Hot answers tagged gm-tools
22
Steal a couple and mash them up
Colleges and universities are actually, in general, remarkably good about putting their plans online. To make a believable college campus quickly, steal a couple, and mash them up. Then use the building plans featured in the street map for your internal plans.
Internal plans: MSU, LaTrobe Library, Melbourne, Colorado State
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10
The irony games generator is long gone, as far as I can tell.
When it dissapeared, I started coding my own generators.
I guess they'd be better if I dedicated a bit more time to them, but at least they help me with my games (they might be useful for you too).
And if you don't like them, check my "about" page. I try to link to other people's generators.
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9
Dresden Files is pretty tracking-light compared to D&D; the only character assets that really need tracking are the Stress tracks (which work fine on character sheets) and Fate points.
For my games I've been using the following:
A stack of poker chips for Fate points. This makes it easy to keep the Fate economy moving quickly; I can take them when spent, ...
9
Generally speaking, if it is too much for a spreadsheet, chances are it's too much for human adjudication in the first place. In other words, if you can't keep track of it with a generalized computer tool like a spreadsheet, then it's a good sign that your campaign needs a redesign. An alternative might be a custom computer application, but if you're ...
8
I'd like to point out that with some good keying, it's a lot easier to keep track of everything. Make a note for each room or item what it can trigger, and then make a checklist for each room for everything that can be changed. Then when, for example, a lever is pulled you could read the key, go to say room 46, and tick a box.
This might take a while at ...
6
Labyrinth is exactly what you want. You have the ability to populate multiple maps with characters, places & objects, link them together and write a bunch of notes for every one of them.
Also there are a time tracking tool and plugins for cryptography (yes, riddles) and relationship calculations.
I've found it preparing an investigative game and it ...
5
Have you ever heard of Vornheim: The Complete City Kit?
It's a must-have if you find yourself GMing a lot in urban environments. It's a book about designing every aspect of a city on the fly, including streets, floor plans, rumors, NPCs, motivations, plot hooks, etc. It's focused on (a rather grim) medieval fantasy, but it's extremely hackable to suit ...
5
The first thing to decide (which I suspect you already know) is to decide what kind of campus the college has.
There's Rural, Urban, and Suburban.
Rural campuses tend to be all contained in a large plot of land with maybe 1 or 2 roads in/out of college. For example, my wife's college was on a mountain. There was 1 road that went downhill, and a footpath ...
4
Playing Fate games we always have a wet-erase gridded mat (a large Chessex battlemat, to be precise) on the main play space. Maps and drawings get sketched on it to illustrate things during the game. Lots of temporary Aspects go particularly well there, since they tend to be attached to map locations or are otherwise associated with something on the map.
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4
A little longer than I felt comfortable with a comment is my answer.
Universities can have extremely haphazard setups. For example, the one I graduated from just bought up an old HS to use as a campus building a few years ago about a quarter mile from the campus proper. So as long as you're consistent you don't need to worry terribly about the exact ...
4
I wrote an application for doing this kind of thing: RPG Ambience. It's an HTML5 app that works in at least the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
At this point it's intended to be controlled with the keyboard, which is pretty handy and fast if you have a limited selection of sounds. I'm working on a visual playback interface that ...
3
I created a foldable character sheet that really helps me keep track, especially since it makes the list of aspects directly related to the player at the table instead of being a list.
I also have used other variations to keep track of aspects and such not directly related to a character- index cards, whiteboards, notepads.
Index Cards - put aspects on ...
3
It's low tech but my favourite approach is to have index cards for the PCs, listing their aspects and folded into a sort of triangle so that the list is facing the table as a whole. Then - a few sheets of paper in the center of the table that with titles like "Scene" and so on where more general aspects can be place, on their own (unfolded) index cards. ...
2
While I appreciate what you're going for, I think you're also forgetting the most important factor when you set up a sort of Rube Goldberg effect: Human Entropy. As stated above, if there is that much set up to happen then it may just simply be too much to worry about. Players will likely not trip every single one of your conditions and that will put a lot ...
2
You may be overthinking things a bit. It's entirely possible for you to say in your blog post "The next game will take place on [Real Date] and [Time1] will have gone by in game since the end of the last session. Please/I will subtract lifestyle costs (so please tell me which you want for this month). You have [Time2] until the next run."
Although for a ...
2
The closest I've come to this was Xmind. It lets you make huge hierarchies of nodes and relationships between them. I've seen a bunch of other mind mapping software out there, but what I found helpful with this one was that you could zoom in and refocus on a single node and its children, ignoring the parts of the game that weren't quite relevant.
Where it ...
2
I asked this exact question on my blog after asking Relationship Mechanics for D&D/Pathfinder? here. I've gotten a large number of suggestions, none of which I have successfully used - they all basically seem to be too much work for the value they give.
Per suggestions from the post I've looked at yED, The Brain, Kumu, Freeplane, XMind, and Omnigraffle ...
1
I believe that what you are looking for best modelled as a graph.
Graphviz is a graph drawing tool and as such is suitable for modelling NPC relationships. However, it fails on your requirements: it is general thus complex, is not RPG specific, and has no GUI. However, since you widen your question, here is the comment expended as an answer. I have used ...
1
Perhaps try downloading FMOD Studio? It's a middleware tool designed for developing and mixing audio in electronic games, but it can easily be used to control audio for tabletop RPGs, as well.
After all, it's designed for the task: It can design, mix, and control game audio on-the-fly, and (more importantly) it allows you to audition what you create, so you ...
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