The Spelljoined: Campaign of the Month

Today we bring to you guys, a truly awesome showcase of campaign depth and intricacy. The very dedicated and friendly DungeonMasterLoki shares with us a bit about his game, his players and gives us some sound advice. The Spelljoined campaign has been going on since before some of us were born! So ‘ave a seat cutter, and stop rattlin’ your bone box for a just minute and park your ears right here!

New Feature: Case sensitive tags

Many of you have noticed that your tags aren’t fully case sensitive. In fact, the chosen case of a tag often seems very random. I can assure you that it’s not…but that’s not really what you want to hear. What you really want to hear is that now we will be respecting the case of your tags, so “cleric” and “Cleric” will now be distinct and you can choose your casing however you want.

The downside is that all existing tags will remain. This means that if you have a lot of pages tagged with a particular case, then switch to a different one, you will end up with two different tags. In other words, you can now end up with tags for both “cleric” AND “Cleric”. That’s probably not what you want.

That’s why we recently released DragonTagger, the bulk tag editing tool that works with our API. With DragonTagger you can quickly rename your tags to match whatever case you want. It’s not exactly fast (or pretty) but should do the trick.

Enjoy!

Are we too D&D?

We try to stay neutral, like the Swiss

The beginning

When I first started, I knew there would have to be sacrifices made. Either it would be completely neutral, and therefore useless to everyone, or it would be biased toward one system or another. There’s a wide spectrum in there, and I decided that whenever a question came up, I would bias the system toward D&D, which I was playing at the time.

The best example I can think of is that we added race and level to the character sheets. They were freeform fields, so you could type “Elf” or “Dwarf” if you wanted. Or, if you were in a totally different system you could type “Eldar” or “Metahuman” or just leave it blank. It was up to you. Still, the concept of race and level is admittedly a D&D centric concept.

The shift to neutrality

As I migrated away from D&D to other systems, so too did my views on how Obsidian Portal should work. I realized that the central elements to all RPGs were the characters, adventures, and campaign world. As such, I focused on making those entities the core of the site. We politely declined requests to add more detail and fields to the character sheets and instead added things like the quick select popup to help you more easily interweave your story and characters. When the time was right, we released the Dynamic Character Sheets, thereby saying “Make the characters what you want!” Subsequently, we removed race and level from the character sheets, instead deferring that to the DSTs where it belonged. We want characters to embody the story, not the stats.

The commitment to neutrality

I started out thinking we would bias ourselves toward D&D, but I’ve become much more committed to overall neutrality. I’m convinced that the future of RPGs does not belong to any one company, brand, or game. Likewise, the future of Obsidian Portal, in supporting the RPG community, does not belong with any one game. So, when I’m told that we’re being too D&D specific, this is a cause for concern. What do you think? Are we too biased toward one game or another? Or, on the opposite end, are we trying too hard to please everyone all the time, and therefore offering a mediocre experience? We feel like we’ve charted the correct course so far, but I’m curious to hear what others think.

Caption Contest Update

We have some bad news, and some good news for you? Which would you prefer first? The bad news? Okay, well sadly enough, the caption contest going on right now in partnership with d20Monkey has to come to a premature end. On April 5th we’ll be closing the comment section and going through the hundreds of entries on a quest for the best!

Ah, now onto the good news. The good news is that the reason we’re doing so is because d20Monkey is going to be creating caption strips for us on the regular! That’s right folks there’s been such a positive response to this one we’d like to keep them coming at you in our monthly (and perhaps bi-monthly) newsletter.

The contest rules will stay the same, as you can earn some free ascendant time and get your caption published on d20Monkey.com however the cameo appearance will be a this one time only offer, so be sure to get those captions in for a shot at internet fame!

We hope you’re excited to read this news as we are to bring it to you, stay tuned to the blog for ongoing caption hilarity!

Seeking a User Interface Designer

If you’re a designer who loves playing tabletop role playing games and would love to play a key role in improving Obsidian Portal, we’ve got an opportunity for you.

