# Other tools for PbP games?



## Morrus

Are there any more tools that PbP gamers could use?  Not being a PbP gamer myself, I kinda need to rely on your input as to what would actually be useful.

One thing which occured to me is "Aliases".  You can create a number of aliases for your account; these are essentially characters.  Each has an image and a description, and it's easy to switch between them.  When you post in a designated forum (i.e. a PbP forum), you are able to have your character make the post (although there is a note which indicates whch member that actually is).  People can click through to read about the character.

Would that be of any use?


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## Blackrat

Oh, I really think that would be usefull. Especially if you can add the character sheet to some sort of description page of the aliases and then find that page by just clicking the name.

Currently it can be somewhat tricky to find your sheet fast


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## IronWolf

Morrus said:


> One thing which occured to me is "Aliases".  You can create a number of aliases for your account; these are essentially characters.  Each has an image and a description, and it's easy to switch between them.  When you post in a designated forum (i.e. a PbP forum), you are able to have your character make the post (although there is a note which indicates whch member that actually is).  People can click through to read about the character.
> 
> Would that be of any use?




Aliases could be quite cool and useful.

And not to harp on an older problem, but email notifications would help a lot as well to know when your PbP thread has been updated and possibly waiting on a response from you.


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## renau1g

Paizo's site uses Alias' IIRC. It seemed to work out well as when I clicked on someone's alias it took me to their CS. 

Ex.
http://paizo.com/people/ErianElranelen


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## Morrus

Cool.  We'll put that on the list, then!

We likely won't have all the categories (stats, racial abilities, class abilities) etc. that Paizo's has on the alias's page, simply because we want to cover all game systems.  So we'll just make it an empty space which you can put whatever information you like in.


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## renau1g

Actually, that user just added them in. The actual box to enter the info is blank so your comment would be how it is over there.


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## Merkuri

Might be good to provide a blank text area for aliases and/or a link to another site that would represent the character sheet.  Some people might not want to use the blank text area but just want their character sheet link to go to some other service, like iPlay4e.


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## Morrus

Merkuri said:


> Might be good to provide a blank text area for aliases and/or a link to another site that would represent the character sheet. Some people might not want to use the blank text area but just want their character sheet link to go to some other service, like iPlay4e.




The general plan is to keep traffic here, not send it elsewhere.


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## Merkuri

Morrus said:


> The general plan is to keep traffic here, not send it elsewhere.




Then you should probably look into some way of keeping a character sheet that isn't just a plain text box.  You might want to surf around and see what options other sites use for some of the more popular games.

For example, iPlay4e imports .dnd4e character sheets from the Character Builder, which is a big bonus for 4e players because you don't have to completely re-type your character.

I don't know if it's still alive, but there was a service called 3eProfiler that I used a few years ago to store 3.0 and 3.5 D&D sheets.  I think they offered a download that webmasters could use to put a 3eProfiler on their own sites.


This is getting into the area of "may be too much trouble to be worth it" but you might want to consider finding some way of letting users build their own character sheet "templates".  A template would basically be a bunch of text boxes, dropdowns, etc that users could lay out on their own and share with other users.  So one player in a PbP game could put together a CS template for their chosen game system and share that template with the other players in the game.

If you want to get really advanced you could let template creators specify certain "actions" (or dice rolls) that can be automatically made using values from the template.  For example, when playing a D&D 4e game you could create a template that stored the character's level, the 6 ability scores, and the ability score modifiers, then you could create an "action" called "Str attack" that would roll 1d20 and add whatever is in the Str Modifier field plus whatever is in the level field divided by 2.  An alias using that character sheet could then fill out those values and then after they've made a post they could choose to add a roll and instead of rolling normally they could pick the "Str attack" action and it would automatically do the roll using the information taken from that alias's sheet.

I would be ecstatic if you implemented this sort of thing, but it would probably take a lot of code and might be comparable to the effort put into the Gamers Seeking Gamers system (if not more so).


I don't play PbPs often anymore, but honestly there are only two things that would make me want to store my character sheet on this site as opposed to elsewhere.  One would be the ability to quickly import a sheet from elsewhere (like iPlay4e).  The other would be the ability to use the information I typed in to automatically do dice rolls.  If you don't provide either one of those things then I'm likely to just use the character sheet text box to paste in a link to some other site.

Not trying to be negative, just trying to point out that there are plenty of other sites out there that do a very good job of storing character sheets, and if you want people to use EN World for that then you'll need to either provide the same quality of sheet-storing or give us some feature the other sites don't have (like the ability to use numbers from the sheet in dice rolls).


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## Morrus

We're not in any position to develop something that complex in the near future, but it's worth considering for next year, perhaps. That's a pretty major and expensive development. 

One thing we do plan is to let users save their favourite die rolls, which achieves some of the same aim (you can save your often used attack and damage rolls, for example, and roll them quickly).


