn’t completely new.

When you have a whole world fleshed out, you don’t have to throw it away and start over.  Trying to do that too much will burn you out.

If you’re reading this just starting out, understand that you’re going to have a lot of games that fail due to no one’s fault.  Don’t just copy and paste a character into everything unless you have a feeling why it’ll work better in that game, and even if you do, make a tiny tweak or change.

An example would be that I’ve got a D&D character who was basically given powers by an angel.  I use similar concepts a lot but the DM (what D&D calls a GM) had the plans for everyone being recruited by a wizard.  I suggested that the angel and the wizard were good friends and it filled in some gaps when the DM liked the idea.

I know another GM who uses the same fantasy setting for multiple games, with different stories but all using the same basic map that the GM knows very well.

6.) Don’t give up

Above all, it’s going to take practice.  You’ll make mistakes along the way but you’ll get better at it.

We all come into this world fully ignorant.  There are no born GMs who never had to learn all this stuff.

Around the turn of the millennium, one of my favorite D&D GMs told me not to be like him because he does various stuff people don’t like.  I took what works and discarded things that didn’t.

7.) GMing is an art, and every artist is unique

There’s a lot of rules and guidelines out there that may not fit with what you want.  Now, the rules of Elliquiy are not to be broken, but if you have a feeling why doing things one way or another will work better for your game, ask and try.

You’re going to find your own individual style for what you like.  You may find out that things I’ve suggested here can be done even better than what I’ve said, and if so, I’ll get to learn from you in return.  Maybe there’s a middle ground that works best of all.

Not counting the rules of Elliquiy, the most important thing is to follow what you and your players want.  It can be a task all in its own on finding that out, but when you do, you can make specific creations that wouldn’t work for others but are exceptionally beautiful.

[AndyZ]

Coding



All of these buttons do something, and if I'm going to making references to them, it's better to have it explained first.

I put down basic numbering for the groups of buttons, but you'll notice that on mine, the very last button is clicked.  I'll explain them in order but there's a reason for that and why yours likely isn't.

If you want to use these, for most of them, you just select the text you want and click the button.  I'll also sometimes provide the code for what I'm doing.

1.)

Bold, italics, underline, strikethrough are very common.  I don't use ^superscript and _subscript much.

Code Select Expand

[b]Bold[/b], [i]italics[/i], [u]underline[/u], [s]strikethrough[/s] are very common.  I don't use [sup]superscript[/sup] and [sub]subscript[/sub] much.
2.)

Want your posts on the left?

How about the center?

Maybe on the right?

How about justified?  Justified is usually when (as per my understanding) it's set up so that there's just enough space between the words so that it doesn't have weird blocks on the right.

The pre on the far left removes all that formatting.

Code Select Expand

[left]Want your posts on the left?[/left]

[center]How about the center?[/center]

[right]Maybe on the right?[/right]

[justify]How about justified?  Justified is usually when (as per my understanding) it's set up so that there's just enough space between the words so that it doesn't have weird blocks on the right.[/justify]

[pre]The pre on the far left removes all that formatting.[/pre]
3.)

This is the font name of Trebuchet MS.

This is font size 4.

This is red font.

Just play around with them and you'll figure out exactly what you want.

Code Select Expand

[font=Trebuchet MS]This is the font name of Trebuchet MS.[/font]

[size=4]This is font size 4.[/size]

[color=red]This is red font.[/color]

Just play around with them and you'll figure out exactly what you want.
4.)

Images are explained in 5, but floats are here.

This smiley floats on the left, so that I can have text to the center and right.





I put a lot of empty space here so that the two smiley pictures don't collide.

This smiley floats on the right, so I can have text on the left and center.

Which is better is entirely a matter of preference.  GMs will pick one or the other so that everyone has the same uniform formatting.

Code Select Expand

Images are explained in 5, but floats are here.

[float=left max=45%][img height=100]https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/465566966/display_1500/stock-vector-smiley-vector-happy-face-465566966.jpg[/img][/float]This smiley floats on the left, so that I can have text to the center and right.

[float=right max=45%][img height=100]https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/465566966/display_1500/stock-vector-smiley-vector-happy-face-465566966.jpg[/img][/float]This smiley floats on the right, so I can have text on the left and center.

Which is better is entirely a matter of preference.  GMs will pick one or the other so that everyone has the same uniform formatting.
5.)

For 5, you'll click an image and it'll bring up the chance for you to fill in what you want.

YouTube videos are just put in, but usually people will put them in Spoilers (number 6) so that they don't take up lots of space.

Images may have height and width, measured in pixels (usually 72 to an inch) but those are optional.

Inserting a link lets you do a description if you choose.

You can also put in an e-mail.

Just play with it and you'll figure it out easy enough.

6.)

Tables are rather vast and beyond the scope of what I want to do here.

Inserting code is how I've been showing you the code I was doing in earlier sections.  However, I can't show you code for code.  You'll just have to select what you want and click on that second button like I did.

A quote is used to depict when someone else is talking and how.  If you quote someone else's post, you'll see it pop up.

7.)

• Bullet Lists
• Why bullets?

• Why not numbers?
• Depends on what you want.

Big horizontal lines can always be helpful in dividing areas.  That's the HR code.

Code Select Expand

[list]
[li]Bullet Lists[/li]
[li]Why bullets?[/li]
[/list]

[list type=decimal]
[li]Why not numbers?[/li]
[li]Depends on what you want.[/li]
[/list]

[hr]

Big horizontal lines can always be helpful in dividing areas.
 That's the HR code.
8.)

