Blog Archives

New System Thursday: Flashing Blades

Get your outrageous French accents ready, because this week we’re traipsing through 17th century Paris as Musketeers!

D'Artagnan?!

Ok. Not that kind of Musketeer. The kind from the movies that buckles swashes and swings from chandeliers. That’s right kiddos, this week we’re adding Flashing Blades by Fantasy Games Unlimited!

“It was a question of honor, and honor was always foremost in the minds of the men who strode through the age of the Sun King. A deserted courtyard on the edge of Paris was the stage on which they met with… FLASHING BLADES.”

 So? What are you waiting for? Grab some candy, grab some friends, get the rules, and create a Flashing Blades campaign now!

My Life as Tech Support

Every now and then I like to pull back the curtain a little and give a glimpse into what it’s like to run Obsidian Portal. It’s pretty much an endless stream of putting out fires and fixing bugs. I really love to do it, but I like to pour cold water on anyone who thinks it’s all fun and glory. For example, today I had two support emails that caused me quite a bit of grief. Enjoy…

Ascension without consent

I never gave my permission to “ascend” or be charged anything, you don’t even have my information. so, yeah, please take off this “ascended” title, because, I’m not going to be charged. so, again, nobody has my consent in anyway for any reason for anything ever. the end.

As it happens, the issue here was that the person in question signed up with a promo code when creating their account. The promo code gave 1 month of free Ascendant time to new signups.

I understand that we could be a little clearer about “complimentary” vs “paid” Ascendant accounts, but frankly I’d rather work on cool features. Some other people have inquired about their strange Ascendant status, and I was happy to answer. In this case, I did exactly as was requested and deleted the complimentary subscription. Be careful what you wish for, I might just give it to you.

My wiki is gone, I hate you

Pages on my XXXX page were deleted. I want them back, along with my money.

These emails always fill me with dread. Did I accidentally delete someone’s work? How long has this been going on? Is this just the first of a flood of hate heading my way?

Luckily, I’ve been hit with a lot of these by now, so I know not to panic. In almost all cases, it’s a misunderstanding. In this particular case, it is a legitimate bug…but not one where data was lost. Instead, there is a case-sensitivity bug for some of the wiki links. In other words, Places isn’t the same as places. The pages are all still there, but some links in the wiki are broken. Definitely something I need to fix.

Unfortunately, it took several back-and-forth emails to discover the actual problem. The original email didn’t have any real information, only anger. I know it’s frustrating when things aren’t working right, but a “You screwed me” email is pretty worthless in terms of diagnosing the problem and finding a fix.

The moral?

There are essentially two morals to this story, one for me and one for you:

For me: Can’t please ’em all

I am the first to admit that Obsidian Portal has bugs and problems…a LOT! But, wonder of wonders, it limps along enough to provide thousands of gamers with the tools they need to manage their games. That provides me a lot of comfort when I deal with irate users. I have to remind myself that even as I’m working to fix one person’s problem, hundreds of people are managing their games and having a great time doing it.

For you (and me too): Take a breath before sending

When I get a support email, my initial gut reaction goes one of 2 ways: I want to help this person, or I want to hurt this person. If the email is asking for help, I want to help them. If they are lashing out at me or the site, I want to hurt them. I can usually swallow my pride and do the right thing, but it’s always tempting to just reflect back the anger and hate coming my way.

The point is to realize that most websites (and small businesses) out there are like this. When you send an email, it doesn’t go to a customer service person. It goes to the head-honcho, the person who pours their heart and soul into the site. If you have a problem, ask for help, and you’ll probably get it. Accusations and rage will send your email straight to the trash bin, or worse, the site owner might flip out and declare war on you. I’ll admit, I’ve come very close to doing this in the past.

Blow your top, or solve your problem?

Before sending a support email (to anyone, not just me), ask yourself: “What’s my goal here?” Do you want to get your problem solved? Or, do you want to unleash your anger and surrender to the Dark Side? If it’s the former, then do your best to describe the exact problem, what you did when the problem manifested, and have a little patience. If it’s the latter, tap into your deepest hatred and let me know how you really feel. Just don’t be surprised when I don’t respond and you suddenly find your account disabled.

