Gaming with Blogger

Keeping a journal for your campaign can be extremely helpful to your gaming group, but it can also be yet another thing to add to your already crammed to-do list. Factor in higher priorities in your life such as taking time to pay the bills, spending time with your family, working on projects around your home, running errands, or enjoying time with your non-gaming friends; the next thing you know, your next game session is tomorrow night, and you've forgotten everything that happened in the previous session. The entire effort becomes a chore, and soon neither you nor anyone else in the group is able to keep accurate track of what's going on in the campaign, especially if you're not playing any more frequently than once or twice a month.

That's where a team blog in Blogger can come in handy. This article will show how you can collaborate on a team blog in a fun way to keep track of your campaign while also developing your character's personality further as the campaign moves along, all without having to take too much time away from your life away from the game table.

Creating a Blogger Account

Before we get too in depth with this, let's talk a bit more about Blogger, Google's free blog service. Blogger's tagline is "Push-Button Publishing," and it really is that easy as you'll see in a little bit.

Conveniently, all you need to create an account is to sign in with your Google Account. Once you've signed in, you can click the little link labeled "Create a Blog." The next page will ask you to name your blog and provide a web address. The only difficulty here will be in trying to find a web address that isn't already taken. Note: You can create multiple blogs with a single Google Account.

Congratulations! You now have a blog.

Benefits of a Blog

How many times have you had the following conversation?

• GM: OK, guys. Do you recall what happened last session?
• Player 1: Didn't we have to find some magic doo-hickey for that guy, whatever his name was?
• Player 2: His name was Horace.
• Player 3: No, Horace was the inn keeper.
• Player 4: I thought we already found it.
• GM: No, you guys. You already found the Chaos Stone, and it wasn't for Horace the inn keeper; it was for Ferrik, the priest of Ralishaz. Ugh. Don't you guys keep track of this stuff?
• Player 3: No, we didn't. We were in the middle of the crypt just outside of the main vault. We haven't caught up with the BBEG's do-boy.
• Player 5: Hey, guys! Sorry, I'm late. What did I miss last session

Too many times, right? Well, you, too, can prevent RPG amnesia by keeping a journal.

It's easier said than done. In some cases, someone might volunteer to be the party's scribe, which is great for players playing bards, scribes, chroniclers, or news reporters, but for anyone else, it might be a burden.

Adding Authors

By default, you're the administrator of the blog. Now, you'll want to add some additional authors, specifically members of your gaming group. In Gaming with Google Groups, we added members of the gaming group to your Google Contacts. We saw how convenient this was when you added members to your Google Group, and we get to see this same convenience when you add authors.

To add authors to your blog:

1. Click the Settings tab.
2. Click "Permissions" on the far right of the second row of tabs.
3. Click the button labeled Add Authors.
4. Either begin typing the names or email address of the members of your gaming group, or click "Choose from contacts" and search for them.
5. Click "Invite."

Note: The Permissions screen also allows you to set who can see the blog. If you want it to remain private for the authors eyes only, you can set that here.

Each of the members will get an invitation to join your blog. Once they have accepted, they will be designated as authors of the blog and can create new posts. By default, they will not be able to edit or delete posts from other authors or change settings in the blog. If you desire, you may click "grant admin priveleges" next to their name to give them those additional rights.

Tips for Maintaining Your Journal

Tip: Get the members of your gaming group to contribute to the blog in the same manner. This serves several purposes:

1. Load balancing: Rather than one person being tasked to keep a record of events, everyone can contribute a little bit of their own perspective.
2. Error Correction: Players and their characters might each remember something differently or recall different details and facts. This helps when one or more players forget a detail that might be important.
3. Redundancy: It's always good to have a backup and a redundancy system. The same is true here. If you depend on one person to maintain your campaign journal, there's too many reasons why the journal might not be updated (e.g. - absence from a game session, other life priorities, etc.)

Now, when most people think about keeping a campaign journal, they immediately assume they need to write these great, elaborate, imaginatively detailed stories with which they'll entertain their gaming group and the world. If you want to save your sanity, forget that idea. You've got enough to do. Instead, think more along the lines of an in-character journal that's written in short blurbs of notes.

