Monday, February 23, 2015

Making A Portable White Board

My players often need to synthesize their ideas in a common forum, and a police-procedural style whiteboard is an obvious and, judging by my experience, successful way of doing this. Players get a double bang for their buck because not only do they all get on the same page, the process of getting there is often a revelatory and enjoyable RPG experience in itself.

So, how do you make one?

You'll need one of those three panel cardboard things kids use for science projects, which you can source from any good office supply store, and a roll of self-adhesive whiteboard material which you can find on Amazon.

You'll be covering the inside of the folding board with the whiteboard material of course. There will be a seam because this stuff isn't sold in the same size as the project board and you'll need to make two passes with the self-adhesive plastic.

The trick to laying this stuff down is to cut it to length first and flatten it out in a warm room for a bit before attempting to stick it down.  The project board is slightly backfolded to make it lie flat, and the plastic applied by removing the backing a little at a time and burnishing the plastic with a wad of paper towel (dry) to work out the bubbles as you go.

On mine the plastic co-operated quite well and I was able to get the two passes to lie adjacent with no gaps or overlay, which is important. If you have to go for one or the other, I'd go for a small gap rather than overlap.

The plastic sticks very well to the board but will peel a bit. Taping the edges can help sometimes.

When you fold the board into threes, make sure the plastic goes into the hinge rather than lifting outward.

The portable board can be taped to any co-operative surface. I found that tape would not hold on the enormous window I wanted to stick it to so I used stacked pairs of these magnets wrapped in paper towels on each side of the glass to "pin" it. (I happened to have a bunch of these magnets lying around when I needed them. There may be other, better ways of sticking the board to glass temporarily but I don't know of them).

Dry- and wet-erase markers can be used to good effect on the board, which can be folded between games preserving the precious clue connections.

If this seems a little too much for your game, a smaller, ready-made folding whiteboard solution is available from Amazon. I've got two of these myself and they work very well for all sorts of whiteboard needs and they have a grid on the reverse side which is useful for gaming too.





Rediscovering The Joy Of Home Brewed Adventures

For just about three and a half years I've been running a Delta Green game once a month, using the D20 Call of Cthulhu rules and the dual system sourcebook.

It all started as a one-off game run at RetCon 1. The players were all younger than me and were eager for more so I began crafting adventures kindasorta X-Files-y in nature set in the mid to late 80s, an era which we called "Delta Green: The Cowboy Years".

The players responded with outstanding role-playing and general enthusiasm for what we were doing, and I felt moved to outdo myself with each new adventure, culminating in a months-long story arc that had so many plot elements I designed a portable whiteboard so the players could do the Police Procedural thing with dry erase markers to sort it all out.

I recommend this, by the way. It is a great way to get the players all on the same page by their own efforts, and the GM can see where they might be about to make a colossal mistake and gently guide them back onto the path - or not, as the mood suggests. I'll do a mini instructable later on how to go about it.

Anyway.

The players began dropping out, with real-world concerns taking priority for some and general burnout doing for the rest. The core player set went from seven down to three, then back to four and is currently at five.

Worse was my own burnout. I pulled out all the stops for that aforementioned scenario, crafting clues that pushed my photoshoping skills (nonexistent at first) to the limit as I created photographs of locations and crime scene elements (I was proud of several of those), age-worn signposts, plans of extensive abandoned army bases etc. A five hour session could eat several days of clue manufacturing and plot tweaking.

By the time it all ended we made an agreement: The player characters would become major NPC movers in the newly reformed and reorganized Delta Green and we would for the foreseeable future be playing published scenarios.

A couple more players dropped out and a couple of new ones joined. My load went down to about a half of what it had been. I was surprised it took so long to prep for published scenarios but they turned out to be full of holes and mis-steps that needed patching before play.

One player announced he was probably going to be moving out of New York in a few months, and expressed a desire to return to a location I had used for the first adventure he and the others had experienced - I had said that when the original team had left there was a continuing story evolving there that would require a revisit by a Delta Green team at some point.

So I started writing the scenario I had had buzzing around in my head for a couple of years.

And two of the drop-out players immediately asked if they could rejoin the game (of course they were welcome) and we were off.

And once again I find myself madly building clue trails of memos and logs and newspaper articles and Azathoth-knows what else when I should be doing other productive stuff.

Example: The scenario calls for a submerged modular laboratory/base. I sketched out the first draft using Flash, my preferred drawing tool. There has been no tool to equal Flash in terms of usefulness and intuitive interface in my opinion.

But I found myself wondering if I couldn't do a bit better than a simple plan. You see, I can picture what it is supposed to look like, would look like if it were in, say, a first person computer game.

So I downloaded Blender, a 3D workbench and rendering tool that is truly amazing in what it promises, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get to grips with its "unique" interface. Nothing works the way a seasoned GUI user would expect and a lifetime of mouse habits have to be unlearned. Thank Shub-Niggurath for YouTube, where people, some of them articulate, can be found showing us all how to do various simple things you should be able to figure out yourself were it not for the godsawful Blender user interface.

It's not the tool designers' fault really. They have to cram so much into so little real estate. But some of them don't do themselves or us any favors either. It's as though the ability to code the amazing capabilities of the program comes at the cost of knowing how to communicate how to use their code to the world.

Anyway. You really have to look at Blender to see it for yourself. It is a gobsmacking achievement.

After three days cursing and fumbling I finally have a single module that renders the way I want in greyscale. I spent most of my trip in this morning trying to understand how to put a rusty metal skin on the basic cylindrical core of the thing.

Why am I doing this?

It started out as the idea of making a 3D picture of the entire shebang, but I'm thinking I might try and make a short movie of a swim-past. The movie part looks like it works much the same as Flash does.

I hope I can get it all done before they visit the place and abandon it, but it will be good practice anyway.

And the payoff will be the satisfaction of the players as they once again try and make sense of my deliberately obscure scenario.