The last two turn things on and off for you.

The first is Maximize, which will make the editing area take up the entire screen.  That's useful if you want to see stuff in a wide frame.

The second is basically the ability to see the code for what you're making instead of just seeing how it looks.  Do you want to see how it actually looks or do you want to see the code?  That's a personal question and may change depending on what you're working on.

Personally, I leave the code on all the time, and I just Preview - the button next to Post - if I want to see how it'll look.

My plan next is to work on character sheets and headers, so you can see why I wanted to focus a little on code first.

[AndyZ]

Character Sheets

Props to Oniya for this suggestion.

The reason for having character sheets at all is to ensure that people know about each other, can check stuff as a player very easily, and so on.

Even if you don’t much care what other people make, I recommend telling everyone that their sheets have been approved.  That way they aren’t waiting for you to say so and they know that you’ve seen their sheet and things are okay.

Remember that as GM, it’s your job to let everyone know that they’re aligned with your vision.  I tried not doing this at all with the aliens in the aforementioned thread, but they much preferred having sheets as well.

So, what should a sheet have?  That depends on the game, but it helps to have three things:

Public Information

Anything that people should automatically know.  If your character is rich and famous, then everyone needs to be aware of that.

Compatibility

There’s a lot of people here to get their fun times on, and having a sheet that explains your Ons and Offs and tells what kind of character your character will be interested in can help tremendously.

Powers and Abilities

This is far more common in system but can come up in freeform.  If your character has supernatural abilities, people will want to know what they are.  Even games with deities as player characters will have those deities have powers based on a theme so they can’t all do whatever they want whenever they want.


Keeping those three things in mind, lets talk about what we commonly see on character sheets.

Note that, if you’re playing a system game, you’ll probably either have all sorts of stuff besides this or your players will already know what information is necessary and expected.

Regardless of what kind of game you’re playing, if you don’t have a sheet, it’s going to make it tough for players who want to join.

So let’s talk about common and uncommon things to add to the character sheet.

Pictures

Pictures are great.  They’re worth a thousand words because, even if you type up a thousand words describing exactly how your character has their hair branded and boots buckled, few people will bother reading that much specifics, but everyone can just look at a picture and get a general idea.

I suggest making it clear that pictures are welcome but not necessary because some of our E members are visually challenged and it’s better to be inclusive.

It’s best to cut down pictures to a specific width or height and then post them up with a float tag, like you saw me do with the smiley face pictures.

Name

As a thought experiment, I considered what kind of game would not require names.

I was reminded of the Borg in Star Trek.  They don’t have names, they have designations like Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One, but is that a meaningful distinction?  It would be if I was playing a game where everyone is playing Borg from Star Trek.

There’s a Twilight Zone episode Five Characters in Search of an Exit, where there’s five characters with amnesia (a clown, a ballerina, a cowboy, and I forget the other two) in an enclosed circular space with no opening but up above.  I won’t spoil the ending, but, again, designations.

If you don’t have names for the characters, make sure they all have some way of differentiating each other in posts other than “the character played by so-and-so.”

Pronouns

If you’re playing a game where everyone is cisgendered and heterosexual, I guess you don’t really need this.  However, don’t think that just because you’re playing such a character doesn’t mean everyone else will be, unless you don’t want them in the game.

In my experience, people who want to play something unusual may get tired of asking if it’s allowed.  I know because I have my own unusual stuff.  I once tried playing a fully hermaphroditic elf in D&D and made up elven pronouns that didn’t quite mesh to he and she.

The real reason you need this is because other characters will be typing about and describing another character before the two even really meet.

Sex/Gender

This could be argued by pronouns, so how many of these do you really need?

Spots like this help if a character doesn’t fit into the usual binary.  Some will argue for putting sex and some for gender, but I personally like Sex/Gender as a catchall that can let people be as vague or specific as they want.

Unless you’ve already posted rules on that regard, you’re likely going to have people asking about all sorts of stuff.  My advice is to let people play things even if you aren’t attracted to them yourself and to have an open environment where people feel up to trying out whatever they like.

That said, if you as the GM really don’t feel comfortable with something, don’t be afraid to say so and make it clear.  The people who might want it will know not to waste their time and yours.

Age

Do you need age?  Not really, but it’s nice to have.

If you’re running something like a vampire game, people might want two spots for this for chronological age and apparent age.  However, even with those, it’s common to just have one spot and people put both ages in the one.

Sexual Orientation/Sexuality/Sexual Preference

Three different ways of saying the exact same thing.  This is highly recommended because people can just look at the sheet and know if they should try to hit someone up and have a chance of a connection, unless that person is playing something less common.

This being Elliquy, even if you aren’t expecting a game to go in that direction, your players will probably have other ideas.  Plenty of system games get run with side threads where things get frisky.

Supernatural YES/NO

In a supernatural game, you might need someone to say if they’re human or not, and give details therein.

I’m more concerned with giving the YES/NO option here.  Sometimes a Yes or a No is all that you really want as an answer but it still takes its own spot.  That’s totally fine.

Description

Doesn’t the picture do it?  Sure, but there can be plenty of things that a picture might not have that people will still notice.  Maybe your character has a tattoo on their left arm and you spent hours finding pictures with that arm hidden.

Some people like to specify even more like height, weight, hair color, eye color, build, and so on.  Do what you feel works.

Personality

This is especially important when other characters should know about you to some degree already, and less important when everyone is brand new and getting to know each other.

Some people put lots of stuff like likes and dislikes, skills and flaws, and so on.  Again, whatever works for you.

