From Brain to Palm: Portable Gaming Without the Paper Mess
Keeping track of copious amounts of information is a task all gamemasters face. Reams of paper notes scattered across a table behind a shabby barrier to shield it from players' eyes is the norm. But gameplay should be about interaction and creativity, not flipping through pages looking for information. And whether you are of technical bent or not, a silicon solutions exists to make your gaming cleaner, neater, and more organized - smooth-flowing and more fun.
The Setup
The players are gathered. The snacks are laid out nearby in all their sugary and fattening splendor. The catching up on each other's week and the early socializing has thinned to a humming trickle. The game begins.
A mischievous gleam lights in the Gamemaster's eye. Oh, the devilry he has planned for them tonight! What mystery! What challenge! What happened to his notes!? But the party grows impatient. Oh well, on with the fun! Summoning his every last wit, every last memory, the GM forges ahead. Surely he will remember enough details to fake his way through Room 3B. One page of notes, that's all. Maybe the party won't even make it to the third floor tonight, what with that 3-headed Wumpus and the horde of undead lawyers on level two.
But, alas, he failed to reckon that Sally, who plays the party's Cyborg Paranormal Investigator, is a second-year law student, who cleverly evades the undead lawyers with a Writ of Habeas Corpses. And a lucky roll of Trans-Legendary +3 by Whitman the Archer finished off the feared wumpus in two rounds. Now the intrepid adventurers are on level three, opening the door to - yep, you guessed it - Room 3B. The gleam in the Gamemaster's eye fades. "Let me run upstairs and print up my notes." Good thing they're not playing at Sally's place, as was the original plan before her roommate got sick.
The Problem
Paper notes can be a pain to keep up with and organize, and expensive to print if you're very detail-oriented and have a lot of pages. The computer is a great help, but if you are not near the machine at the time, or worse, if you're playing at someone else's place altogether, then the computer's usefullness ends with the planning phase, or very nearly so. But without fairly detailed notes, all but the most inventive Gamemasters will find their hard work resulting not in a session of great collaborative storytelling, but in stumbling and mumbling about.
As a rule, Gamemasters (and other roleplayers, for that matter) are creative types and often given to stereotypically artistic mentalities, and may or may not be apt to organizing information along carefully structured lines. The better organized your information is, however, the smoother your gameplay is likely to be. For many, the tradeoff is that the more structured their data is, the less flexible it becomes.
Example 1: Kate is a meticulous and detail-oriented GM, organizes her notes by the following general categories: PCs, NPCs, Monsters, Treasures, Maps, Puzzles, Equipment, Races, and Magic Spells. Good. But now she is leading her players (PCs) through a maze (Maps) where they run into a griffin (Monsters) who insists they answer a riddle (Puzzles) before they can get past it to retrieve the Orb of Spiders (Treasures). Kate can either duplicate all the information necessary from these five sources into one place (which I would recommend for ease of reference) now giving her a tenth set of notes, or she can tediously cross-reference between five or more stacks of paper. Ugh.
Example 2: Bob the GM, who sees the world as a stream of events, rather than as discrete chunks of data, has written out his adventures as stream of conscious-style dialog. He envisions the players going through a derelict spaceship room by room and so he has a hand-written list of each room and what creatures and item it contains, along with whatever details he thinks will be necessary in each room for any potential combat. But the PCs don't cooperate and Daisy the Spy sneaks through an airduct to another room, surprising the deranged ensign who has been living alone on the ghost ship for a month now. He overpowers Daisy and runs off, instead of being subdued by the party. He makes it to an escape pod and leaves. Bob has the brilliant idea of having this lunatic as a recurring villain who returns to wreak havok on the party for evicting him from his imaginary kingdom. Nice touch, Bob. Now Bob has to sift through his notes and copy everything to do with the ensign and then he has to place them in future notes. Otherwise, he can use Kate's multi-stack system that has left her gaming table a torrent of paper. Eek.
A Solution: GM's Second Brain + Plucker
Phase 1: Creating your notes
Enter the computer: cross-referencing, hypertext, and cutting-and-pasting. Oh my. And if you are a database designer, or proficient in programming, you are all set up to make full use of these marvelous capabilities (you could get by with a good grasp of (X)HTML, if your thinking is structured enough). But if all you are doing is keep your notes in a text editor or word processor, you are only making use of a small amount of the power available to you. If you do not expect to be near your computer, then you still have to print all this up, and then you're back to the problems faced by Kate and Bob.
A great assistant to the GM is the GM's Second Brain, or GMSB. This handy application is written in Java so it will run on just about any system and allows you to organize your notes as a web of ideas, with each note containing as many links to as many other notes as you need. (Oh, and it's free.) GMSB calls each note a 'node'. Create a node with the notes for the room your players are to explore. Want to include an important item? Create a new node for it, categorize it however you wish, and link it to the room node. Now when your reviewing the room, you will see a list of links, including a link to the Item node you created earlier. Is there an NPC present? Create a node for her, too. Are the item and the NPC related to each other, beyond being the same room? If so, it's simple to create links from the NPC note to the item note. However structured or scattered your thinking may be, GMSB makes it easy to navigate through your notes so that anything you need is just a click away.
Further, the GM Second Brain comes with a sample 'web' that will walk you through the details of using the application. Oh, did I mention it's free?
Phase 2: Making it portable.
If you're playing near your computer, your job is just about done. If you need to take your notes with you, GMSB can help with that too. You can navigate your notes using GMSB, or the Second Brain can export the files as XHTML to view in your browser of choice, or as XML if you know how to use it.
Now, make it more portable. Take it to your PDA. Don't have one? An older model can often be found for $60-$80 US. If your needs aren't elaborate, an older model will do fine. Admittedly, for some of us that's a lot of cash to drop on a gaming accessory. But you'll use it for lots of things. I only had mine (an ancient relic in tech terms, a Palm IIIxe) for a week before it become indispensable to me. I am not by nature an organized person, so now I can hardly live without the darn thing. Also, in addition to the topics covered here, I've found lots of other RPG tools available for my PDA, including a Fudge Dice Roller.
How to get your GMSB "web" to your PDA? Enter the next player in our little production, Plucker. Plucker consists of an e-book reader for your PDA and a desktop application for converting HTML files into Plucker documents. I won't weigh down this article with descriptions of how to download, install, and use Plucker - that can be found on the Plucker website. But the tools can be downloaded for free (notice how I love that part?) for both the PDA and your desktop machine, and they are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
By the by, a wealth of literature is available for free to download at sites such as www.pluckerbooks.com.
The Process
Okay, now to put the pieces together.
- Compose your Notes: Using the GMSB, create your adventure, module, campaign, what have you. Take full advantage of the numerous ways you can link and cross-reference your information.
- Convert to HTML: Use GMSB's built-in export function to do this.
- Convert HTML to Plucker: Use the Plucker Desktop tool to do this.
- Load the Plucker Documents: Use whatever PDA synchronization program came with your system.
- Enjoy: Take your incredibly organized notes with you just about anywhere. Forget the muss-and-fuss of reams of paper notes which inevitably get lost, shuffled, folded, spindled and/or mutilated.
I also use Plucker to keep track of playing notes under other GMs. I play a very crunchy game with some friends and could never keep track of the GMs rules and lists until I Plucker-ized them.
Conclusion
Though it's a little tedious to set up the first time, the Brain2Palm system can free you up and organize the sometimes overwhelming amount of information that GMs deal with. The ultimate purpose: smoother gameplay that lets you and the players focus on exactly what Fudge is meant for: fun interactive storytelling.
