Some time ago, a co-worker turned me onto a free storage service called Dropbox, it’s basically a cloud storage system for Windows, Mac, Linux, & iPhone and I’ve found it to be an indispensable tool for our gaming group. No matter where you go, when you put a file in your Dropbox it will sync across the board and be retrievable on any device you also have Dropbox installed on and even if you don’t install the app your stuff is always reachable from the internet via the Dropbox website. You can share folders with friends and it even archives stuff so if you delete it and later decide you need it back, you can restore it with 1 click. For each friend you recruit into using drop box they give you an extra 250mb of space tacked onto the 2Gb you start with as a free account.
What we use it for is – everything. Adventure logs, character sheets, pdf reference books, music & playlists for our game, DDI magazine articles you name it we throw it in there so everyone in our gaming troupe can have access to it anytime. When we find good reads, or resources we toss them in. As a DM it’s especially handy as I have “installed” all of my DM’ing software into it as well (Masterplan, InCombat4e, Mapping software, etc) also my docs, xp charts, adventure modules, and other necessities to run my game are there too. This way I never lose track of anything because it’s all where I need it to be.
When my players level up they just shoot their character file into Dropbox for safe keeping & printing, everyone seems to enjoy it quite well. Perhaps it could even be used as a matter of pooling resources together with other DM’s from all over, among other things. The program itself is very inconspicuous, only taking up a tiny slot in your system tray and popping up to notify you of sync operations and consumes very little bandwidth and system resources (I’m only speaking for the windows/linux version btw). Dropbox enables me to DM virtually anywhere I can take my netbook and I highly recommend giving it a whirl. If you do decide to check it out and sign up, help a fellow DM out hit this link so I can score some more free space! Happy gaming everyone š
Dropbox is great! I use it all the time for all kind of things.
Another great tool for DMs, especially managing character sheets, is iPlay4e – http://www.iplay4e.com/
Also works on most smart phones including iPhone and Android (yeah, I helped with that)! š
That’s pretty cool. Now if I could figure out how this “World Wide Spider Web” worked, I’d be set.
-Tourq