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## ryryguy

Morrus said:


> One thing we do plan is to let users save their favourite die rolls, which achieves some of the same aim (you can save your often used attack and damage rolls, for example, and roll them quickly).




That would be very useful alongside the alias feature.  Group the saved die rolls with a particular alias.  Having 4 PbP characters active is a lot of different rolls to be saved - possibly too many for the saved roll feature to be useful.  Even if a full alias is not implemented, some ability to group or tab the saved die rolls would be useful.


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## ryryguy

By the way, is there any meta thread to discuss the new tags









*OOC:*


such as this one?







I was wondering what the "MAP" tag does exactly (it's new, right, or did I just never notice it before?)

Also, while I like the indenting and background blocking for these new tags, I feel like the formatting on the OOC block makes it stand out too much.  Typically we like to hide OOC chatter.  For example, sometimes i use DarkSlateGray text inline for OOC text.  Could the new OOC format be changed to something that's less obtrusive, easier to ignore?  

I know, it's a fine line between "easy to ignore" and "hard to see".


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## pneumatik

I like the idea of aliases. I've seen people often post their PC's name and level in the subject of an IC post. I associate people's avatars and names with their PCs for ease of reading, but when they change their avatar it confuses my primitive human brain. So an alias for posting a pbp IC thread would be great. For now each alias can just link to anywhere on enworld so that players wouldn't have to move an existing character sheet to use it.

In follow-up to my comments over here, I like the idea of giving a whole post a different background color. If aliases could pick different background colors it would be really helpful for identifying which PC posted what. It would be similar to how the OOC and GM tags call attention to their topic, but organized by PC.
I'm not sure how many different distinct yet still subtle background colors would be available. I'm also not sure how well that would mesh with people wanting to call-out what their PC says.

As an aside, I love how little space the sblocks (or whatever Paizo's board calls them) take up in the alias character sheet on link upthread.

Finally, the dice blocks are really big. Could there be a different formatting option to make them smaller, similar in size to xp posts? I like not having to go to invisible castle to roll, but several rolls in one IC post would be very visually distracting. I'd prefer something like:

1d20+0 -> 3


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## Morrus

ryryguy said:


> By the way, is there any meta thread to discuss the new tags




There's a thread in Talking the Talk.



> I was wondering what the "MAP" tag does exactly (it's new, right, or did I just never notice it before?)




If you put an address in MAP tags, a Google map displays the location.


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## Morrus

pneumatik said:


> Finally, the dice blocks are really big. Could there be a different formatting option to make them smaller, similar in size to xp posts? I like not having to go to invisible castle to roll, but several rolls in one IC post would be very visually distracting. I'd prefer something like:
> 
> 1d20+0 -> 3




Covered in so... many... places.  I can't bring myself to type the answer again; I think I'd be in danger of a brain seizure!


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## IronWolf

pneumatik said:


> Finally, the dice blocks are really big. Could there be a different formatting option to make them smaller, similar in size to xp posts? I like not having to go to invisible castle to roll, but several rolls in one IC post would be very visually distracting. I'd prefer something like:






Morrus said:


> Covered in so... many... places.  I can't bring myself to type the answer again; I think I'd be in danger of a brain seizure!




Just so Morrus doesn't enter the throes of a brain seizure, here is one of the places he answered the question:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/5318350-post25.html



			
				Morrus in another thread said:
			
		

> But we'll add some options later for a "streamlined" view which each user can select via his settings.


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## Morrus

So here's a really preliminary idea based on this thread.

*CAMPAIGN MANAGER*

You can create campaigns or characters.  There is a list of your current campaigns and characters.  

*Campaign* - name, description, image.

*Character* - name, description, image, stats (a blank box), file attachment (if you wish to attach a CB file or your 120-page PDF character background).

The two interact in the following way:

*CAMPAIGN*

A GM creates a campaign, assigns a description, recruits players.
Players "join" his campaign with one of their characters.  The GM approves or denies that join request.
He then has a list and details of the characters playing in his campaign.
He has an optional "lock" button with which he can prevent a player editing his character while playing the campaign (may or may not be used depending on whetehr the GM is the type to do so or not).
He has a list of dice rolls used in his campaign.
*CHARACTER*

A member creates characters.
You can have multiple characters.
The system doesn't actually handle any stats - it's all just a blank text box and you can enter the character stats however you like (your GM may require a specific format, for example, before he approves your join request).
You can have a character join an existing campaign; the request goes to the GM who needs to approve it.
You can post as your character, which gives you a different post format.  Instead of your username, avatar, location, post count, etc. on the left you see your character name, image, short description such as "Level 8 Eladrin Gardener", and a note which says "This is a character belonging to X".
How does all that sound?  Remember I don't PbP myself, so I won't take any offence if any of my assumptions about how it works are wrong.


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## Morrus

Maybe something like this for the initial page. Then, of course, there are sub-pages for individual campaigns and characters and stuff.


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## Morrus

Just casting summon on you PbP guys so I can get your thoughts.  

