John August

Software

A DM’s guide to Roll20

Geek Alert, Software, Tools

Since the start of the pandemic, our regular D&D game — which has always been in person — has shifted to online. We use Zoom to chat, and Roll20 to simulate the tabletop.

I’m comfortable using Roll20 as a player, but when it came time to begin planning my own campaign as a DM, I was stumped. The interface is wildly confusing, and the built-in tutorials aren’t up to the task.

Craig offered to walk me through the process of setting up and running a game. We recorded the whole thing, which is now available as five videos.

If you’re considering DMing a game in Roll20, I strongly suggest you start here. Craig’s a good teacher.

Let’s make a Fountain block for WordPress

Geek Alert, Projects, Scrippets, Software

Way back in 2008, I announced a plugin for WordPress that made it easy to insert short bits of screenplay-like material into a blog post.

EXT. HOUSE -- DAY

Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.

Shaking his head...

MAX

I thought we talked about this, Frank.

FRANK

(drunk)

I was born naked and I’m not changing now.

I called these chunks “scrippets.” This plain-text format ultimately became Fountain, which in turn became the basis of Highland and other screenwriting apps.1

The Scrippets plugin still works — you can install it today — but WordPress has moved on to the concept of “blocks.” These are discrete elements of a post that can do specific things. You can find blocks for code syntax, tables, and even poetry verse.

There should be one for Fountain.

If you’re a WordPress coder who’d like to tackle this project, here are some thoughts to get you started.

  1. Visit Fountain.io/developer and the GitHub for implementations of the parser.
  2. While I’d love to support the whole Fountain spec, I’m not convinced title pages and headers/footers make sense for this use case.
  3. Notes and synopses are super useful. We’ll want to style them so they’re visually distinct.
  4. Forced elements are very important. Blog posts often center on weird edge cases, and international users may need to force character names like @黄.
  5. Ultimately, it’ll be best if there’s one “official” Fountain block plugin, but if multiple people decide to tackle it, my team and I can help coordinate.
  6. This would be presumably be GPL licensed. This is for the good of the internet, not any one company or person.

So if you feel like giving it a shot, go for it! You certainly don’t need our permission.

If you have something you’d like us to see, or a question we can answer, write ask@johnaugust.com

  1. One of the coders who put together the WordPress plugin was Nima Yousefi, who has now coded nearly everything we’ve made. ↩

Getting TextExpander and WorkFlowy to play nicely

Geek Alert, Meta, Software

We use WorkFlowy to outline Scriptnotes before we record. After 462 episodes, I finally decided to make a template for it so that I wasn’t typing it all from scratch every time. So I made a skeleton outline, which you can see here.

Excited for the all time I was going to save, I copy-pasted the outline into TextExpander, the app I use for such things.1 I assigned it an abbreviation and tried it in WorkFlowy.

It failed.

It pasted plain text, with none of the indentation and formatting I wanted.

Naturally, I tried to Google a solution, but nothing turned up. So I experimented with different options. It turns out the trick is to Export the template (using the three-dot menu on the left) and choose OMPL as the format.

workflowy export

You get text that looks like this:

workflowy opml

A mess, right? But it works.

Copy-paste it into TextExpander. When expanded into WorkFlowy, it’ll be properly indented and formatted.

For the record, the amount of time I spent figuring out and blogging this time-saving technique is now probably a wash.

  1. TextExpander is fine, but I suspect there are other macro apps that work just as well or better. This technique should work with any of them. ↩

From Indie to Action Comedy

Episode - 361

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Directors, Film Industry, Genres, Highland, Producers, QandA, Scriptnotes, Software, Transcribed, Writing Process

John welcomes Susanna Fogel and David Iserson to talk about making their new movie, The Spy Who Dumped Me. They discuss the transition from TV and indie film to blockbuster, the collaboration involved in crafting a comic action sequence, and the fun of production overseas.

Susanna and David explain the advantages of spec scripts (this was one), and what it’s like writing with a partner.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 8-7-18: The transcript of this episode can be found here.