Collaborative campaign information management using Slack

[takai]

Hi all

I work on the "processes, methods and tools" side of software development, catering to the needs of software teams requiring, for example, information and knowledge. So naturally, when I run or participate in a campaign, I like to try out new stuff.

Roll20 is a given for me, as browser-based is a must have, and the system works fine for pushing around tokens. And when you have a session, communication is direct and information can be passed, so information management needs mostly concern the time when the group is not playing. So over time, the following requirements have emerged regarding collaboration off-game:

• Managing information concerning the story of a campaign. The GM needs a place to post important story elements and players require this as a reference. It's very hard to get all the players to notice all the tidbits of information and publishing them as a blog after the session makes sure everybody is well prepped for the next one.
• Managing information concerning people that populate the campaign. The GM needs these to come to life, and the players need to interact with them and post reminders about NPC interactions.
• Off-game persistent communication within the group, asking questions, getting answers, scheduling etc
• One-on-one persistent communication for whatever comes up that the others should not know about
• Loot management

I tried a couple of approaches, for example using the Journal and Forum on roll20 or sharing notes with Evernote. However recently I tried Slack for this, and it seems to work out really well.

Slack can handle both the persistent communication as well as posting content rich blog posts and all kinds of binaries to go with them. You can have multiple channels for your team. I have found different channels for story, people and party to work out well. Important content can be "pinned" in Slack and is very easy to find, if you know where to look.

Slack is free, if you do not require your message history to exceed 10k, which I never found to be a problem so far. It is also extremely invasive with clients and apps available for most devices and an excellent notification mechanism, that you can tailor to your personal needs. It also offers various "integrations" into other SaaS services and I tend to use the Google Apps integration a lot to be able to work on spreadsheets as a team (for loot management, for example).

So in short, I found it very useful and wanted to share my experience here.

 

[Porcupine]

[*]One-on-one persistent communication for whatever comes up that the others should not know about

Presumably you could do private communication with two or more others as well? And how is it in terms of tagging posts to divide access between certain groups?

This sounds really useful.


edit: Just re-read more carefully and it looks like the channels thing you mention answers my question.

 

[takai]

That's right. Private conversations with multiple people can be done through a channel which only certain people may see.

 

[Porcupine]

Thanks for posting this. I've been trying to work out a way to use Google+ to run the Dracula Dossier as a text-based game but I think Slack might be the way to go instead.