[MENTION=21076]IronWolf[/MENTION], [MENTION=27761]Blackrat[/MENTION], [MENTION=54810]renau1g[/MENTION], [MENTION=41321]Merkuri[/MENTION], [MENTION=64945]ryryguy[/MENTION], [MENTION=21087]pneumatik[/MENTION].

Please summon (mention) any other PbP people you think should be involved in the discussion.


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## renau1g

Ahhh....thank you Morrus, that was getting pretty tight in that lamp

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLQLFJrV_o4]YouTube - Aladdin The Genie part1[/ame]

[MENTION=36973]stonegod[/MENTION]  I choose you
[MENTION=9789]evilbob[/MENTION]  thoughts?
[MENTION=13739]Velmont[/MENTION], [MENTION=48762]Leif[/MENTION], [MENTION=11520]Scotley[/MENTION], [MENTION=29558]Mowgli[/MENTION] - you guys usually have an opinion, and as old as Leif is I'm sure he's gotta have some wisdom at some time


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## stonegod

Looking good.

Re Sheets: The Living worlds used to do them on the Wiki here; they're now offsite. Won't be coming back with just limited sheet support, but I totally understand limited dev resources.

One possible PBP addition: Characters usually have a color of speech text. If there was a way to associate a character with color and maybe a [speech][/speech] tag that works with that, that'd be grand (and save a lot of [color=whatever][/color] typing).


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## Morrus

stonegod said:


> Re Sheets: The Living worlds used to do them on the Wiki here; they're now offsite. Won't be coming back with just limited sheet support, but I totally understand limited dev resources.




What does a wiki allow you to do with a character which this won't? Both are blank pages waiting for you to put things in however you want, surely?  Except this offers automated co-ordination for the GM.



> One possible PBP addition: Characters usually have a color of speech text. If there was a way to associate a character with color and maybe a [speech][/speech] tag that works with that, that'd be grand (and save a lot of [color=whatever][/color] typing).




Hmmm. I can talk to the developer and ask him if there's a way the GM can asign colours to characters in his campaign once he's got the list. 

Keep the ideas coming; if you dont' suggest it now and we develop the system and then you suggest it later, the response will be "shoulda said before I spent the money, not after!" 

Feel free to make suggestions. I can't promise we'll do them all, but if we can come up with a decent PbP platform together, that would be awesome.

I'm currently trying to think of a way we can do battlemaps. I think that is too ambitious, though. But I'll keep thinking.


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## stonegod

Morrus said:


> What does a wiki allow you to do with a character which this won't? Both are blank pages waiting for you to put things in however you want, surely?  Except this offers automated co-ordination for the GM.




The wiki allows
- Templates that take simple input and make complex output (formatted char-sheets from just a few numbers and text); also does some validation.
- Editing by not just the poster but the GM and the Living World judges (important for character approval).
- Automatic linkage to other characters that share the same category tag (for noting all Warforged, all Warlocks, etc.). 

The first two are the important points, the last one a nicety by not a game breaker. You can see an example of what I mean here: Tondrek; if you "Edit" it, you can see the templates in action. At the bottom of the sheet you can see comments from Judges (which is why we like the more-than-one editing).


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## Maidhc O Casain

I currently use ENWorld for my actual game play, and Obsidian Portal for my campaign management. I really like the options they've got over there. I'll go ahead and say that campaign management is all they do, so it's unlikely you'll be able to set up anything that elaborate. However, I really think you're on the right track here; I'd just suggest that you take a look over there for some potential inspiration. For an example of what a GM who's ready to devote some time and effort, check out Arsheesh's Tales of Darkmoon Vale.


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## pneumatik

I like the idea of having easy access to my campaign's rogue gallery. Right now I have to scroll through several PCs who are no longer in the campaign to get to the newer ones. It would be nice to have a brief list that would let me expand one or all of them rather than linking to a separate page, like so:

Fafrd
Human Fighter 1
[sblock=full sheet]stats go here[/sblock]

The Grey Mouser
Human Rogue 1
[sblock=full sheet]stats go here[/sblock]

I'd love to be able to build character sheets (really I'd just steal someone else's work) in which the PCs just type in the numbers and it gets auto-formatted. I think. I mean, every characters sheet that's not just a sheet of blank paper has notes in the margins and on the back.

Anyway, if I could boot PCs out of my game when they stop playing it would help keep things neat.

If all these different things - PCs, characters sheets, die rolls, etc. - are represented by single objects/variables, then it should be easy to repeat them while keeping every copy synchronized. So I could see all of a PCs die rolls on their character page and they'd also been in/under the posts they were made for.

And, uh, [MENTION=29098]Rhun[/MENTION] and [MENTION=84167]HolyMan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=13966]Arkhandus[/MENTION], getthehellouthere!

Oh! The one thing that drives me the most crazy is when sigs aren't displayed while I'm composing a post. That's where I keep handy links to the rogue's gallery and OOC thread (with campaign reference). If there would be some way to keep the link to the main campaign page while composing a post it would be super-awesome.


