World, campaign and game management website

[Lokius]

Hi All

I have been talking with a friend of mine about building a web deployed game & campaign management tool for running Pathfinder and are considering whether we should build something that is multi-tenanted.

Basically, we are looking at building a website where you can intelligently create campaigns, including campaign places, characters, continents, countries etc and then link them into games.

So for example you can create a world with countries, cultures, religions, characters, locations all intelligently linked on each other. That is to say you could create a religion and then link all characters associated with that religion, what countries and locations are associated with that religion etc. You could do the same for countries and cultures.

Characters, locations could be linked to games so that each week you could put out a report about what and who was involved in last game.

In addition to this we are looking to develop, based on open source content a proper character builder where you can drag and drop options and it intelligently updates a character sheet with all relevant modifiers.

We have a proof of concept site that we have been toying around with while and using as an interim until we can build a better engine. It can be found at http://pineapple.nakedit.com.au. This is only a basic concept site.

My question to the community is, if we were to build a multi tennanted site with world creation, character building and game management is it something the community would be interested in being able to use to run their campaigns? If so, what kind of functionality would you like to see available through the site?

TLDR: Looking at building a web deployed campaign, world and game management tool and are interesting in whether it is something the community would use and what kind of functionality would you like to see available through the site?

[Mr. Swagger]

I would look at Obsidian Portal for ideas since they have a lot of the features you are thinking about.

edit:The link you have only says "default page".

[Lokius]

Hi
I have looked at Obsidian Portal. The functionality available through it is actually fairly basic compared to what I am talking about. Seems to mostly just be a site you can collect, upload and post information on rather than a site biult on a proper relational database.

Unfortunately you can't see the back end where you enter in all the information and link all the features together.

Not sure why you are just getting a default page. Just checked the site you should be connecting to the front end correctly.

[Mr. Swagger]

I am still getting an all white page except for default page. I am using firefox. I don't know if that matters or not.

[Lokius]

I don't have mozilla on my machine here but to my knowledge that shouldn't make a difference. Will check with my mate and get back to you.

[Lokius]

Worked on FF. Make sure oyu copy the link without the fullstop at the end when you paste it.

[Malchizedec]

G'day Swagger, I'm the "Friend" that Loki was talking about. If you remove the fullstop at the end of the address "http://pineapple.nakedit.com.au" as opposed to "http://pineapple.nakedit.com.au." it will work.

[Malchizedec]

The idea is that Obsidian Portal while a fun tool is limited in key areas. Its great as a simple game tracking tool but it falls well short of a proper Campaign/World management tool.

With obsidian you can create your Campaign using a huge list of systems and from this generate characters with a wide range of free opensource character sheets (Which is cool). Now if we want to link those characters to Worlds/Countries/Religions/Organisations/Characters/Items and manage this infromation as something a more organised than a wiki then it falls short. You should be able to browse from a world, look at all its coutries, then view any otehr related items. An example would be looking at a city and quickly view its NPC's and the games those NPC's have interacted with the party or been up too things in the background. If you want to then view that NPC and the locations within a city they normally hangout it isnt that easy to do in obsidian portal(unless you link it manually together in the wiki which is error prone and hard to follow).

Loki and I would like to create management tool specifically for Pathfinder which ties the rules in with a management tool so you can manage all of these relationships as well as your game. You could for example view a game from the past and quickly see who was there, what happened, what NPC's took part and where thigns happened. From here quickly view a special location whihc appeared in the game and again see all of the related information.

I hope this is making sence and highlighting where Obsidian Portal stops short of what we want in a campaign/world management system.

[Mr. Swagger]

I was copying the period. I can't believe I did not catch that. The site is nice.
If I am understanding things correctly you get to build a world, and then use drop down list to access any nations within that world which can then be broken down to regions, cites, and so on.

Link to Site

[SwnyNerdgasm]

Dotting this to check later, as I am at work and unable to open a website that contains the word naked in it's URL

[Lokius]

Yes. There is a lot of functionality that is not really being demonstrated well as it was just a first pass at building a page and only really set up for our immediate needs. Plus we have been a little slack about uploading/creating content for the world. It isn't really set up to be multi tenanted and the code it is built on needs to be redone.

It is hard to explain since the back end is not visible but essentially you are correct. Additionally, as well as geographich breakdown, cultures, organisations and religions and the like can be linked to places, buildings, people etc.

So ultimately you should be able to click on an organisation and then see all publicly visible characters linked to it. There is of course the ability to put in DM notes only visible to DM logins. Also full character sheets are visible to DM's and to the individual player that a character is associated with.

Similar to PC's NPC are linked to games so it becomes easy to track where NPC's have been used and what story is associated with them.

[Malchizedec]

I forgot to mention that once a town/city/region/whatever has been created you should be able to drop it into another campaign and everything associated with it comes along as well.

You create a campaign and really like all the work your've done on a city you can clone it into your new game and its NPC's/Locations of Interest/History is transplanted itno your new campaign world.

I would like to have this available so you can clone other peoples cities/NPC's/whatever but Loki and I would need to work through the IP issues as not everyone is as fre and friendly with thier work (and for valid reasons in some cases).