The board is public, so anyone can see it. I’ve filled in a few things I know about.
Cards on the board use labels for Hooks, Arcs, personal projects, and so on. There’s also labels for each PC. You can filter cards by any label, for example to see who has active plots going on.
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
Sign up for Trello! It’s free. If you tell me your Trello user information, I’ll add you to the Team that owns this board. If you add your own cards, PLEASE USE LABELS!
If you don’t have time or interest in doing that, you can tell me stuff to add to the board.
As a long-time Fate GM, I’m usually okay telling the players a rough outline of something without going into specifics, but you know your own oysters best. You COULD clone the board and use it for your private tracking, of course.
The cards represent “work” (or for us, fun), and move from the left columns to the right columns as we make progress on them. Cards can have checklists as well - for example, some of the cards have “player action”, or stuff we want to do in character.
Cards are listed in priority order - top is what’s going on now, or coming next, bottom is far-off or vague stuff.
In short, if you look at the “Active” column, reading top to bottom, it should tell you what’s going on in our current sessions. If it doesn’t, I’ll work on fixing that.
One final super-helpful tip (for me at least): rather than having to remember what the labels mean by color, just click on a label. It’ll make all labels show you their name as well as a color.
I’ll say this - I’ve been ‘on’ Trello for a long while, but this has been the best demonstration of it in proper use I’ve personally experienced. (I do all my dev solo, so there’s much less push to use a good tracking tool.)
Couple of thoughts, just from the last half-hour …
1. Is there a way to “subscribe” to a label? I can subscribe to notifications of the whole board, or to individually picked items, but I’d love to get notifications of stuff for the “Jason” label, or “Enemy:Nemesis”.
2. I’m already seeing (and adding in myself) a lot of content (resolutions and answers to stuff) that would otherwise be here on the board. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and maybe that’s the kind of task / thread / activity thing needed and appropriate for it, but it does reflect a fracturing of the info around the game. Something to be aware of and consider.
3. We should probably discuss or establish the definition of the “Hook” and “Arc” (and “Personal”) labels.
I’ll say this - I’ve been ‘on’ Trello for a long while, but this has been the best demonstration of it in proper use I’ve personally experienced. (I do all my dev solo, so there’s much less push to use a good tracking tool.)
Task tracking is Serious Business for me and my team at work. It takes discipline to do well, but yields rewards if you adhere to it. Like so much else.
1. Is there a way to “subscribe” to a label? I can subscribe to notifications of the whole board, or to individually picked items, but I’d love to get notifications of stuff for the “Jason” label, or “Enemy:Nemesis”.
2. I’m already seeing (and adding in myself) a lot of content (resolutions and answers to stuff) that would otherwise be here on the board. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and maybe that’s the kind of task / thread / activity thing needed and appropriate for it, but it does reflect a fracturing of the info around the game. Something to be aware of and consider.
3. We should probably discuss or establish the definition of the “Hook” and “Arc” (and “Personal”) labels.
1. Not that I know of. You can periodically view the board, filter by #jason, and subscribe to any cards you don’t immediately see yourself subscribed to.
2. Where possible, cards should indicate the presence of something to work on, and have links back to the relevant forum posts.
3. Hook and Arc are specific Masks conventions; the GM should be the one to assign those. “Personal” is for all other story that doesn’t qualify as one of these things. For example, your “The Menagerie” card for figuring out team identity should not tag individual PCs, and should be marked “Personal”. No specific PCs are being spotlighted (the point of that label) and there’s no drama or conflict to play out (at this time).
More generally, here’s what I intended for all Trello labels, and how I’ve used them so far:
Hook, Arc: GM-defined. These are explained in the Masks rule book. Hooks are a tug-of-war between two labels, embodied by two conflicting characters in a specific PC’s life. Arcs are a main story that’s being told.
Personal: apply this label to any card with a story to tell that’s not a Hook or Arc. Individual PC tasks, stuff we do as a team that’s not GM-driven conflict, and so on get this label.
Countdown Clock: a thing which is happening behind the scenes, and will continue happening until we intervene. An NPC activity, created by the GM.
Each PC has a label. Apply this label to any card where that PC is in the spotlight, or otherwise features prominently. All cards could include every PC; these labels are for the cards that must include that PC by definition.
Enemy: this is a standalone fight or some enemy-centric card. Stuff involving Alycia is also being tagged with Enemy: Nemesis. If we have other favored-enemy labels that become relevant, we can create those.
I added links back to the forum to several cards, and redid some labels. I won’t tell people where they should have discussions - I like seeing that emerge organically - but I do agree that multiple sources of truth can harm a discussion. Roll20’s forums suck for cleanly organizing and sorting data, but are great for long rambling discussions about stuff. Trello’s cards are the reverse. As long as they’re kept in sync with each other, I think we get the best of both worlds.
3. We should probably discuss or establish the definition of the “Hook” and “Arc” (and “Personal”) labels.
Hooks and Arcs are, in this case, being used very specifically in the way they’re used in the Masks rulebook (starts at page 181). In that sense, both are basically ‘owned’ by me. If there’s some kind of ‘thing’ that you want to get up to as Jason, that’s probably Personal (see robot animals, under link/jason, frex).
Basically Hooks are short-arc things where I try to pull you between two labels, resolve that, and then try a different pair.
Arcs are what they sound like, and there’s usually 1 active and 1 or 2 waiting impatiently in the wings.
I like what Bill said: let the discussions mostly be here, with Cards in Trello to reflect any… umm… I guess “Action Items” that come out of that, with a link back to the forum discussion that has the info.