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## HolyMan

Someone called for a HolyMan??

Hey wait you don't look sick, what is going on here?

EDIT: So far I like aliases. Will there be a cap?

HM


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## Blackrat

It looks good. And I can't think of anything to add right now that hasn't been said before. Stonegod's color suggestion I echo.


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## Relique du Madde

If you do a speech tag PLEASE make it use (optional) arguments.

[speach="Color"]   [/speech]

or 

[speech="Font,Color"] [/speech]*


*Font being optional.

Personally, I don't want to force colors on people in my campaigns since it's the player's character, therefore they should get to choose how their character speaks, not me.

It's like a table game.  Do you tell your player's how they are supposed to make their character's are supposed to sound when they RP?


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## Relique du Madde

To continue my thought...

Maybe the argument for the speech tag can be SPECIFIC style attached to a user's account (which can be accessed through a "character's tab").  So for instance, if my account had these styles:

Gaetanna = red, default, italic
Delta = plum, courier new 

So, I (or someone else) would have to type:



		Code:
	

 [speech=Relique du Madde.Delta]Text here[/speech]


To access a my "Delta" character style.


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## Morrus

I'm going to see what we can do with CB characters.  No promises, though - I've no idea how difficult that will be, and we're obviously not allowed to step on the toes of the actual character generation.


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## Morrus

stonegod said:


> The wiki allows
> - Templates that take simple input and make complex output (formatted char-sheets from just a few numbers and text); also does some validation.




A form could do the job just as well, though?

Although bear in mind that verging towards actual character generation risks a takedown notice from WotC. 



> - Editing by not just the poster but the GM and the Living World judges (important for character approval).




Well that's just permissions. Easy peasy. 



> - Automatic linkage to other characters that share the same category tag (for noting all Warforged, all Warlocks, etc.).




Easy enough.


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## Morrus

Mowgli said:


> I currently use ENWorld for my actual game play, and Obsidian Portal for my campaign management. I really like the options they've got over there. I'll go ahead and say that campaign management is all they do, so it's unlikely you'll be able to set up anything that elaborate. However, I really think you're on the right track here; I'd just suggest that you take a look over there for some potential inspiration. For an example of what a GM who's ready to devote some time and effort, check out Arsheesh's Tales of Darkmoon Vale.




I see nothing there that doesn't look easy to do here with a little time.

Although I don't understand how the character sheets there work - are they simply uploading images of their character sheets, doing character generation, or entering the data into forms, or what?


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## IronWolf

Morrus said:


> So here's a really preliminary idea based on this thread.
> 
> *CAMPAIGN MANAGER*
> 
> You can create campaigns or characters.  There is a list of your current campaigns and characters.
> 
> *Campaign* - name, description, image.
> 
> *Character* - name, description, image, stats (a blank box), file attachment (if you wish to attach a CB file or your 120-page PDF character background).
> 
> The two interact in the following way:
> 
> *CAMPAIGN*
> 
> A GM creates a campaign, assigns a description, recruits players.
> Players "join" his campaign with one of their characters.  The GM approves or denies that join request.
> He then has a list and details of the characters playing in his campaign.
> He has an optional "lock" button with which he can prevent a player editing his character while playing the campaign (may or may not be used depending on whetehr the GM is the type to do so or not).
> He has a list of dice rolls used in his campaign.
> *CHARACTER*
> 
> A member creates characters.
> You can have multiple characters.
> The system doesn't actually handle any stats - it's all just a blank text box and you can enter the character stats however you like (your GM may require a specific format, for example, before he approves your join request).
> You can have a character join an existing campaign; the request goes to the GM who needs to approve it.
> You can post as your character, which gives you a different post format.  Instead of your username, avatar, location, post count, etc. on the left you see your character name, image, short description such as "Level 8 Eladrin Gardener", and a note which says "This is a character belonging to X".
> How does all that sound?  Remember I don't PbP myself, so I won't take any offence if any of my assumptions about how it works are wrong.




I like the campaign manager idea.  Anything that helps bring the information one needs while playing in a PbP is a definite plus.  

I think the other thing I would suggest is a way to "link" threads in a PbP game to a place in the campaign manager.  So for example in this campaign manager if I could see a quick filter of the threads related to the PbP that would be great.  For example, the IC thread, the OOC thread and such.

If a PbP runs long enough there is a good chance it will have multiple IC and OOC threads, so being able to have each of those easily accessible from the campaign manager would be great and help put all the information one needs at their fingertips.

I suspect thread tags would help with keeping threads together for display.


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## Morrus

IronWolf said:


> I think the other thing I would suggest is a way to "link" threads in a PbP game to a place in the campaign manager. So for example in this campaign manager if I could see a quick filter of the threads related to the PbP that would be great. For example, the IC thread, the OOC thread and such.




Absolutely.  I should have mentioned that in the description, but it's an essential function.


