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Text Club

Text Club

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My friends, players, and DM’s all know that my favorite niche is text-only games. It’s not for everyone, but those of us who like it, are really passionate about the experience. There hasn’t been a lot of innovations that spark our collective interest until Fantasy Grounds came along.

Fantasy Grounds solves so many burdensome mechanical and administrative details for the text-only gamer. All the time wasted getting dice rollers to work, email scans, correct turn order, and other background stuff is all gone. All that saved time is now spent on role-playing and having fun with friends!

And minis… we now get to have minis!!! Sure, that isn’t a pure text thing, but everyone loves miniatures. I mean isn’t Matthew Mercer like a professional voice actor? He is the epitome of vocal talent and improvisation, but he still like his minis. Miniatures are transcendent across all forms of gaming!

So anyways, this blog is going to be all about text-gaming on Fantasy Grounds. I will share my tips and tricks that I have learned (and am still learning) for making a smooth text based experience. There are many reasons people might prefer text-only (disability, bandwidth, ESL, etc..) but I will detail those in a much later post. For now, I encourage everyone who hasn’t tried it to take a peak and see if any of these methods spark your interest.

To start things off, I will share the number one rule of Text Club: “The first rule of Text Club is you don’t worry about spelling in Text Club.” This can be a hard habit to get into at first, especially for Americans as we are overly critical of English usage. Whenever a typo appears, we immediately have to follow up with an correction. *a correction. This takes up extra time on something everyone understood anyway. If you say, “I swing my axe at the orr,” everyone knows what you meant and probably even missed the typo. The only person judging your spelling and grammar is you. Don’t stress it and enjoy the game!

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Comments

  1. Teufelhunde87's Avatar
    That rule HAD to come from playing with me and BDaniel!
  2. LindseyFan's Avatar
    LOL.. I could say yes.... But no, we all go through the over correcting phase in the beginning.
  3. Phystus's Avatar
    Huh, I expected it would be "You don't talk about Text Club" but I guess if it was you wouldn't be blogging about it.

    A serious question, though. Do you find it helps with immersion in the setting? In voice games it seems a little disconcerting to hear voices that don't match the characters, and I've always imagined that one of the advantages of a text game is not having that conflict.
  4. Teufelhunde87's Avatar
    I had my first text experience a month or so ago and I thought it helped . I can't do voices well, so I am one of the disconcerting ones!!!Text game take a little longer, and I have to remember to use the proper chat options, but IMO it does help immerse you into the setting.
  5. LindseyFan's Avatar
    I agree that it helps with immersion. That's the biggest treat, I think! All the voices match the PCs and it feels like you are in your own novel.
  6. MarianDz's Avatar
    I remember time when text games was favourite. Continue "[B][I]LindseyFan[/I][/B]"
  7. GunnarGreybeard's Avatar
    Making sure you do not have too many players as a GM is also important. With Text Only, the chat window can fill up, and scroll pretty fast. The good thing is you can scroll back up and recheck to make sure you didn't miss anything instead of asking again while wondering who said what. It's best to get as much content into chat frames in your story and other sections to reduce the amount of typing you as a GM has to do.
  8. LindseyFan's Avatar
    Great tips, Gunnar! You are certainly one of the excellent text DMs I try to emulate. One good thing about FG is that scrolling text box for when you do end up with 7 players. At first it seems crazy, but then you realize that all your players get to talk at once without feeling interrupted by any other. I savor when my players get to feel like the hero; letting them be heard at the table goes a long way towards that.
  9. inos2711's Avatar
    I also had my first text only experience recently and it was awesome. I loved how Lindsey gave life to the monsters. That is one of the many things I would love to do when I DM.
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