History

Some people are going to write whole pages on this.  Newer players or those without a strong idea may just do a paragraph or two. 

You may even change it to Publicly Known Information which lets others read and know stuff.  However, I have a better suggestion for that.

Rumors

If your game takes place in a college, you might well have rumors running around about all the characters.  This gives people a place to put such things.

However, if you don’t have that kind of game, you don’t need it.

You’re probably starting to see the pattern.

Faceclaim

If you use the picture of someone who’s well known in real life, you probably want to “claim” their face so that nobody else puts together a character using the same image.  That’s called a Faceclaim.

If you’re using lots of fantasy pictures and the like, you won’t need this.

Likewise, if nobody knows who a particular picture is, it doesn’t matter because nobody’s apt to use their picture again.

We just don’t want twelve people all trying to be Taylor Swift.

Ons/Offs

Not everyone has this information in their signature, and it can be useful even just to know those of the players, for the same reason as the Lines and Veils mentioned above.

Extra Info

Everyone’s going to have something that you didn’t think to put, and you want to make sure that they have some space for it, even if it’s just the very last spot at the bottom where they can put whatever they want.

If a lot of people put something, consider adding a space for it in the character sheet.

Now, reading this, you see a lot of maybes and uncertainties, so I decided to put together a character sheet anyone can use free of charge.  Feel free to change it however you like, but make sure to put it in a Code tag so that others can easily copy it down to make characters.

Code Select Expand

[float=right max=45%][img height=200]https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/465566966/display_1500/stock-vector-smiley-vector-happy-face-465566966.jpg[/img][/float]
[b]Name:[/b]
[b]Pronouns:[/b]
[b]Sex/Gender:[/b]
[b]Age:[/b]
[b]Sexual Orientation:[/b]
[b]Faceclaim:[/b]


[b]Description:[/b]

[b]Personality:[/b]

[b]History:[/b]

[b]Rumors:[/b]

[b]Ons/Offs:[/b]

[b]Extra Info:[/b]


[AndyZ]

Headers

When running a game, every post players make should have a header.

Not only does it help keep track of who everybody is, but in system games, there can be a lot of information that people want to keep handy.  D&D has spell slots, abilities that can only be used at certain intervals, hit points, and all kinds of other stuff.  Other games have other important things.

For freeform, some games have multiple dates and locations.  Maybe you're roleplaying in a house that has twenty-six different rooms, and you want people to have a header that specifies which room they're in.

If everyone is in the same general area or under the same GM, like a D&D session, stuff like date/time and location is far less necessary.  If there's only 4-5 of you, everyone should be reading everything that everyone else posts and it's less of an issue.

With that explained, I'm going to go into more detail for what a freeform game needs, because it's less obvious.

Have a picture of the character in question in the same way, but usually smaller, like just the head and in a smaller size via the float tags.

Name

Even if players don't know who the character is yet, being able to refer to them as something more than "the blonde in the blue sweatpants" makes it very clear that you mean this person and not that other person.

It's common for people to use the URL tag to give people a direct link to their character sheets.

Date/Time

I mentioned this before, but some games are very open sandboxes where people might be roleplaying in different points in time at different locations.  Maybe you're at an island resort, you start out in the morning at the beach and are getting food at lunchtime.  It's confusing to imagine if it's your first game but it gives you a lot of opportunities to meet lots of people simultaneously rather than waiting for the speed of forum posting.

Location

Same deal as Date/Time, but even if you don't have multiple locations, you want to make it clear where each character is at so that people can find each other rather easily.

Wearing

This is a rather optional tag, but it can help to know what all a character has on, especially with a lot of different people in the same place.  By contrast, when your character changes clothes, some people may not prefer to have this.

It can also just be a reminder to people that characters wear clothes and they should describe them, in the header if not in the post.

Warning

Some posts are going to be Not Safe For Work, but some people do post from work.  Other posts deal with really heavy issues that may be difficult for some.

A common tactic is to give people some heads-up as to what's coming in a post.  A simple NSFW can be plenty, but some will talk about all sorts of things.  Basically, if you suspect something may make someone uncomfortable to read, better to put it in the warning tag.

Tagging

The basic idea here is to let someone know that you're interacting with them.

It's common protocol that, even if someone isn't reading everything, they'll specifically look for headers of posts that tag them.  That way, they won't miss anything that should be glaringly obvious to the character in question.

A lot of people like to put mentions here as well, if you're looking at or thinking about someone but not actually interacting with them. 

Now, be polite with this; don't have lots of stuff about thinking how you hate someone and things they do without giving them any sort of way to respond.  It can come across as very rude, especially since it's not like they can respond.

Finally, writing OPEN in the Tagging area can mean that you are open to roleplay and want to invite anyone else to join in what you're doing.  In some games, it's polite to differentiate from CLOSED for scenes where nobody else is invited in and anyone else coming into the RP would be unwelcome.

A lot of people like to end it with an HR tag that delineates the header from the post itself.  This is optional and depends on your style.

I thought about doing an example, but I feel that headers, far more than character sheets, need to be personalized by the game in question.

However you do it, make sure that every IC thread has an example of the Header with a Code tag so that people can copy/paste it, like with the character sheets.

[AndyZ]

Threads and Discord

So let's say that you've got a group of people who all want to play your game.  What kind of threads do you want to make?  Do you want Discord?

I'll talk about Discord first.  Discord is a messaging software that gets used by people on Elliquiy a lot.  You may be old enough for AOL or MSN (or even ICQ) or you might know about Skype.  Discord is free, and a lot of people use it, but not everyone.