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## stonegod

Morrus said:


> A form could do the job just as well, though?
> 
> Although bear in mind that verging towards actual character generation risks a takedown notice from WotC.



it not generation; it's just uploading the character sheet in another form. You have to crunch the initial math elsewhere (and the class/power/feat texts). In fact, as per WotC guidelines, we only post final power numbers, not things like 2[W], etc. 

A smart form could do that. Ive had some thoughts there, but not the resources to dedicate to it.


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## HolyMan

Not only linking threads but I was thinking some way of clicking a post and sending it to a favorites spot in a campaign manager. 

The way your profile "collects" every post you make is their a way to add a favorite posts spot and then a "send to favorite's" button. This would be very useful in living worlds and campaigns as if as the DM I post something signifigant I can then send it to my faves for storage till I have time to go back and put it in it's proper place. 

Players could use it to track treasure gained or XP rewards. I haven't used the search function much (just in LEW researching for games). But it gives a lot of "extras" that takes more time to sift through. I DM 12 games now and play in 11. I am always looking to make my searching a lot faster.

HM


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## Morrus

HolyMan said:


> Not only linking threads but I was thinking some way of clicking a post and sending it to a favorites spot in a campaign manager.
> 
> The way your profile "collects" every post you make is their a way to add a favorite posts spot and then a "send to favorite's" button. This would be very useful in living worlds and campaigns as if as the DM I post something signifigant I can then send it to my faves for storage till I have time to go back and put it in it's proper place.
> 
> Players could use it to track treasure gained or XP rewards. I haven't used the search function much (just in LEW researching for games). But it gives a lot of "extras" that takes more time to sift through. I DM 12 games now and play in 11. I am always looking to make my searching a lot faster.
> 
> HM




I'm afraid I don't understand.  You want to bookmark specific forum posts somewhere?

I don't see that as being difficult, but would not a designated "Reward Tracking" page in the Campaign Manager achieve that more elegantly?


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## evilbob

Morrus said:


> A form could do the job just as well, though?



What is an example of a form?

The templates - bits of actual meta wiki code that crunch numbers for you - can't be stressed enough.  It's _hard_ to re-create a character sheet in text; it takes a long time and it's a huge deterrent to new players.  Also, you've got the WotC specter on your back if you create something that's TOO good.  What we have on the wiki is a delicate balance; it would have to be simpler than that to get everyone to move back, especially since we just moved.  That said, even if something is complicated to set up, if you can set it up once and forget it we have lots of talented, dedicated people who know a thing or two about coding who are happy to help.

Also, to expand on what stonegod said:  we need the ability for multiple people to be able to edit and "ok" the sheet AND to be able to have a "frozen" state once it is okayed.  However, it still needs to be able to be changed even after frozen!  Currently, this is handled extremely well by wikis thanks to their _edit history_ feature.  Every time something is changed, a full change state is created:  you will always know if something is different because the full edit history (back to page creation) is on display for all to see.  We need that level of accountability and flexibility.


Re:  Campaign stuff
This looks pretty cool to me!  Although I don't know that it really gains much more than a forum thread already does.  Especially since you'd still have to use a forum thread in conjunction, right?

The main usefulness seems to be having a link to a character sheet on hand at any time, along with cloud-based DM notes that the DM can keep track of - which is very nice for people like me who use multiple computers in a day.  Neither of those are really earth-shaking, however.  If you could throw in a battlemat feature on top of that, I am _sold_.


Re:  Dice
Can we make them smal- just kidding!    It WOULD be nice to have a special DM-only dice area that could also be revealed as necessary, however.  And if dice rolls were shown in the "Topic Review" when you're replying.


Re:  Aliases
Also cool!  I'm also wondering what the max number would be (at least 5?  10?) and if the alias would also have a link to both the character sheet AND the normal options for someone posting.  For example, I'm exceptionally lazy and if I want to write someone a PM, I'd rather just continue to be able to click their name in a thread and PM them instead of having to click through a few screens to get to it.  Another cool thing would be if the alias had its own speech color that you could set yourself, and any time you used a [speech] tag or something similar, it used that color.


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## HolyMan

Correct, I hope the campaign manager would have a rewards tracker spot.

What I think would help is a place to put that reward post "temporarly" till I had time to go back and then move it to the rewards tracker spot.

It would be very helpful with things like NPC names and descriptions. After making up an NPC on the spot it is a chore to go find him and add him to the NPC spot in my RG.

And in sandbox or living worlds threads important "add ons" to the world, could be sent to the faves spot till they could be added to the campaign wiki's.

HM


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## Morrus

evilbob said:


> What is an example of a form?




A form is where you enter info in boxes. The system then uses that info to do whatever the programmer tells it to do. In this case, presumably, display a character sheet of some kind.



