I am curious as to how other players/GM's use the Game Wiki in their games?

I have been using it to create the "World" the players are in e.g description of places and their contents or population.  Instead of writing up what players find in a location they may visit regularly and posting it in a game thread, I put it in the Wiki.  I figure it's easier for players to find in the wiki than having to scroll through posts.

At first I had thought about using it to post custom rules for the games etc but I actually find it more convenient to have game mechanics in locked threads in the game itself.

Do other GM's or players use the Game Wiki much?  If so, what do you folks use it for?

I don't use it at all. I have a homebrew setting I use for my games. Copying that into every game is a bit much, so I have set up a separate "game" to hold world information, instead. I just reference it in my RTJ/Character creation threads.

Easier on, and not too rough for the players.

I thought setting up "Games" like that was against rules.

Not that I can see. Truthfully, I may have missed something, but it's a private game thread, well within my Number of Games limit, and has everything needed to play except players.

They have "games" that are simply discussion groups about one subject or another. Players without a game, in other words. A game without players should be fine.

The rules, if I remember correctly, state that you can’t just use Rpol for storage. If I were the boss, and very clearly I am not, I’d say that since you are using the material in a game, it would be ok.

In reply to Alex Vriairu (msg # 3):

As long as he's actually using the stuff for games on RPoL, then we would not have an issue with the information being stored here (as long as it doesn't break other site rules - eg: permitted content only, no copyright infringement, etc).

That would not be the case if somebody, for example, set up a board on RPoL to store background information and provide a dice roller for a game they were running elsewhere.

In the games that I run, I used the game wiki only once, for a campaign where using the game wiki made more sense to me and it worked well.
In most of my games, the characters are young adventurers that know about nothing of the world surrounding them at the start of the game (so the little they know can be easily summarised in a game thread) and they learn more by roleplaying.
For campaigns where there is a lot of background knowledge of the characters, the option of using the game wiki looks more interesting to me.

I have it categorized into things like background, house rules, unique items, important NPCs, and summaries of adventures, and then it acts like a reminder and quick reference guide.

When I add new stuff, I tell the players in a thread and lead them there.

I think it is extremely useful and saves me from having a bunch of locked threads that I can't organize internally, and I don't have to go elsewhere to set up a homepage for these game materials.

Are the game wikis accessible by those NOT in a game?

Is there a way to limit which players/groups within a game have access to the wiki?

@Jewwk: As far as I know game wikis are publically readable but you can set access permissions on who can EDIT the wiki.

In answer to the OP I use game wikis in games where I want to give a lot of background info and don't want to have loads of in-game info threads (I tend to spam my games with info threads enough already).

I actually have a shoutwiki account where a lot of my settings that I keep coming back to end up on that. But I still mirror some of the info in an rpol game wiki because I might run a game which diverges from the base setting I created in subtle ways.

rpol is slightly more limited that other wikis based on mediawiki code (for example, inline stylesheets don't seem to work).

Well... the wiki is public and must meet all public access requirements. That being said.when you make the wiki, make an index page for each group. Then link to the index page in a group thread, or pm. You can’t (as far as I know) access pages by searching for them.  Without knowing the page name you can’t even see the page. This is problematic when making a wiki here if you change capitalization by accident game.wiki.Group_A is a different page than game.wiki.group_A.

As long as you have a GM page with all the group names on them, you can access the individual group pages.

In reply to CaptainHellrazor (msg # 1):

I used it to track the extensive cast of incidental NPCs in a game with a lot of players. I gave each faction/city a page and notes for each of the corresponding NPCs. It saved me from having to create every side character as a character in the game but also created a record where I could update and recycle NPCs if I came up with a use for one of them again later.

Yes

No

See this: link to a message in another game
This message was last edited by the user at 23:49, Thu 21 Jan 2021.