Tag Archives: items

New Search Filters!

Sorting Things Out

Greetings everyone! We’re here with a quick feature update. We’re glad that everyone is enjoying the new and improved use of tagging within Obsidian Portal and we’ve been wanting to do more with it. So, beyond just tags, we’ve added a few new filtering options.

The Items tab – Keep an eye on it

As many of you have no doubt noticed, we have introduced an Items tab on each campaign. This has been a long requested item, and I thought I’d explain why it’s taken so long, and where it’s going.

When I originally architected Obsidian Portal, I imagined that people would be storing and sharing characters, items, spells, locations, and all kinds of RPG-related data. I tried to create the ultimate generic data model that would hold all these things, and characters and items were the first implementations of that.

After using it for a while, I’ve come to realize that characters and items are fundamentally different in how they are used and even if they are used. For example, characters are a core component of every RPG. Items are a component of some, but not others. There are many systems that specifically try to avoid the “We loot the bodies” mentality that pervades D&D. Having played some of these games now, I can see why an Items list isn’t exactly necessary, like a characters tab is.

On the flip side, for games where looting is a central aspect, a raw list of items isn’t much help. Instead, you need something more like a spreadsheet, where you can easily track the items along with their quantity, perhaps the assessed value, plus a bag for currency. In many ways, it needs to resemble a computer RPG inventory screen much more than a raw list of items.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the time right now to give the Items tab the attention it needs, so we have to put it out as-is. We wanted to modify the top navigation to remove the Items and Characters links (which are pretty useless now that we have search), and that would have pretty much orphaned Items forever. So, that’s where we are today.

But! We’ve got plans for the Items tab to make it closer to what it needs to be. As I said, imagine an inventory screen or basic spreadsheet and you’ve got a pretty good idea. We’re not sure when we’ll get a chance to work on it, but it’s on our list.