> Also, to expand on what stonegod said: we need the ability for multiple people to be able to edit and "ok" the sheet AND to be able to have a "frozen" state once it is okayed. However, it still needs to be able to be changed even after frozen! Currently, this is handled extremely well by wikis thanks to their _edit history_ feature. Every time something is changed, a full change state is created: you will always know if something is different because the full edit history (back to page creation) is on display for all to see. We need that level of accountability and flexibility.




This simple permissions stuff is all very easy. 


R







> e: Campaign stuff
> This looks pretty cool to me! Although I don't know that it really gains much more than a forum thread already does. Especially since you'd still have to use a forum thread in conjunction, right?




Well, that's what I'm asking. If it's not gonan be useful, I ain't gonna spend large sums of money developing it. 

The thread's about asking what folks would like for PbP games. This is something that combines all the things folks said (so far in this thread) that they'd like.

The main usefulness seems to be having a link to a character sheet on hand at any time, along with cloud-based DM notes that the DM can keep track of - which is very nice for people like me who use multiple computers in a day. Neither of those are really earth-shaking, however. If you could throw in a battlemat feature on top of that, I am _sold_.




> Re: Dice
> Can we make them smal- just kidding!




Grrrrr!  



> Also cool! I'm also wondering what the max number would be (at least 5? 10?) and if the alias would also have a link to both the character sheet AND the normal options for someone posting. For example, I'm exceptionally lazy and if I want to write someone a PM, I'd rather just continue to be able to click their name in a thread and PM them instead of having to click through a few screens to get to it. Another cool thing would be if the alias had its own speech color that you could set yourself, and any time you used a [speech] tag or something similar, it used that color.




I doubt we'l set a limit on Aliases (characters).  If we do, it'd be something very high - 20 or more.


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## Morrus

I've updated those two images a little.


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## HolyMan

I've been thinking of a dice roller thread for those games I don't wish to use the roller on their posts.

Some games short ones, like my Pathfinder Society game. I will let pople roll in the post. But games that I have been running for more than a year I'm thinking a roller thread with them making a saves, skill checks, and combat post. Then having them link to that post in the IC keeping things nice and neat.

And we will find out how many rolls a post can handle LOL, 

HM


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## Morrus

evilbob said:


> If you could throw in a battlemat feature on top of that, I am _sold_.




That's the Holy Grail.  It's what would turn this into a full-featured virtual tabletop PbP system.

But I've:

a) No real ideas on how it should be implemented

b) No idea whether it is even feasible, let alone possible.

However, if folks can give me an idea of how they'd like to see it implemented, we can at least give it some thought.


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## Morrus

HolyMan said:


> Correct, I hope the campaign manager would have a rewards tracker spot.
> 
> What I think would help is a place to put that reward post "temporarly" till I had time to go back and then move it to the rewards tracker spot.
> 
> It would be very helpful with things like NPC names and descriptions. After making up an NPC on the spot it is a chore to go find him and add him to the NPC spot in my RG.
> 
> And in sandbox or living worlds threads important "add ons" to the world, could be sent to the faves spot till they could be added to the campaign wiki's.
> 
> HM




So basically a DM draft/notes section, where you can save it privately for the DM and he can "publish" it to the campaign when he's ready?


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## evilbob

Morrus said:


> So basically a DM draft/notes section, where you can save it privately for the DM and he can "publish" it to the campaign when he's ready?



Ah, now THAT really is cool.  Basically, a cloud-based notes system that you can then publish piecemeal as the fog of war is revealed?  That's like having an online adventure module that you can work on when you have time and then reveal as you go along.  Very cool.


Re:  battlemat

Minimum functions:
- upload background image for map (link to something online is also ok but upload would be really nice; maybe set them to expire in X time with a way to request extensions to help with storage space?)
- grid overlay on map (prefer auto-generated grid that has column and row labels - X, Y, Z vs. 1, 2, 3, etc.)
- be able to hide/reveal map as necessary
- upload images for tokens for PC/monsters and battle effects (zones, etc)
- DM only control but all players can see what is revealed (obvious but thought I'd add)

Would be nice:
- mouseover tokens shows status (HP, current effects, marks, rounds left until disappear, etc.)
- invisible DM area for cloud-based note taking (monster stats, etc.)


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## HolyMan

Sure or you could have sent to a person's profile (a new section there?) since a fave post could be just about anything.

Doesn't need to be to secert as you have already posted at least once.

HM


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## Morrus

evilbob said:


> - mouseover tokens shows status (HP, current effects, marks, rounds left until disappear, etc.)




Bear in mind this isn't a D&D system, it's an all PbP system.


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## evilbob

Morrus said:


> Bear in mind this isn't a D&D system, it's an all PbP system.



I am.  I'd imagine few systems don't use HP (or wounds, or something to denote health that also changes and should be kept track of), and it's a good general-use feature.  I wouldn't make it specific:  just let there be mouseover notes.

And it was in "would be nice" instead of "required" as well.


