Blog Archives

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.

Dynamic Character Sheet bugfix

We found a bug in how the dynamic character sheets were being stored, and we pushed out a fix tonight (Oct 6, 2010). Essentially, there was some duplication of storage where the same character would be stored in two different states in two different places.

We did our best to pull the different pieces together and keep it all straight. However, there may be some slight changes to your dynamic sheet values, like a wrong stat here or there, depending on if the data merge was 100% successful. We’re confident that it worked correctly in the vast majority of cases, and we humbly apologize if any of your data was incorrectly modified. If you’re seeing huge discrepancies on your dynamic characters sheets, please let us know.

We’ve fixed the problem and everything will be smooth from here on out. Again, our apologies for the inconvenience.

Problems editing characters

If you’re getting a 500 error when trying to edit a character, we know about the issue and are working on it. It’s a subtle bug and we need to be careful about fixing it to make sure we don’t lose data.

We’ll be working on this on October 7, and hope to have a fix for it by the afternoon, or perhaps sometime on October 8. Until then, our apologies and we hope you can live without a character or two for a day.

October’s Featured Campaign (System?!): WyrmShadow

This month’s Featured Campaign is a bit different. It’s also late, but that’s not really worth noting. The important part is that it’s amazing, it’s innovative, and it’s a whole world managed by our dear friend, Duskreign.

New System Thursday – Hunter: The Vigil

It’s Thursday and you know what that means! It means we’ve hunted down another RPG system to add to our list of over 165! Did you know there were over 165 RPG systems? Because I had no idea. Anyway, this week’s new system is White Wolf’s Hunter: The Vigil

The scales have fallen from your eyes. A fire is lit: is it a lamp perched over the inscription upon an ancient blade? Or a roaring conflagration consuming the house in which the howling fiends wait? Things will never be the same after this. You ve set forth on a damning path. Carry the Vigil. Fight back the shadows.

Hot dog! Well, what are you waiting for? Grab some friends, grab the rulebook, and fight against the shadows now!