Keep in mind that if you only have most of your players in the Discord, they're going to have a much easier time communicating with everyone and the person who doesn't have it might well feel left out.  Discord also provides dicebots, programs that let you roll dice for various system games.

It just makes it a lot easier to plan and communicate overall to have Discord, but that comes down to personal preference as well.  It's certainly not required to be on Elliquiy but the program is commonly used now for both system and freeform games.

If you have a Discord server and everyone is on it, you may not even want to bother with an OOC thread.  It's common for everyone to post IC in the threads and have various OOC going on using Discord; this is why I mark the two as related.

Should there be enough interest, I'll talk about setting up a Discord channel.  For now, we'll move back to threads.

Threads

I already mentioned OOC, and the next big one everyone will have will be Character Sheets.  As you may recall, I said to tell people that they've been accepted, so you can tell everyone to copy their sheets into this new thread.

If you're in a Big Group, I suggest putting a Pin on both the OOC and Character sheets, as well as any other OOC character threads.  That way, they won't get lost over time.

So, how many IC character threads should you make?  That depends on if you're in a Big Group Game or not.

If you made a game big enough to start out as a Big Group, you get your own subgroup and can make as many threads as you want.  In that case, I suggest you ask: how much room can I spread out so that everyone feels like they have their own personal space?

Here's why: if you're all in one big group, it can be frustrating when you have to scroll up to find your old post in order to quote it to reply to someone else.  Sometimes other people have been posting back and forth a dozen times by the time one partner gets back to you, and it can feel underwhelming.

Think of it like positions on a chessboard: where would there be enough space for two people to just hang out, and how likely would they be to pick this spot?  Remember that you can always make more of the same, just by delineating in small ways.  If you know that the beach tables are going to be popular, maybe make a northern beach table thread, an eastern beach table thread, and a southern beach table thread.

If they don't get used, who cares?  You're a Big Game.  You have all the space you want.

By the same token, don't go nuts feeling you need to make lots of room that may not be used.  Your players can tell you what threads they want, especially if one is already in use.

This is an art more than a science, and you can add, remove, even merge threads with GM powers for a Big Game.

If you're in a system game, most things you have going on will be in the main IC thread, but you may want to have a side IC thread for sexy times and such.  This is Elliquiy, and maybe characters will want to get up to shenanigans and maybe not.  There's a lot of downtime like the long rest of D&D Next where they can meet up.

Remember that you may also choose to make different threads for different dates and times, but if possible, in my experience, you're better off reusing threads rather than making a huge number of small threads that get used once and then locked.

It does raise the question of whether someone would want to "book" a thread the way one does a hotel room, but I've never seen this done.  If someone tries it, please contact my Companion Thread and let me know how it works.

Ultimately, there's no magic number or formula, and people aren't apt to be upset if you don't manage all the things I've suggested.  What helps is that you try out new things, learn from them, and see what else can work next time.

Edit: I usually see one thread and only one thread for technology and social media, like phone calls and such.  Up to you if you want that approach or want to spread it out.  It does make it hard to dig through when you've been messaging people.

[AndyZ]

Splitting and Merging Topics

I asked Oniya about this recently because I had to do it for a game, and she sent me a message.  I felt like just copy/pasting her words directly since I'm still new to the process and she did a great job of explaining.  Words recopied with consent:

Neither of the two functions is fully automatic, so clicking on the wrong thing isn't going to result in an immediate snarl.

When you split a topic, no matter what post you click on, you get options that will allow you to get the 'right post' out.  There's 1) Only split this post, 2) Split topic after and including this post, and 3) Select posts to split.

For getting a character sheet out, most people will click on that post and select option 1, but if you miss, option 3 will save you.  If you're splitting a scene out from a master thread, and it's continuous, click on the first post of the scene and hit 'Split'. 

Merging topics is a little less intuitive.  Clicking the button gives you an option to 'select topics to merge', but you need to click on the little arrow thing in front of it - not the topic name.  (I can't tell you how long it took me to learn that.  Before that, I was selecting the name, grabbing the topic ID from the URL and entering it manually.  Which works, but the potential for a typo is real.)

Even so, you get a confirmation screen that lists the two original threads and asks you to confirm.

With both tasks, you get an option to adjust the name of the new thread, and whether or not to change the title on all posts in the new thread.

Now, what I will tell you is that you're going to want to make a few extra posts in the first OOC post you do, just so that you can split them out and turn them into other threads you may want later.

In my case, I forgot to make a thread for Inactive Characters, so when I needed to make one, if I'd made a brand new one, the character would have been older than my post.  So I just found my first OOC post I made just to mark the OOC thread (I'm not the moderator who made the OOC thread for the game in question).

If you want to make the very first thread just about ten random posts that say "I don't know when I'll need to use this later, but I'm new at GMing, and I'm sure I'll need at least a few of these," I doubt anyone will mock you.  You'll be glad you have such posts if they turn out to be necessary later.

[AndyZ]

Multiposts for the same player in the same thread with different characters

One question that's been posed to me is the following: if you're in a thread where you have multiple characters, is it better to make each post all its own, or is it better to make just one post where all the different characters are separated by divider?

It wouldn't seem to make much difference, but I found a difference.

When people plan to make one huge post separated by dividers with multiple characters, it becomes more common for them to wait, allowing them to build up a huge post.  This means that, rather than posting every time someone posts, they deliberately wait until everyone has posted.