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## IronWolf

evilbob said:


> Re:  Campaign stuff
> This looks pretty cool to me!  Although I don't know that it really gains much more than a forum thread already does.  Especially since you'd still have to use a forum thread in conjunction, right?




The thing the campaign manager would do for me would be to allow easy access to relevant threads to the campaign.  A GM could link the relevant IC, OOC and possibly even "campaign library" threads listing NPCs encountered so far, rewards, house rules and such in one place.  So as a player I could bookmark the link to the campaign manager and immediately have my gateway into threads that pertain to the campaign.  

Much easier than needing to sort through the various forums to find the one I need or even bookmarking all relevant threads in a game, which from what I have seen tends to me a minimum of three threads per game.


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## Scotley

Lots of good ideas here. I really like the 'one stop shopping' idea. I run and play in several pbp games here and currently (at least until this week) I've had to go out to invisible castle for die rolls, to a wiki that I pay for to get my campaign notes, to another wiki or an obscure thread deep in the forums to get character information and a jump drive or cd for pdf's of reference material. 

It would be truly awesome to have easy to get to characters and private and public game notes as well as the dice roller and forums all in one place. If you can add a battle mat feature so much the better, but please keep it simple. I'd much rather have a basic tool that is easy for everyone to use even if they play from an older machine or an Apple or Linux box that I can update in a couple of minutes rather than some massive graphic resource hog that takes five minutes to load and weeks to figure out. I am definitely *not* in favor of anything that degrades overall performance of the site. 

Thank you!


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## GandalfMithrandir

I am here of my own accord becuase i was not summoned. I think that for the dice rolling, if they could be compacted or hidden that would be REALLY nice, for example this post, where I rolled five saves, would take a massive amount of space with the dice the way they are. Just sayin', I know it would be hard to do, or harder, but it would be nice.


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## Morrus

GandalfMithrandir said:


> I am here of my own accord becuase i was not summoned. I think that for the dice rolling, if they could be compacted or hidden that would be REALLY nice, for example this post, where I rolled five saves, would take a massive amount of space with the dice the way they are. Just sayin', I know it would be hard to do, or harder, but it would be nice.




Someone failed their Perception check!


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## Velmont

My 2 coppers:

*Dice Rollers:* Great thing to have them. I would just love to have them to be able to hide them under a SBLOCK and now I'll be interested to use it. It will be a bit annoying to have to roll after posting, as I have a tendency, both as a master and a DM to write my post, reflecting the result of the post. That would mean I will need to Post => Roll => Edit Post. But at least, the way it is, it prevent any cheat, exept form mod who can delete post 

*Alias:* I love the idea.

*Battelmat:* Good: Ditzie is better! After virtualbattlemat goes down for an Xth time, I tried ditzie. A bit less friendly to upload image, but just as easy to move things around, and you can create Mouse over information!!!! Also, it keep each image on different link, so it is easier to do retcon when needed.

*Character Sheet:* A .dnd4e file is just a big XML. Pretty easy to get information out of it, a bit less to get the math out of it. I have been thinking to create an extractor application. If I ever decide to kick my @$$ into doing it, I'll warn you and see how it could be incorporated to teh forum if you are interested.


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## Morrus

Velmont said:


> My 2 coppers:
> 
> *Dice Rollers:* Great thing to have them. I would just love to have them to be able to hide them under a SBLOCK and now I'll be interested to use it. It will be a bit annoying to have to roll after posting, as I have a tendency, both as a master and a DM to write my post, reflecting the result of the post. That would mean I will need to Post => Roll => Edit Post. But at least, the way it is, it prevent any cheat, exept form mod who can delete post




Yes. It has be that way to prevent cheating.

As for the SBLOCK - as with Gandalf, above, read any one of the many threads about the Dice Roller, or the Dice Roller announcement in the news, or my sig, or the text on the Dice Roller interface itself for your answer. I ain't typing it out no more!


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## evilbob

So about the dice rolle-ACK!  **grab**  *smash*  *crashes*



/Defenestrated!


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## Hypersmurf

Velmont said:


> But at least, the way it is, it prevent any cheat, exept form mod who can delete post




Interestingly, I just tested this - even when I physically remove the post from the database, the roll still shows in my Dice Rolls tab on my profile.

I could still delete and recreate a post until my d20 roll came up the way I liked it... but in my Dice Rolls tab you'd see a d20=3, d20=7, d20=1, d20=18 sequence.

You couldn't prove that the 3, 7, and 1 were rolls for that task, unless you enforced clear entries in the Description field, but it's better than no trail at all.

-Hyp.


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## Morrus

Hypersmurf said:


> Interestingly, I just tested this - even when I physically remove the post from the database, the roll still shows in my Dice Rolls tab on my profile.
> 
> I could still delete and recreate a post until my d20 roll came up the way I liked it... but in my Dice Rolls tab you'd see a d20=3, d20=7, d20=1, d20=18 sequence.
> 
> You couldn't prove that the 3, 7, and 1 were rolls for that task, unless you enforced clear entries in the Description field, but it's better than no trail at all.
> 
> -Hyp.




