At Will

For the technology-savvy, time-pressed GM, a wiki really is a god-send.  Gnome Stew has written a great article spelling out what a good wiki can do, but I want to add some of my personal notes to this as well.

I had contemplated using Obsidian Portal, but I prefer to have more control over these things and therefore decided to create my own wiki site on my web host.  Dreamhost makes the creation of a site pretty easy, so from there it’s all just learning mediawiki’s (terse, kludgy, powerful) markup language to customize presentation.  If I didn’t view the wiki creation as a project worthy of some time investment in and of itself though, I would have just gone with Obsidian Portal and I suggest you do the same.

What I love most about having a wiki is it allows me to build a world around the players.  Rather than simply wait for them to ask, or for me to volunteer information, there is information about the world they are in.  Information about places they have been and places they have not.  This enforces the fact that world exists outside of them, and also lets them point out some places that the group may want to go.  “Oh, this place sounds interesting.  I want us to go there.”  And I as the GM can then conspire them to have reason to go.  Or even better, the players find some reason to get there themselves.

The last reason I love wikis is…It’s just pretty cool to have a world that you created sitting there to look over.  Sometimes I go over what’s there so far as an inspiration for what will happen next, or to prime myself up for other writing.  The “juice” of building a good campaign wiki is certainly worth the squeeze.

Use of a wiki isn’t perfect, though.  I’ve had some problems getting players to go to the wiki.  I’ve remedied this by simply sending e-mails to the group whenever I’ve done a major revision.

There is also little use of the wiki for collaboration.  I’m comfortable with wikis and editing documents but my players are less so…this means at the moment that my players are likely to not put anything on the wiki unless I show them how to use it.  My current project is to do a screen cap tutorial to help them along and push the player involvement to the next level.

So….how are you using wikis for your campaign?