I’ll be the first to admit it: Obsidian Portal isn’t as pretty as it could be. Ryan and I are great programmers, but we’re a little lacking in the design department. Since the beginning we wanted to bring on a professional designer, but it’s always been on the back burner. Finally, we’re at a spot where everything is in place and a designer would be a perfect fit.

Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for a “hands dirty” designer. Someone who wants to get in and make the overall UI and User Experience better. Cleaning up the homepage, making the editing of pages and wikis friendlier, improving our landing page, adding useful popups, and so on. We need a gamer who uses Obsidian Portal extensively, has concrete, applicable ideas on how to make the existing features work better, and would be able to execute those ideas if given access to the code.

In addition, you must be someone willing to wear many hats. We’re a small team and that means often straying out of your comfort zone. For a designer, that means designing t-shirts, stickers, achievement badges, flyers, and just about anything graphical you can imagine.

Benefits

• Be part of a small but dynamic team. You’ll be amazed at what we can get done in a very short period of time.
• Play with cutting-edge technologies – Ruby on Rails, jQuery, MongoDB, Redis, Chef, Amazon Web Services…you name it, we’ve tried it.
• Work from anywhere on a schedule that fits you.
• Interact with an awesome community. They’ll thank you profusely every time you make Obsidian Portal easier to use and look at.
• Best of all: Make Obsidian Portal look and behave like you know it should! How often have you said, “I could do this better…” Now you can!

Qualifications

• Great understanding of UI/UX
• Competent with Photoshop and Illustrator
• Experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript/jQuery
• Not scared of interacting with server-side code. You won’t have to write it, but for testing you’ll need to be able to at least run a Ruby on Rails project on your local machine.

Compensation

This is a paid, part-time contract position. The time investment required will be quite variable, but will probably come out to about 10 hours / week. Really, it comes down to how much time you want to give to making Obsidian Portal great.

Pay rate and compensation is negotiable. Tell us what you expect from this position.

How to Apply

Send me at least 2 examples of web interfaces you have designed to [email protected]. Be descriptive and specific about what part you played, what you designed, and your thoughts on what works and what doesn’t. Describe what you did with CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and server side language (Ruby, PHP, Python, etc).

Finally, tell me what parts of Obsidian Portal are in dire need of redesign, and how you would go about it. There are no right answers here. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear yours.

Get Monkeyfied! Comic Caption Contest with d20Monkey!

Update: Congrats to our winner Matt Dukes (aka @DireFlail) and his comedic genius! His entry is displayed above and will also be featured on www.d20Monkey.com today, stay tuned here for more caption contests and to d20Monkey for good laughs and Matt’s cameo appearance!

Well Helooooo Adventurers…

Want to see yourself (or your RPG character) inside the super hilarious d20Monkey comic strip? Maybe you just want to show off your superior comedic prowess…or maybe this lovely ogre ‘lady’ is just too irresistible for you?! No matter the case, we’re challenging you to caption this image for a shot at fame and fortune! Okay, well, maybe just fame. Internet fame, but fame none the less!

Rules & Rewards

The winner will get their caption published on the d20Monkey comic strip with recognition, as well as a cameo appearance within the strip as a cartoonized version of themself (or their character, which doesn’t have to be of the fantasy genre). Just to top it all off we’re throwing in 3 months of Ascendant time to sweeten the deal.

Note: The cameo appearance is a one time only offer while we kick off this series, subsequent winners of caption contests after this one will not have themselves placed into the d20Monkey strip.

The Not-So Fine Print

You’ll have until the stroke of midnight, April 30th 2011 to get your caption(s) in, you may submit as many as you like. You must submit them as a comment to this blog post via the handy comment section seen below. For the sake of clarity, if you choose to submit multiple entries please do so with each one as it’s own individual comment. There is no right or wrong way to caption this, be it word/thought bubbles, a single caption to encompass the entire image or whatever else you can think of!

The winner will be chosen jointly by Obsidian Portal staff and comic author Brian Patterson and announced on May 5th 2011. Good luck!