I decided to check out the Obsidian Portal website and try using it as a place to store campaign notes and a journal. This part was pretty easy. As I looked at other websites though I got the impression the site did a lot more than just that.
Does anyone have experience with Obsidian Portal. I'd like to talk to someone who maybe has a campaign on there because I'm wondering what all the site offers to do.
Is it a site pretty much intended to keep campaign notes and player invites to bring to you game at home? Are you somehow able to play your game on their site? What are the primary purposes of the site?
It can do everything it advertises. It really is an amazing product.
However make sure your players are committed to using it before making the plunge. I put a lot of work into mine and after a few months players abandoned it so it was wasted energy.
It can do everything it advertises. It really is an amazing product.
Is there a way to make charts when you create a Wiki page? I thought about posting the rules here but I have several charts and when I cut and paste, they just fall apart, everything is out of place.
The site is really really buggy. I used them for 4 years or so, and 2 years ago they had a major site overhaul. They got themselves in deeper than they could handle. The site is less functional now than before and the people who run it don't have the time/skill to fix it. I had an open help ticket for 13 months before I decided not to renew my acendent membership.
But it is a useful tool for keeping in contact with player and posting information for them to see. You can manage wiki posts and forum posts to auto-email the group which is super handy.
Feel free to poke around in my old campaigns.
House of Cards Wiki section has some charts that I exported from excel. The markup bb code is also pretty rough and makes posting HTML based character sheets virtually impossible. Think of every time a character sheet has a '+' on it. Well, the '+' sign is an operator in their bb code...
I am in 2 OP campaigns, one as a GM and one as a player. I agree with Muad'Dib abut making sure your players are committed to using the site before you commit to it. They have 2 ways of paying for your Ascendent Membership, monthly or annually. You only get access to the full features under an ascendent membership.
One way I got player participation was by offering Building Resource points. They are explained in the Ultimate Campaign. I set limit on how many they could have at one time to 4. Any other points they got were converted to gems whose value was level x 100 gp.
If you wish here is my GM page for you to take a look at.
One thing that bothers me about the Wiki is that it doesn't seem to be able to break it down into different categories. Its just one long list of topics and can take a lot of searching to find it should you want to update it.
It would be more useful if I could break it down into folders entitled:
Equipment, Worlds, Races, etc. Then if I want to search for a particular World I would click on that folder and it would open up all the different worlds.
I've yet to find a Search bar either for the campaign to type in what your looking for and click it. Then wham bang it brings it up.
I've seen another OP site that had different tabs to click, ones they had made themselves. How do you do this?
I like OP for its simplicity and straightforward interface. However, you can easily paint yourself into a corner if you try to get too fancy with your code. Honestly, if you're putting up tons of customization, you might be better off writing your own page from scratch in Wordpress.
I have three campaigns on OP. My active campaign is:
My group has used it mostly for note taking / reference making for a while. We're a long way from finished, with hundreds of logs to upload still and probably a thousand wiki posts to make still, but you're welcome to take a look
The big advantage in my mind is honestly the wiki / search function. The ability to dig up an old reference is super useful as a player. The problem is keeping it maintained...