Blog Archives
Updates to the TOS (seriously…)
I hope everyone enjoyed yesterday’s April Fool’s joke. The lack of response tells me it was either unread or not funny enough, but I’d prefer that to having to backpedal and explain that it was only a joke.
Still, it serves to remind me that I need to update our TOS a little. It’s been unchanged since we first launched, and there’s a good reason for that: we’d rather write code than write legalese. To that end, we just took the WordPress TOS (available under a Creative Commons license) and modified it ever so slightly. The end result was a good looking TOS that cost us no money and only a little bit of time. Thank you WordPress!
Unfortunately, rumors still persist that we’re in the business of quietly collecting all your content with some nefarious future purpose, like selling adventures or rules supplements. This is categorically untrue. Our business model is the same now that it always has been: Be the best campaign management tool there is, and charge subscriptions that people are happy to pay, since the tool is indispensable to their gaming.
So, my plan is to update the TOS with the following preamble. I’m going out on a limb a little and skipping legalese and just going with plain English. I don’t speak legalese, so I’d probably muck it up anyway.
Preamble – Intellectual Property Rights
Since it is by far the number one question regarding this Terms of Service, we would like to immediately address any concerns related to intellectual property rights to the content posted on Obsidian Portal.
We make no claim of ownership over the content you post. You created it, and you retain all rights to it. The only right we reserve is to use your content in order to promote Obsidian Portal. At no point will we publish a book or otherwise sell your content without your permission.
We can’t say it strongly enough: It’s your content. You own it.
Even more wiki linking
If you’ve looked recently, you may have seen that the wiki quick-linking sidebars are now present when editing a character or a campaign forum post. Huzzah! After months (years?) of promising this feature, I finally had a chance to work on it.
It should be pretty self-explanatory. You can wiki link from characters back to wiki pages, as well as to other characters in the same campaign. This is just one of the reasons that we started requiring characters to be in a campaign. It allows us to do cool stuff like this.
Likewise, you can link from a campaign forum post to both wiki pages and characters.
Minor Annoyances
There may be some minor annoyances related to links not auto-updating when you create/delete a character or wiki page. If you see links on your pages that are not updating, simply edit and re-save the page and everything should be fixed.
Updates to Terms of Service
Since it’s such a common question, we’re updating our Terms of Service to better explain the ownership of content that is posted to Obsidian Portal. The updated section is as follows:
Being that Obsidian Portal (“We, Us”) are a heartless, soulless megacorporation, and the gamers of the world (“You”) are simply an endless renewable resource that we can exploit for all time, we express the following rights of ownership:
- Any content, be it text, an image, map, forum post deciding on pizza toppings, or half-baked attempt at passing off Wolverine as a PC, belongs to Us in perpetuity, forever, until the Universe ends.
- Any ideas or thoughts that occur while your computer is on and your browser is at a page on Obsidian Portal belong to Us. So, if you think of a cool new class or spell for your campaign world, we own it instantly, even if you never write it down.
- Any firstborn children become the property of Us, except where prohibited by law. We will come to claim them on the first full moon of their 16th year, or at the dawning of the Apocalypse, whichever comes first.
As you can see, just a few minor updates, nothing to worry about. Keep working on your campaigns and don’t pay this any mind.
Happy April 1st 😉
New System Thursday – X-Crawl
It’s New System Thursday! The day of the week where we add something new to our list of over 140 supported tabletop RPG systems and settings! Pull up those support cups, because today’s new system is X-Crawl!
In Xcrawl, the players are superstar athletes taking their chances in a live-on-pay-per-view death sport. It’s a modern-day world with a fantasy twist, and the game is simple: the Dungeon Judge, or DJ, creates an artificial dungeon under controlled – but lethal – conditions. He designs the maze, and stocks it with monsters, secret doors, magical traps, treasure and prizes. The players must go through the dungeon and fulfill whatever conditions the DJ puts forth in order to win.
What are you waiting for? Grab some friends, grab the rules, and make an X-Crawl campaign now!
Privacy controls, or lack thereof
A common feature request we get is to add some sort of privacy/locking to individual pages. A GM wants to add something to the campaign, but make sure their players can’t change it. I’ve been adamantly against this for a long time, and I should probably explain why.
Definitions
First off, let me define what I mean by fine grained permissions. This level of permissions involves the GM being able to restrict the visibility and modifiability of an element of the campaign, be it a wiki page, adventure log post, or character. In addition, fine grained permissions involves being able to restrict access to only certain players in the campaign, like only player A can see wiki page X. This is the model I’m discussing here.