Now, this isn't to say that fast posting is inherently better than slow posting.  The hard part occurs when someone decides to wait for no other reason than to have all their posts happen at the same time.  Even just having one person doing this can create a huge bottleneck in the game, but having more than one person doing it can create a situation where no one can post next because everyone is waiting for all of their posts to get a reply.

For this reason, I suggest having a rule for the game that people with multiple characters to allow people to just post in separate posts one after the other when it's different characters.

Edit: Let me also add that it means that you'll have one huge post that you're working on, which means that if something goes wrong, you lose ALL of it rather than just the little you posted.  We've all had that issue from time to time.

Now, something I'll touch on here is that people can use multiple characters in a way that can be problematic.  I've seen situations outside of Elliquiy where a player playing two characters will nudge events in the favor of both characters.

As a GM, when you have various NPCs working for your own player character, it's better to do things in a way that streamline the game.  For example, if everyone is signing up for something and interviewing with a particular NPC, there doesn't need to be a scene with your own character signing up. 

Above all, try to avoid doing things with one character that unduly influence events for another character.  Even just having an NPC ask another player what they think about your PC can be incredibly awkward.

What I like to do is have it that the characters are known to get along but don't really talk much about each other unless it's something like "[This other character] is looking for you" as a way to segue into another scene.

Of course, if I'm playing a dozen NPCs and there's only one or two players, this may be entirely necessary.  Know your game, and recognize when exceptions can and should be made.

[AndyZ]

I've been thinking about e-mail systems.  While threads can often be self-contained, the nature of a private e-mail thread is usually one huge mass of e-mails that can't really be sorted and catalogued.

Would it be possible to give each player or character their own To Inbox?  That way, the person posting knows they sent it and the person receiving has only one place to check.  There could be rules about linking to the last post.

Having a separate thread between every single combination would quickly become cumbersome.  With five players A, B, C, D, and E, you'd need AB, AC, AD, AE, BC, BD, BE, CD, CE, and DE threads, and you'll usually have much more than five which will increase exponentially.

It may not be something that can be easily handled.  However, I'm curious.

I have full intention of answering the questions on the Companion Thread at some point in more detail, but I've been very busy with, on top of the rest of the chaos I've taken on, my weekly Shadowrun game is doing a hard reset and I've had to make a completely new character.

Thank you for your patience.

[AndyZ]

I got some questions from Kaelith and I plan to address each one.

1)How do you come up with your world(backstory of the world characters with in the world etc...)

Many people are familiar with the concept of going through a maze backwards in order to have a much easier time in finding the solution.  I don't know if it works like people say but it makes for an analogy.

If you know what you want something to be, you can start at that point.  When you know that players will all start out not knowing each other (which many players on Elliquiy seem to prefer), start out by asking why that would be the case.  Are the characters all from different areas and only just meeting in your specific area for the first time?  Fantasy or science fiction games allow for people being from different worlds, realms, or even different timelines, but what brings them all together?

This doesn't have to be elaborate.  It's a cliché in Dungeons and Dragons to have it that everyone just starts out in a tavern not knowing each other yet, and they meet up and decide to go on an adventure.

What you can do is provide a setting that makes it easy for people to meet each other.  In the tavern example, the barkeep may recognize everyone as adventurers.  Maybe an adventurer gets a free drink because of something a hero did back in the day if they tell everyone about themselves.  This encourages everyone to give their backstory.

Start out by thinking about what you want to happen and then encourage it in game.

Now, characters follow a similar pattern.  A GM I played under about a decade talked about how he'd set up a villain and would have a particular plan of action for what would happen if the players didn't stop the calamity from occurring.

What I like to do is have a lot of different characters that have many different plans without any real cohesion about how to have them come about. 

Watch a political intrigue show and you might see a lot of characters who are all relatively good people, trying to work behind the scenes for particular goals, invariably clashing with each other and causing problems that COULD have been solved if all the NPCs just sat down and talked to each other civilly.  Unfortunately for them, that's not how things are done.

You might also see a political intrigue show where everyone is a garbage human being, or one that was rewritten from a book and suddenly some of the characters feel like really good people.

It's just how people work.  There's a lot of lack of cohesion and disagreement, with people having minorly deviating goals, and it helps for your NPCs to reflect that.  The movie The Godfather has a good example of splitting a group by finding someone who disagrees with the head person in charge.

Now, with groups, it gets a little tricky, because you have to do the opposite of this.  Let's say that your adventurers meet up with an entire kingdom of dwarves.  You'll want to figure out some of the key figures that they can meet who will speak for the entire group.

You can't make an entire society of people, but you can figure out a few important NPCs, people that are most likely to be regular acquaintances.  Maybe a retired adventurer takes a liking to the players and decides to hang out with them.  If they need something, he can handle it for them.  Don't actually work up the king unless it's likely the players will even get an audience to see him.

Now, one other important issue: when you start out, it's fine to give people some direction.  Not everyone likes railroading - where they're forced to follow a particular path - but when it's clear that you're starting out and have a story you want to share, people will usually let you tell it.

By contrast, a true character dilemma can split the party and cause chaos.

I'll use the Goblin Baby as an example.  This may not be perfectly historically accurate but it's my understanding.

When D&D first started, a lot of the plans for goblins involved making them one-dimensional evil creatures that people can slaughter out of hand and not feel bad about doing it.  They were all very evil and it was just in the game design that there was nothing you could do but fight them in a game designed for fighting.

However, some people didn't like that idea.  They talked about how having every creature of a species.  Could a goblin baby be properly raised and redeemed, or was evil just pure born evil like a bad seed?

