One of the biggest problems my games have been having (both as a player and a GM) is that the slow pace of rpol (compared to tabletop) makes it a LOT harder for everyone to keep track of what's going on.  It's one thing to remember a clue from a few hours ago, or last week, but if it happened 6 months ago it's a lot harder to remember.  The scratchpads aren't big enough (or at least weren't when I last tried to use them extensively a couple of years ago), and can only be viewed by the one player.

It's also a lot harder for players to discuss said clues, since they have to type all the discussions, and then those past discussions have been buried way back in the distant past when they want to bring them up again.

We've been trying to solve some of these issues by creating a "sticky" thread, where players can copy posts that they think are important enough to want to be able to find again later more rapidly, and that helps.

What would really help, though, would be if the GM could set up some threads as wikis, where the players could all edit the same text as they hashed out what they thought was going on.

This seems like a useful feature to me, I maintain "Note" threads in many of my games, including some that are just me and another person. I think though, with granular access controls under consideration ( link to a message in this forum ) the need for a separate function wouldn't be there: you could simply give everyone Mod to a certain Group, and then all threads posted in that Group become true collaborations.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:11, Mon 30 Mar 2009.

I don't know that a wiki as such would be useful, and it seems out of scope, but certainly giving people mod access to a planning thread would be (which is further support for jase's other idea). I actually feel like letting everyone edit posts in a shared thread could work very well for that purpose.

Actually, I solve this in my games by making a thread and making one single post on behalf of each character. Each character can then edit their own post as needed.

I admit though, that this would be only a partial solution for anything larger and more complex than a general list of clues and names.

I have to agree with Shannae, the granular access would fix this issue nicely and would also lessen the need to create individual posts to be edited later as suggested by truemane.

Some sort of way to better addressing this would be nice.  We just had one of the games I'm in reach a point where one of the players who joined late really had very little idea what was going on because so much of what was happening was based on information spawned from various characters' backgrounds rather than explicit cannon material.

A wiki style interface does have certain advantages in terms of organization.  But it could mean a lot of work and more data storage and such.

Some model that marries the organization and group ownership of a wiki and the ease of implimentation I'm sure Jase would prefer would not go amiss however I would think.

Bulletin boards (such as RPoL) and wikis are really very, very different organisms.  To have a wiki on RPoL would, I suspect, require ground-up recoding of the entire site, or the coding of a whole new site such as wiki.rpol.net (something I would certainly not want to moderate!) just because the functions are so very different.

What I would suggest is, if you're one of the games who actually need a wiki, consider adding one to a game website that you maintain.  Many wikis are free, or free for personal use.  A comparison chart is avilable here.  Most people who have an account with an ISP also have an (unused) amount of webspace where such a thing could be set up since ISP accounts often allow things free accounts do not.

There are also sites like Wikia which host wikis and allow folk to request their own (though the request can be subject to approval).  I haven't researched it too far, but there may well be other sites which allow the setup of wikis too.
This message was last edited by a moderator at 13:05, Tue 31 Mar 2009.

This is actually a fairly elegant solution that requires zero new work from jase.

The offsite suggestion from cruinne is also good because it again requires zero new work from jase.

I should mention that the solution -- having a thread with one post per character in it that they can edit -- is what I use in my own games for an "Adventure Notebook".  Any details a player wants to share about their character with others (languages spoken, interesting inventory items, &c.) they can put there, and some use it for notes when trying to work out mysteries.

It seems to work very well.

It also has the advantage that, unlike a Wiki that anybody in the game can edit, none of the other players can accidentally delete your carefully compiled notes.

While, on a basic level, I like the idea of having a Wiki area, it just doesn't mesh with RPoL and the games.  Integrating it into games would be, well, a huge undertaking.  I don't think having most of a game with the structured permissions we currently have and then another small section of a game with this sudden free-for-all attitude would seem logical, and possibly confuse many users.

Having a separate "wiki.rpol.net" would make more sense, imho, but then you might as well use wikia.  Which is the suggestion I think I'll leave you all with.