Having tooled around a number of RPG boards that go to increasingly silly lengths to make forum software do things it was never intended for, I've lately been tossing around the idea that what online RPG communities need is less forum software and more a social publishing platform.

So, a question: what online tools do you use to support your TTRPG hobby?  Blogs, fora, campaign wikis, social networks, virtual tabletops, IM tools, online event schedulers, etc., etc. ?  Let me know and perhaps if I'm feeling exceptionally masochistic I'll knock together a prototype.

Forum + MapTool + Skype.

Too many to mention, really.

For example, just to support and provide inspiration for d6 Star Wars, I have links to 34 seperate websites. Most of which I had to do exhaustive link by link searches for because they are "forgotten" or "lost". It was an exercise in internet archaeology, that was.

jeff37923, I was thinking more of social/collaborative/creative sites.

I think that Epic Words is a pretty cool site, and the membership fee is fairly cheap compared to other comparable sites.

Quote from: daniel_ream;540000jeff37923, I was thinking more of social/collaborative/creative sites.

This is about as social as I get on the internet on gaming. I have a circle of fellow local Players on Facebook, but that is it.

I had tried to use collaborative creative sites in the past but it always seemed that the most vocal and responsive to my presented ideas were also the most clueless with the most ridiculously out of place suggestions. I'd try to talk hard sci-fi in a game and nitwits would start bitching because I didn't include psi powers and jedi knight knock-offs in my hard sci-fi. As much as people like to rag on theRPGSite and it's "Fuck You" attitude, this place has the best signal to noise ratio that I have found online.

Google for research. Google Maps for modern day gaming.

Other than that, nothing.

Quote from: jeff37923;540007I had tried to use collaborative creative sites in the past but it always seemed that the most vocal and responsive to my presented ideas were also the most clueless with the most ridiculously out of place suggestions.

Much of this, I think, is due to a lack of ability for users to control access to their own content.  This is supposed to be G+'s killer feature: circles that let you decide exactly what groups of people can and can't see and/or respond to your posts/entries/contributions.

For instance, I might be running a West Marches-style campaign with a co-GM and ten players.  I'd like to share the campaign with people who aren't actually in it, while keeping GM-only secrets away from the players and preventing random abuse of the campaign wiki.  So I might have two sets of users: "GMs" and "Players" (and a third, default, "Everybody Else")  stuff I need to keep secret gets tagged "only GMs can see this", the rest of the campaign stuff gets tagged "Players can update this and Everybody Else can read it and comment on it".

In your specific case, you might need a fourth set "Fuckwits", with everything tagged "Fuckwits can read this but not comment", or even "Fuckwits can't even read this, because fuck them".

That may be too much bookkeeping; I'm not sure most people care that much about fine-grained permission controls on their collaborative elf-play.

Various forums, a wiki, a blog, and Skype.

Quote from: Drohem;540003I think that Epic Words is a pretty cool site, and the membership fee is fairly cheap compared to other comparable sites.

Ninja's by Drohem! I'll second this; my FLGS owner (who also plays in my campaign) recommended Epic Words and I'm really glad we're using it. It has a forum for our out-of-game discussions, a journal for in-game events, lots of file storage (for characters, art, fiction, or whatever), XP tracking, and a few other features.

tvtropes.org

Quote from: Drohem;540003I think that Epic Words is a pretty cool site, and the membership fee is fairly cheap compared to other comparable sites.

Looks like they're about 75% of the way to what I'd envisioned already, so perhaps I'll just go volunteer there instead of reinventing the wheel.  Thanks for the tip, Drohem.

Your welcome.

Just my own site and google.

I do the vast majority of my gaming over IRC, using Yahoogroups for notifications and file storage and Google Office for improvised maps. I might start using the Tabletop Forge extention for Google+ if I can get my players on there.