When a GM suddenly has the group discover a goblin baby, some players in the group will want to try to raise and redeem it.  However, adventurers aren't really set up for raising and redeeming a child.  Other players aren't going to be interested in the change in play, and what you'll end up with is a divided group where some people want to kill the goblin and others do not, which can often come to blows.

Handling drama and politics so that the players stay on more or less the same page is an artform.  If you attempt it, it helps to have three paths: one for the obvious plan A, one for the obvious plan B, and when problems start forming, you need to have a compromise ready that will satisfy everyone.  With the Goblin Baby, maybe someone knows about an orphanage that'll take the kid in.

This leads to the issue of knowing your players.  Don't just throw in drama for its own sake unless you know the players will enjoy it, and make sure you know ALL the players will enjoy it.  It's much harder in a forum situation where you can't see who's having fun and who isn't.

I mentioned railroading, so let me go back to it.

Sometimes, you'll have a situation where players completely surprise you because they want to do something you never expected.  I once ran a vampire as an antagonist for a solo game and the player wanted to be turned into a vampire and join them, which completely threw me at the time.

Everyone has some pretty obvious plans for the game and what they expect to happen.  The bad thing is when you can't properly improvise to let people do whatever they want.  I don't remember the game well enough but I wouldn't have been prepared well enough to run a game with vampire PCs and all such.

Railroading is really only bad when the players actively want to do something and can't because the GM refuses to allow it on what can seem like very shaky grounds. 

Knights of the Dinner Table has a comic where the DM just wants people to follow the road and go to town, but the players insist on heading off into the forest and wilderness, so the DM just has the terrain completely impassable.

When there's a real problem like this, the best thing to do is talk it out.  If you know the players want something and don't feel prepared to give it to them, it can be better to say so OOC.

You can also set up conditions for the thing.  You want your adventurer to be a princess?  Sure, but I'm not having a game where you have an entire kingdom at your disposal.  Tell me about your backstory where you have a crown that's no more than the 10gp you would have had and why you don't have an entire kingdom helping you.  Was the whole kingdom destroyed by a demonic infestation?

This gets into a very important idea that you want to avoid saying no flat and outright.  Give reasons why you don't like something, and sometimes those reasons can be worked around.

If the players want something that you're willing to give but not easily, you can construct the Quest equivalent of an elaborate maze with many pitfalls and journeys they'll need to overtake and overcome before they get there, and things will be all the sweeter for it.

Finally, but something that deserves an area all up to itself, give players some leeway and decision.

You don't have to be the only one who designs everything, and players will be much happier if you ask them.  Does this world have catgirls?  What kind of aliens exist?  If they're from a specific area, no doubt they'll want to have some say as to what things are like back home, and you can shape your world to their desires.

This takes a lot more work and collaborative effort than just making your own setting, but if you can be clear what you like and don't like, and if you move a little outside your comfort zone to try but not so far outside that you can't get good ideas, you'll have a lot of fun.

P.S. It's cliche, but the more you read, the more you watch TV and movies, the more games you play, the more you'll be able to just pull an idea out of nowhere.

"I was watching this anime where everyone was using hamon and I want characters to have hamon."  If you can explain what hamon is, go for it.  It'll provide some new thing that others won't be used to and will make the world seem all the more unique for it.

This doesn't have to be in fantasy or sci-fi either.  You may have heard about a new type of music and want to incorporate it into your game.  Maybe you just heard about cat cafes and think it would be a fun place to visit in your romance slice-of-life.

The important thing is to use everything you're making as a guide for the story you want to tell, and to fish the answer out of your players.  Do they want to be on the side of the alliance or the horde?  Show them both and let them choose.  If they're split between, offer them mercenary work on both sides and see if they can help bridge the division to form a lasting peace based on the principles the pro-alliance and pro-horde sides want.

That got very varied, rambled, and carried away, but I hope it helps.

[AndyZ]

2)How do you keep track of said information do you hand write it down or do you type it out first in your phone or computer?

I have several methods depending on what I'm doing, and I'll mention them all.

Assuming you want it kept private, the first, easiest, and most ubiquitous is my own personal Discord channel.  No one has access to it but me and I have a ridiculous amount of stuff on it.  If your game has a Discord channel, and you're the admin, you can also put a private channel (or several) that only you can see.  This lets you take lots of notes and have them anywhere, but can be harder to manage and organize.

If you want to take lots of notes and really organize and rewrite them, my preference is Google Docs.  Again, this can easily be accessed on both your phone and on your computer.  Unlike Discord, it's a lot easier to rewrite and reorganize a lot of files, but it can take longer to load and parse through than Discord.  If you want to share, there are ways of sharing as well.

If you want to have a lot of public information available on Elliquiy, there's a whole section for World-Building.  I've seen quite a few GMs who write out a whole lot of information and post it up for everyone to see, though I don't do this as much.

Unless you spend a huge amount of time either on your phone or on your computer, whatever you use, I suggest it be accessible through both.  These aren't the only options that exist, but they're what work for me.  When you play around with it, you'll figure out what works best for you and form a habit.

3) How do you speak and write from a GMs perspective?

Exposition and characters.

Every character you make has the chance to tell characters information, but if there's something you feel that they should know and there's no real way to tell them in-game, don't be afraid to just have it as its own lore paragraph.

Example: "I don't know," said the beggar, but she was just an uneducated commoner.  Every wizard knew about the true reasons of the festival, which was to keep the demons at bay.

Now, the way I wrote it, it sounds like the player playing a wizard should know.  The character always knew, but the player is just finding out because you told them now.

