Latest Updates
Archlords updated the character Minas Son of Glamdring (human 5 paladin)
18 minutes ago
Please login to comment.
Obsidian Portal Around the Web
Archlords updated the character Minas Son of Glamdring (human 5 paladin)
18 minutes ago
Please login to comment.
Baloner is Josh
It’s good finally to have a campaign running and some of the players here on the site. I’ve given command of Rod’s and Snow’s characters to them, so they can feel free to edit and expand on anything as much as they want (which can be none, if they want). If someone will tell me who baloner is, I can include him, too.
They’ve made tags case-sensitive now, which is a pretty good solution, if not necessarily the best (but avoids the problem I have on Wikispaces). I’m linking the announcement, so I can remember where the tag editor application is.
The tag system also includes some quirks that are just irritating, not actually harmful. One is the fact that, apparently, every tag is automatically changed to the capitalization that was first used for it—including one used by someone you’ve never even heard of in a completely different campaign. For instance, I’ve created NPCs for a campaign (won’t tell you which!) who are forced to be from “HELL.” This must be a glitch, as I can’t see why anyone would want such a feature. If you’re going to make it case-insensitive, you should really just reduce them to something consistent, like how LiVEJOURNAL makes everything lower-case (thus inspiring me to use special characters, as you can see from the alphabetization).
Another thing that I find jarring in many places as well as here is the use of “x” to represent “×.” This just results in the writers looking not terribly literate. Of course, in some cases, that may be useful to have an “everyman” feel. Using ”-” as a minus sign is more understandable, as it’s also used in code to represent the “–” that is not easily typed with a keyboard.
There’s another one in the character creation system. If you ever want to add an image to a character, you shouldn’t make any changes to the profile in the same edit. Although they’re both changed from the same page, they’re completely separate—if you click “Upload Picture,” any changes you’ve made elsewhere will be discarded. I imagine the same would be true if you gave ownership of the character to someone else. They should really separate those, particularly considering that the image and ownership don’t warrant loading an entirely separate page for each operation.
Incidentally, since they make a huge blank space to the right of the characters’ names anyway, they may as well show “short subject” fields there, like Brief Description, Race, and Character Level. Besides allowing searching by these parameters, it would also make a much better overview of the list of characters.
Another thing that annoys me is that they’ve for some reason decided to start hiding all other tags if you’re looking at the characters who have one. Why would they want to prevent us from being able to tell what other tags the characters viewed have?
Speaking of tags, nor do I know how to access items that have a certain tag. Unless there’s some way to do so, I don’t see what the use of giving items tags is in the first place. Nor can you add them to a campaign, so there’s apparently no way to use them other than by linking each one directly (or sending people to your user page).
Indeed I can. It’s still inconsistent, though.
One quirk that actually causes significant problems is in the text formatting. When I try italics, sometimes it hides the entire affected text and italicizes other parts, as you can see Content Not Found: Shiki. I’ve tried removing everything questionable and fiddling with where I put the underscores, but I have failed to figure out why it happens (nor why it doesn’t happen normally). Maybe I can use “” or “” tags.
On the other hand, I forgot that posts here send you email alerts. Does anyone else get that?
Although email is better for attention to the recipients, here, the information may be noticed by others. As such, it would be a good place for feedback about the Obsidian Portal system. For instance, when I get around to it, I could talk about my reasoning for using this as opposed to the likes of MyDnDGame.