So we’ve completed our first major round of changes when it comes to NPC and Character creation/management. Here’s some information handed to me from those on high.
Note: These changes are currently in the works, but are not completed yet. This is a warning of things to come (very soon).
Characters belong in Campaigns
The essential concept behind the changes is that characters will now belong to campaigns. Just like wiki pages or adventure log posts, it will be impossible to create a character that is not part of a campaign. It should have been like that from the beginning, but we live and learn.
Some people are in the habit of creating their characters, keeping them secret, and then adding them to campaigns. We feel that this is the wrong way to do it, and now we’ve corrected the system so new characters can be added and kept hidden in a much better way. From now on, when creating a hidden character, mark the character as GM only during creation. When you’re ready to reveal your character or NPC to your players, edit the character and clear the checkbox for GM only.
The place to create your characters has changed somewhat, and now lives on the “Characters” tab (formerly the NPC Tracker). Just look for the “Create New Character” button there and you’ll have no problem getting started.
We’re still working out the logistics of this, but the “NPC Tracker” tab is now just “Characters”. Soon we’ll be changing the layout and display so it shows both PCs and NPCs, and also makes it much easier to quickly review the details of each character. Think “quick rollover to get a teaser” or something along those lines.
In the future, we hope to make it even easier so that it’s possible to quickly add an NPC right in the middle of writing a wiki page. But, that’s an update for another day.
Nothing is deleted
Even though we’re not allowing new characters to be created separate from a campaign; existing characters in that state will be left untouched. So they’ll still be available and such. But, we would encourage people to try and move their characters into a campaign. 6 months from today, any character’s that haven’t been moved into a campaign will be deleted.
Visibility inherits from campaign
We’re getting rid of the public and visible attributes from characters. It was always confusing. Now, characters will inherit the visibility of their parent campaign. So, if the campaign is private, then all the characters are private. Note! This does not affect their gm-only status. A gm-only character is always private. So, essentially, characters in a private campaign are hidden from everyone except the campaign members. A gm-only character is hidden from everyone except the GM. This may cause some of your hidden characters to become visible. To counter this, assign them to a campaign and mark them as gm-only.
Existing items are affected
On the backend, characters and items are actually very closely related in the system, so all these changes relate to items as well. Now that characters are integral parts of a campaign, items are as well. For the time being, it may be impossible to create new items until we can figure out a good place to fit them in. We’re definitely open to suggestions here!
There will be blood…er bugs
We’re doing our best to make sure everything is good to go, but there will be bugs that slip through. People may find that links to characters are broken, or that they cannot edit a character they own, or other strange things like that. If any of this happens to you, and you need some assistance with your issue, email us at [email protected]. Include a link to the character (or the broken link) and a description of what is going wrong, and we’ll get right on it!
Your world should be rich with life, intrigue, and possibility. So what are you waiting for? Go out there and make some new characters!