Some people like to keep exposition in OOC, but you don't have to.  You see that kind of thing all the time in books, and some movies even find ways to do it in ways outside of characters talking.  However, in movies and TV, characters are the far most common way.

Nostalgia Critic has a particular beef with the phrase "as you know."  You might see a general telling the king "as you know," but if the general knows the king knows, why is he saying it?  The real reason is because he's telling the audience, but it knocks Nostalgia Critic out of the story for a second.

Don't worry so much about this unless you have multiple NPCs talking to one another.  Even then, most of the time, they'll be explaining to tell the PCs about everything.

It's more than fine to have a kindly but powerless old wo/man show up who knows everything and is happy to talk the characters' ear off, explaining anything they don't know.  That lets them ask in character.

If you get stuck on something, don't feel pressured.  Ask them out of character.  "Hey X, I'm not sure about what it is.  What are you thinking?  Do you have any ideas?"  They might pitch you an idea for what they're expecting, and you're free to either run with it or shoot it down.  If you can, unless it breaks things, I encourage you to run with it as much as possible if you do this.  You can always ask about modifying the idea.

Now, in a game I'm running that I'm pretty much making up from scratch, one of the powers of one of the characters is that she just knows things about the world even though she's brand new to the world.  If it makes sense for your game, feel free to use that.  Being told what's going on and what the GM has in mind can be far more interesting and immersive than trying to guess and feeling like an outsider.

Remember that during the first scenes of pretty much every movie or TV show, the character knows exactly where they are and what's going on, even if the audience does not.  The Twilight Zone episode "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" is an obvious contradiction to this rule, and if you've seen the episode, you know why, but let's look at the usual style.

Maybe the movie opens with James Bond pulling off a precise mission and following through all the parameters.  Maybe the princess is talking about how much she hates being forced to parry and wants to go to a land beyond dreams.  When we meet Luke Skywalker, he's not at all surprised by there being two suns because that's only natural on his home planet.

Your job is to set things up so that players have a good understanding of where they are and what's going on, and that they feel comfortable asking IC or OOC if they're stuck on things.  It's best to try to find the balance between too much information (where reading through it feels like homework) and not enough (where they don't know anything about the environment and don't understand what's expected of them).

Having cues can be invaluable.  If the players are supposed to bow, it can be better to say so in exposition than to expect it of players without any notice.  Make sure that if characters are being punished for something, it's because of a deliberate choice made on the part of the player, not for ignorance.  You're much better off with a king who looks confused as to why someone didn't bow and who laughs it off as the strange ways of adventurers. 

Even if you have a cruel tyrant who was going to throw them in prison regardless of what they did, make sure they find out very soon from other prisoners that that was the case, because it can otherwise make players feel like they're doing it wrong.

As said before, since you can't see the faces of people around the table as you're playing with them, you need to be all the more aware of how the players are handling things.  However, since not everyone is fond of giving feedback, you can use characters who will talk up the player characters and ask them what's going on.  Usually but not always, what's bothering a character will also be bothering the player.

Another thing I like to do is turn things on their head from my established plan if the players seem like they have something else in mind.  This can be very hard to do, but if you had them all set up for doing an adventure for a cruel but powerful king, and they start talking amongst themselves how they'd rather take the guy down and find someone more worthy of the throne, have a benevolent NPC who overheard them talk to them about joining the resistance.  If they've been careful not to be overheard, have them be approached.

Some players are just along for the ride you want to give them, but some decide that they want to do something, and not being able can make things feel unfulfilling.  If you really don't have anything for a particular plot hook they've been telling you about and sharing with the group, I've found that the player can often feel better if you let them know from the onset so that they know not to expect anything.

If how one player acts is completely different from what you expect and you can't find a mesh, it can be easier to just say that they aren't from around here and that people can know that they don't mean offense.  Some players will absolutely love that.

I'll end with a bunch of suggestions from Bruce Coville, who wrote a bunch of books I adored as a kid.  https://www.brucecoville.com/writing-tips/

[AndyZ]

The Moana Principle

I'm going to try to avoid any big spoilers for the movie Moana, but there's going to be minor spoilers based on the plot rather than on specific events.

When I first saw Moana, I wasn't much for it.  I'm familiar with a lot of the themes of Maui and the like, and there's a lot of beautiful stories.  It baffled me that they felt the need to nerf Maui down so much in order to make Moana important.

There's a video on YouTube "How Moana Should Have Ended" that takes just one of the elements introduced to help Moana and shows out Moana could have been written out of the story entirely.

Anyway, enough stalling.  Let me tell you why I bring this up.

If you're running a story, you're dealing with players that may not even have much influence on the world.  Maybe there's a cold war between two kingdoms and your players are just playing adventurers.  By all rights, the camera should be on the nobles, not on some random adventuring group, but the players need to be the stars of the story.

Let me reiterate that in case I didn't say it before.  The players should be the most important ones in the story, and their actions should be important.

You can take a story about a girl who's never left her island and slips off to have a major adventure, and even if you're dealing with the demigod who's responsible for slowing down the sun to have more hours in the day, you can fudge things to make her actions important.

Do not be afraid to nudge things so that the players have a lot more importance in things that are going on.  If something seems a little unrealistic but it gets the players involved, that's okay.  Maybe one of the courts needs a group of adventurers, and rather than going for all the more powerful groups out there, they want the player characters.

When you do this, try to come up with a plausible reason why, but it doesn't have to be much.  Maybe the court official charged with getting adventurers is just plain cheap and he can only afford this group of players.  This is Elliquiy so maybe he's lusting after one of the party members.

