flybynightpress has twisted my arm into naming a new date for running a steampunk game.With that in mind, I have a bit of writing to do, to get things to the stage where I won't be sat in front of a handful of players going "Er... Ummmm..." while they wait patiently to get started generating characters.
Since I'll substantially be using the Forgotten Futures rules (author:
I started off with Microsoft Word, but found that it encourages a very linear style of writing which can be a bit of a blocker. Even if I use Outline mode, I'm still thinking of what I'm writing as a document that will be read in a particular order, and which needs a certain amount of introduction and build-up as a result.
While that may be true for some players, and I think it's valuable to have that sort of material available, I expect that most will want a quick reference for character generation and subsequent lookup.
I have been spending too much time on getting a small amount of introductory prose just right and not spending enough time on the actual substance.
Remembering that
flybynightpress has been singing the praises of Voodoopad, a Wiki-style notepad for Mac OS, I thought I'd have a look for something similar on the PC. I came up with WikidPad, which seems rather more basic than Voodoopad, but might do the job.It's not the world's most accomplished app - for example, you can't install it or its databases to paths containing anything as exotic as a space character, which rules out "Program Files" for a start. Still, at least that avoids the errors when it finds it can't write to "Program Files" when you open its "help" wiki. I also found I had to change well-established paths on my machine just in order to put the databases where I wanted them. Sigh.
However, once I'd discovered those issues and addressed them, it seemed to work OK. I am now flicking between Word and WikidPad, copying and pasting, using them alternately to produce brief, to-the-point structured data and also to work towards a single, printable document.
Working in WikidPad does encourage more focussed writing, as it encourages breaking information down into topics and linking between them. While this is possible in Word, it's a pain and WikidPad is better suited to the task. I can always copy content back across to Word once I know where I want it to go.
WikidPad is a bit like having a less visual (and more useful) version of a MindMap. It's much better for building up informal thoughts into a useful structure than Word is.
As I don't own (and therefore don't GM with) a laptop, I won't be able to use WikidPad to make or extend notes during a game, but it does have that potential if the hardware is available. Maybe sometime.
I will also have to take a look at the possibilities of using FlexWiki (a real .NET wiki I've played with before and which I might just be able to host on a web site at some point) and FlexWikiPad (FlexWiki's equivalent to WikidPad). Between the two of them I might have a more powerful and flexible solution than WikidPad currently gives me, but WikidPad seems like a good starting point for now, from which I can always export what I've already done.
I would have looked at MediaWiki, the other really obvious candidate, but it's not an option for any hosting solutions I might be interested in.
