Referee Questions
This functions as the FAQ for our campaign.
Introduction
Who runs this game?
Dragonslayers Space is not like most other Roleplaying Games. There is not a Game Master who sets up adventures or challenges for the players to overcome, to earn experience and level up a character. Rather this is a more cooperative game where the Travellers collectively decide how to move forward and interact with the galaxy around them. This is often called a sandbox campaign because there is no formal structure to what happens.
Someone has to be in charge
BOB is a Referee for the campaign and is the person who presents the galactic background for the Travellers to interact with. I do my best to create a place where everyone can cooperatively build the experience. I dislike the concept of the GM versus the Players, and this game is built on the idea of cooperative storytelling.
Campaign Setting Questions
This is where the Travellers place Out of Character questions about the setting to get clarification.
- Using the Calendar
- Ship Pages
- Chat Logs
- Session Styles
- Wiki Editing
- Anchor Linking
Using the Calendar
The Calendar is the central hub for our campaign. Rather than grouping things by adventure or story arc we have the Calendar where history continues to roll along. The Travellers do most of their interactions by entering their roleplay, comments, links on the various Calendar dates.
The Imperial Calendar has 365 days of 24 hours each. The first day of any year is a Holiday, with the rest of the year rolling through a cycle of seven days.
Each day on the Calendar is easy to link to. There is a link for every day, consisting of the Year-Day. 1105-001 goes directly to the 1st day of the year 1105. On a particularly busy day there might be hourly breakdowns if needed. Those Hourly markers will be Anchor Links on the page, Year-Day#hour. Note that this format is the opposite of traditional OTU notations. We write it this way because we suppress the Year in most displays and having it listed this way creates better sorting of lists.
The main Calendar page lists the days in order starting on 1104-341 (The start of Stepping Stone II) and continuing on into 1105-001 the start of Stepping Stone III and beyond. Clicking on any day will give a collected page of all the locations where the Travellers have been interacting. For example 1104-359 contains the activities from 1104-359-Pioneer and 1104-359-Unity. By clicking on the link at the top of each section the individual activity pages can be edited. This gives us a single Calendar page with links to see all the activities all of the various Travellers are involved with on one date, or follow along only one ship or location on their own pages. When reading a particular location or ship page clicking on the calendar days at the top will go to the next calendar date for only that location. Each of those pages will contain the Session Styles and Category Listings to link everything back to the main Calendar page.
Chat Logs
We use this site for the majority of our interactions for the campaign. The primary way of posting is on the Calendar day by day, the roll of history continues. We use Fantasy Grounds both for live game sessions where all the Travellers get together and for the Players to jump in and make a skill check, or look up information from the rulebooks. Those chat logs are saved and uploaded to Game Day Logs.
In between live sessions the Travellers will log into Fantasy Grounds to look up references or resources as well as roll dice for skill checks as part of the roleplay. Those chat logs are also saved, then added to the Game Day Logs as one entry for several days. Then anyone can edit and add Anchor Linking to the pages to connect those results to the times they are relevant for roleplay on the Calendar.
The Game Day Logs Category page is in date order from oldest to newest, the page automatically updates as items are added to the Category.
- 20231009-20231031 - the oldest chat logs
- 20231111 - the most recent chat logs of a live session
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- 20231112-20231129 - example of another grouping of chat logs
- 20231130 - example of the next live game session
- Calendar - link back to the Calendar
- CampaignTimeline - link because the Game Day Logs page is referenced from here
It is easy for everyone to jump to the most recent chat log files because they will be at the bottom of the page just above the last set of entries.
Session Styles
Session styles are automatic formatting applied to text on the site by using simple tags when posting. The page Session Styles Visible shows what the various formats look like for each tag. The types of tags include In Person conversations, Messages, and Radio conversations. Each Traveller has their own tag as well both for In Character and Out of Character. There are also Environmental tags for game mechanics and the tags help differentiate from the Referee and the Travellers.
We also have Category Listings for each of the Travellers listed on each page that they interact with. By clicking on the Category Listing of a Traveller such as Harison or a Location you can find all the Calendar dates they appeared on, or other associated pages.