If you're running a game where characters get more powerful, don't worry so much about this.  You can hint about things and let characters get more involved when they get more powerful.  However, games on E don't generally have people getting stronger.

When I used to play World of Darkness and Exalted on the chat servers back in the day, the supernatural characters got all the spotlight and the mortal characters got completely ignored.  What people quickly learned was that there was no point to playing mortal characters.

In another game not on E, the only characters who were having any fun were vampires, so a lot of people decided to change to being vampires to make sure they were getting included.

Right now, I'm running a game where we have both ordinary humans and supernatural beings, and while it's easy to find stuff the supernatural characters can be doing, my focus is on making sure the ordinary humans get to shine in their own way.  An example was that an ordinary human is a talented thief, so I made up a supernatural vault that needed to be entered to go and get some specific objects.  It was explained that if any supernatural beings went in, they'd face adversaries corresponding with their supernatural nature, so an ordinary human could just sneak in and didn't have to deal with that.

The ways that characters get involved don't have to be huge and world-changing, but if you do want to go that route, Moana helps show how you can effectively bend the rules and nature of the entire world to make sure your protagonist gets to shine.

Be careful how much you do this in a novel or movie - there are lots of reasons NOT to do this outside of roleplaying - but when you're GMing a game, it can help make sure people feel like they're involved and they belong.

A ran a game of all demigods once where a really powerful deity needed to deal with something gigantic, so the way I handled it was that there were a bunch of little, smaller creatures that kept wrecking havoc, so the larger deity asked the players to help with the smaller creatures while he handled the big guy.  I had various minor descriptions of the big stuff going on while they got to handle something more their speed.

If you ever find yourself saying, "Okay, there's just too much stuff and it doesn't feel like the players matter," ask yourself how you can bend things so that they can make an important dent in the world.  Find some way to make their choices and assistance matter, however small.

[AndyZ]

This is a broad question so I apologize if it's not answerable, but is there anything specific to watch out for when running an RP using a ttrpg engine as compared to freeform, diceless RPs? 

Some of the big issues I've mentioned, but I'll repeat them.

When you're at a table, there's a near-unanimous claim "Never split the party."  If you haven't heard of the Netrunner problem, the issue comes from an old game where one hacker would have to go in solo to deal with an issue, and everyone else at the table couldn't do anything and just had to sit and wait.

With a forum game, the opposite is true if the GM is fast enough.  You can get more done splitting the group into sections than you can trying to keep everyone together.

With a forum group game, you end up having to wait for the slower people, which takes time.

An issue I haven't mentioned is the Reaction.  In D&D 5e, players have the choice to react to specific things, such as a wizard who might be able to cast Shield or someone might take an opportunity action.  I usually see this handled by having people give specific protocols for when they use the abilities, but if you have to wait for reactions, it can take a lot longer with a slower player.

Discord can help a lot with this.  When someone has a question, if everyone is online a lot on Discord even if they don't post a lot, things just tend to run faster and more smoothly.

Also, since Elliquiy no longer has a dicebot, having Discord has become sort of a necessity unless you want to have people roll dice RL and use the honor system.

Now, one game I've seen a lot of issues with is Shadowrun, and I know exactly why: a lack of leadership.

A Shadowrun mission goes as follows: you meet the person giving you the job, you set up a plan and start organizing legwork, you do the job, you get paid.  Every game I've seen on E that attempts to run Shadowrun dies when they don't have anyone attempt to organize a plan.

When you're sitting around a table, this happens easily.  Everyone looks at each other and someone decides to speak up.  By contrast, with forum games, everyone just starts waiting and nothing happens.

Discord can help with this at least to some degree.  People can ask "What's the plan?" and such.  However, my experiences were before Discord was a thing.

If you want to run a forum game, I suggest not leaving a wide avenue of options open to the players where someone has to take charge.  It can be far preferable to have a very obvious solution that somebody will spot and just tell everyone what to do.

I believe the ultimate reason is that with a tabletop game, everyone knows that time is finite and you want to rush things along, but this is incredibly rude form in a forum game.  Instead of the players encouraging each other to step up and hurry things along, everyone is just happy to wait and not do anything.

This requires the GM to set an arbitrary amount of time and say, "Hey, people, we haven't had anyone posting, so I'd like to move this along unless there's anything else that people would like to do."  The GM is allowed to do this by custom but a player doing so can be seen as very rude.

Next, I see far more turnover in forum games than I do in tabletop games.  Generally, people will commit to a tabletop game but are much more likely to leave a forum game for whatever reason.  Having a way to draw in replacements, especially for specific classes you might need, can be a must.

If you're in a D&D group and they need a healer, don't be ashamed to ask other players or put out on the Group Request, "Hey, we're down a healer and we need someone else who can step in."  Then write them in at first opportunity.

In another game I'm in, because it takes much longer to introduce people, we've been having the character introduce while the sheet is still being finalized.  It doesn't make that big of a deal because we're still in friendly territory and nothing roll-worthy is happening yet.  If you already know the character's name, race/class/etc. and have a picture, just let them start and finalize the details later if you're in a safe area.

At worst, you may have to retcon a few minor things.  "Hey, everyone, I said I was going an elf but I should go human."  That very likely won't change all that much while you're still in a safe area.

Finally, don't be afraid to set your own rules if you see particular issues forming,  but make sure everyone knows the rules beforehand.  If you just throw down rules all of a sudden, or people don't have time to react, it can be infuriating.  Explain why you have rules for things, and don't be afraid to give a warning if need be if a rule is still new.