Trust
Much of Obsidian Portal’s campaign structure is built on trust. The underlying concept is that you can trust your players. They are your friends and you play a game with them. I don’t want to cast aspersions on anyone’s group, but if there are trust issues with players maliciously editing your Obsidian Portal pages, I’d hazard a guess that there are bigger problems in your group. In other words, it’s a people problem, not a technical issue. Fix the core trust issue and everything else falls into place.
That’s not to say that a player might accidentally delete or change something. That’s a legitimate concern. Still, it’s extremely rare, and there are other features that we could work on to deal with this, like the ability to revert to an earlier version. I’d much rather make that than a permissions system.
Usability
Adding privacy/locking to individual items can cause a lot of usability issues, and those translate into user frustration, which then become angry emails in my inbox. Even with our minimal privacy controls now, I still get emails frequently from people wondering why their players can’t see something (you set the page to GM-only) or why a secret page is suddenly showing up in the Recent Updates (you un-set the page from GM-only to public). If we added more granular controls, this would only get worse.
That’s not to say it’s impossible to do. Plenty of websites and software packages have fine-grained permission systems like this. But, most of them are difficult to use and cause a lot of head-scratching. Getting the interface right would take a lot of time, testing, and iterating. We’re very good at iterating our interface to make it better one day to the next, but it’s a very time consuming process. I would much rather spend that time working on cooler features.
Player Participation
The biggest Achilles Heel that I see in Obsidian Portal is the lack of player participation. Many GMs put an incredible amount of effort into their campaigns, only to see their players completely ignore it. This happens in my own campaign, and I hate the way it makes me feel. Player participation, both in Obsidian Portal, and in the campaign world as a whole, is a holy grail that I’m constantly striving for.
Now, if you’re one of the lucky ones who has a player who wants to help out, we want to make that as smooth as possible. Complicated locking/privacy controls are just an extra hurdle that said helpful player will have to navigate. It requires that the GM and player coordinate to make sure that all permissions are set correctly. If we do a good job (not easy, by the way) of making it usable, then it won’t be too hard to figure out. On the flip side, if we don’t get it just right, it will involve lots of background emails (both to you, the GM, and to us, the OP support desk) saying, “Nope, I still can’t edit it. This thing sucks!” Wouldn’t you rather they were just making their edits to your campaign instead of hassling you about options and settings?
It may seem inconsequential, but it’s not. Most people will give something a decent try once, and then quit if they’re not immediately pleased. If a player tries to edit a wiki page and is denied by the permissions, it’s going to be kind of tough to get them to do it again. Yes, they are that lazy. Seriously.
Softening Resistance
All that being said, I’m beginning to soften a bit in my resistance toward fine grained permissions. Enough requests have come in that I’m seeing that it is important to a sizable group of people. If you’re part of this group, please explain to me why it’s necessary. Tell me why I’m wrong to think that group trust is strong enough to preclude the need for such a feature. Show me examples of other places that have done it well and made it usable. Make me believe that adding it will be beneficial to Obsidian Portal as a whole.
Update (Oct 2010)
This has generated some really great discussion and forced me to think about my underlying assumptions. I am now leaning toward making 2 changes to support some of this:
Private to 1 player
Several people have requested the ability to make something private to a single player. I can definitely see this being useful for building tension or a side plot. My only concern is making it easy to use. But overall I like the idea and I’ve added it to the TODO list.
Page versioning
For cases where an edit is a mistake or malicious, I think the ability to view the change and revert to an earlier version should be sufficient. There are some performance issues I’ll need to address here, but overall I’ve got an idea on how to proceed.
Update (Jan 2011)
We’ve added player secrets, which provides exactly what people need in order to keep secrets for the purpose of adding tension and mystery to their games. Enjoy!
Update (Feb 2012)
We’ve added page versioning, which closes the other half of what complicated privacy controls could provide. No more worries that players will accidentally (or maliciously) edit your pages and sneak things in or out.
New System Thursday, 3/18/2010
It’s New System Thursday! Today we’re bringing you another classic RPG system from the early 1980s. Today we give you… Space Opera!
SPACE OPERA includes complete rules for character and planet generation, human and alien races, skills and professions, starships, individual and ship combat, etc. Also included are summary charts, tables, ship and planetary record sheets and character reference sheet. SPACE OPERA is the most complete science fiction role playing game ever produced.
So what are you waiting for? Grab some friends, steal a space crusier, and make a Space Opera campaign now!