Q-Workshop Contest – Your Most Important Roll

Do you remember the most important dice roll you’ve ever made? Well we want to see it! For this contest, we want a visual recreation of the most important dice roll you’ve ever made. It could be a drawing, a photo, a mosaic… anything that falls within the spirit of the contest! Be creative! Surprise us!

The Prizes

• 1st prize will get the highly sought after Q-Workshop Dice cup, a box of their newest set of dice, and an extra set of Q-Workshop promotional dice!
• 2nd prize will get a box of their newest set of dice, and a set of Q-Workshop promotional dice!
• 3rd place will get a box set of dice, and a set of Q-Workshop promotional dice!
• 4th & 5th place will each get a set of promotional dice from Q-Workshop!

The Rules

This contest is open to EVERYONE WORLD WIDE! Email your entries to [email protected] with the subject My most important dice roll. The contest ends on October 25 at 11:59 pm (PST). We will choose the five winners from the submissions and announce the winners by Friday, October 29th. We make no claims of ownership to the copyright of any images or text submitted to us for this contest. With us, you always own your own content!

Crash fix for Android browsers

We know that many of you have been having problems loading the site on Android browsers. It took us a while to get our hands on an Android device and pin the problem down, but we’ve finally got a fix.

Basically, the login system we use that allows for Google, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest has some parts that are incompatible with Android 2.1 and below. Whenever the login section would load, the browser would crash. The upside is that we can intercept that and keep it from loading on those Android devices. The downside is that login with 3rd party is unavailable on those same devices. If this causes problems for you, send us an email and we’ll help get you sorted out.

If you’re still having crashing problems on your Android device, please let us know and we’ll keep looking into it. Otherwise, thanks for all the bug reports, and enjoy!

New System Thursday: GAMMA WORLD!

Gamma World is here! And by here, I mean here on Obsidian Portal. Don’t know what Gamma World is? Well check out these three handy links:

• Part two of our chat with Mike Mearls and Rich Baker
• Wednesday’s Penny-Arcade all about Gamma World
• Dave “The Game” Chalker’s review of Gamma World

So? What are you waiting for? Grab some dice, grab a copy of Gamma World, grab your d-d-dancebot, and create a Gamma World campaign now!

Character Quick Select popup

It took me a few hours on Saturday and a few more on Sunday, but I’m ready to announce our coolest new feature: The Character Quick Select popup!

The old way

One complaint we heard long ago was that it was a real pain to be writing a wiki page and want to reference a character. You’d have to open another browser window, navigate to the characters tab, and look up the slug or ID of the character in order to link them. To fix this, we added the sidebar with the dropdown box containing all your characters.

This was a decent solution, but I was never pleased with it. For one, it’s cumbersome if there are a lot of characters. Plus, it doesn’t help when you’re busy writing and want to define a brand new NPC. This happens to me A LOT when I’m planning out an adventure or new area.

The new way

To help with this process, I’ve revamped the lookup process to be much friendlier, and moved it to the textarea toolbar.

Simply click the little character-in-a-folder button, and voila! You’re looking at the new quick select popup.

New Characters

You can create a new NPC for your campaign, right from here. No more need to go add them via the characters tab then come back to where you were editing. Click the New Character button, fill out the basics, click save, and your new character is added to the list, ready for immediate insertion into your post.

Filtering

Just start typing a character’s name or a tag. As you type, the list will automatically filter itself to the characters you’re looking for.

Insert

Found the character you’re looking for? Click the Insert button to insert the link tag right into the post.

Known Issue

There is one main irritating bug that I’m aware of. Sometimes the textarea you were originally editing loses the place of the cursor. When you click the button to insert a character, the wiki tag is inserted at the start of the textarea, instead of where the cursor was originally. This is a limitation of how textareas work, but I’ll see if I can find some sort of workaround.

Like it? Hate it?

I’m very proud of the quick select popup, as I’ve needed it many times in the past. Let me know what you think, and if there are any ways it could be improved.