• Write in character. It helps you to develop your character's personality and perspective of the world in which you're playing.
• Don't worry about writing lengthy prose. Just write short blurbs of notes that your character might make for the sake of keeping track of his adventures with his fellow party members.
• If you have a laptop during the game, take your notes during the session. Blogger has an autosave feature that will save your post as a draft as you compose your post. (Google Docs does the same with your documents.)
• Don't forget you can edit a post or add new posts. Blog posts aren't written in stone. If you forgot a piece of important information, add it to you post or as a new post entirely.

An example of a simple post might look like this:

Ambushed on the trail by lizardfolk while searching for Temple of Kha'shazul. There were only 5 of them. Refrained from wasting magic. Let the fighter and scout dispose of them quickly. The druid did not take much action and looked almost silently scornful. I wonder why.

Found the temple of Kha'shazul. Heavily guarded by more lizardfolk and odd dragon-like centaurs. Stealth and planning allowed us to pass them effortlessly. (Oddly, they kept a pet girallon.) We fought through the upper levels and killed two young adult black dragons. We rest now before venturing deeper.

That's all. Short, sweet, and to the point. There's no need to account for every swing of a sword or every casting of a spell. All you need to do is capture the basic events for record-keeping purposes.

Creating a New Post

Creating a new post is easy. Simply click the tab labeled "Posting," and a new post will display. Writing the post is as easy as typing and using the formatting toolbar. Don't worry about getting fancy with formatting. Remember, this is supposed to be a basic campaign journal. In a future article, we'll talk about how to post from an iGoogle gadget.

You'll probably want to add labels to your posts as well. Labels are ways of dynamically searching for similar posts by click on the label link at the bottom of the blog post or in the list of labels on the side of the blog.  Make sure your labels are meaningful. I recommend also including the author's name as  a label to find all posts by that author.

Posting from Google Docs

In Gaming with Google Docs, we discussed taking notes. Well, Google Docs also allows you to publish your notes to a blog post automatically.

1. Click on the "Share" button and select "Publish as web page."
2. Click "Post to Blog" and edit the settings, most of which is self explanatory. Be sure to type the title of your blog verbatim, otherwise it will not work properly.
3. Click "Post to Blog", and Google Docs will generate a new post with the content from your document.

After the post is added, you can edit the post directly from within Blogger, but this will not update the content in the Google Doc. If you change the content in the Google Doc, you must click "Post to Blog" to update the post.

Gadgets

I can almost hear you asking, "What the heck is a gadget, and why is it important for blogging?" The long answer is a little complicated, but the short answer is it's a tool to add features to your blog, and yes, they can be important.

Gadgets are functional features you can place either in a sidebar of your blog or above or below your posts. To add a gadget, go to your blog, and click "Customize." You'll see a link labeled "Add a Gadget" in the layout. For practical purposes, we're going to add the gadget labeled "Subscription Links." Subscription Links provides web addresses for RSS or Atom feeds to which readers may subscribe and recieve updates when your blog has a new post or comment. We'll talk more about why this is important when we get to Gaming with Google Reader.

1. Click "Add a Gadget."
2. Scroll down through the list of "Basic Gadgets" until you find "Subscription Links," and click the "+" next to it.
3. Edit the Title field if desired, and click "Save."
4. Either leave the gadget where it is or simply drag and drop it to the desired location.
5. Click "Save" above the layout.

Now you, your gaming group, or anyone else can easily subscribe to your campaign journal and automaticall retrieve updates.

Another handy gadget to add is Followers, which makes it easy to subscribe to a blog via Google Reader (more on that next time, I promise) and to see who else following your blog. Take a look at the various gadgets available; you'll be surprised at what you find.

That pretty much wraps up the most basic aspects of managing a campaign journal via Blogger. There are a lot of advanced tools in Blogger, and I strongly suggest you play around with them to see how they work. If you're worried about messing up your blog, create a sandbox blog for yourself to test out the various features and settings.

If you have any questions on how to do something in Blogger, feel free to ask in the comments below or in our Google Group.

Next: Gaming with Picasa Web Albums

We'll explore using Picasa Web Albums to share character portraits, maps, MapTool screenshots, and other images used in your campaign.

Update: I decided to cover Picasa Web Albums next, which will give more utility to using Google Reader.