And that's with mod powers.  Everyone else can't delete posts.  It's unbeatable!


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## Merkuri

Ideas for a PBP battlemap:

Map initialization/creation:
* Each thread can have one map image (background) associated with it, specified by the thread creator at the time of thread creation or shortly thereafter (like similar to how polls work now)
* The map has a grid of configurable size (ideally the grid can be offset to match any existing grid that might be on the background image) (also specified by the thread creator at the time of map creation)
* Multiple small images (tokens) can be placed on the grid.  New tokens should be allowed to be added at any time and old tokens can be deleted.  Tokens can have variable visibility (GM only or all players... if you want to get really advanced the GM should be able to specify individual players that can see the token)

Moving tokens: 
* When replying to a thread that contains a map image the poster should be given the option of modifying the map.
* The poster should be able to indicate a token and an ending position.  Ideally this should be done with a drag/drop, but it could also be done a variety of ways, including specifying the X,Y coordinates of the end position.
* The poster can move multiple tokens, if desired.
* The final post would include an image of the map and some indication of the original position of each moved token (the path that the token moved) - note that each post with a map would show a history of the map and each move that was taken.  The last post in a thread that has a map would show the current map.

Nice to have, but not essential features: 
* Each instance of the map can be scrollable and zoomable by the viewer
* When moving a token, add the ability to put in waypoints in the path
* Each poster alias has an associated token image (not necessarily the same as the avatar) that the GM can place on a map
* Tokens would show some information on mouse-over - information is completely configurable, leaving the posters free to put whatever info they want in it.  Ideally this info would be saved on a post-by-post basis the same as the token positions.
* Assign permissions to tokens so users could only move tokens they owned
* "Active" maps would be shown on the campaign page, and a poster clicking on the map would be taken to the thread the map goes with.
* GM could edit or undo moves of other posters
* Fog of war (areas of the map that the GM could see, but are obscured from player view)
* Ability to draw random shapes/lines on the map


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## Morrus

Heh.  That does sound very cool - but it sounds like an actual software application rather than web page.  I'll be honest, I don't think that's even close to the sort of thing we'll be able to do.

I'll think some more on it, but I'm at - like - 2% of that.


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## GandalfMithrandir

Oops  I would give you XP for typing it out again but I need to spread it around more.


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## Merkuri

I think the bare minimum would not be that hard to do in theory (I've obviously not tried it myself).  

Bare minimum, you need to associate one large image and multiple smaller images with a thread.  You need a grid (honestly, this is probably the hardest thing to do).  You need to associate each of the smaller images with grid coordinates.  Then in each post that shows the map you need to just draw the large image, the grid, and each small image with their grid coordinates.

Heck, you could represent the individual post maps with BBCode that might look something like this:

[PBPMap][token1]1,5[/token1][token2]3,6[/token2][token3]-1,0[/token3][/PBPMap]

And then let the poster adjust the token positions as needed by re-typing some of that BBCode.

The rest is just gravy and could probably be implemented a little at a time as you get the time/resources for it.  This would obviously not be secure, but as a bare-bones PBP battlemap system I think it would be fine.  It's less important that the battlemap be secure than it is for dice rolls to be secure.


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## pneumatik

I've been thinking about how to implement an online battlemat easily and cheaply. I would build a table of square cells with cellpadding = 0 and cellspacing = a couple of pixels. The cellspacing would be colored black or white to make the grid. Each cell would have its own square image that exactly fills a table cell. The edge cells would have numbers or letters in them for reference. And that's the starting battlemat.

There would also be icons for PCs, monsters, whatever. They'd have a transparent background and would also go centered in a cell. So now you have a battlemat with stuff on it.

To build the battlemat you tell the site how large you want it to be (or there could just be a standard size) and it generates an empty table with a checkbox in each cell. Below the table would be a a set of images. You'd check boxes in all the cells you want a particular background and and then click the background to put it in all those cells. Once you've filled all the cells with background you'd go to a similar screen with the icons to place in cells over the background images. Ultimately you want to be able to put multiple icons on top of each other for stuff like grappling and tiny monsters. Hopefully ENWorld could get someone to make some basic map tiles, but people should be able to upload their own images sets, too.

The simple version of permissions is to restrict editing to just the DM or allow anyone to change anything. The awesome version would be to let the DM move everyone and players only move their icons. Maybe they could also upload those icons themselves. To move you just go into the "edit" mode for the battlemat, click your icon, and then click the square you want it to move to.

More awesomeness would allow you to set mouseover or popup text (like the site's xp popup) for each icon to keep up to date with PCs. Even better would be to make that text editable directly, so you could edit HPs or mark off cast spells or annotate buffs directly from the battlemat.

So, yeah, that's a wall of text, but I think the html is at least straightforward. There's no fiddly adjustments to make things line up and no image processing for the site to do. I have no idea how hard it would be to program though.


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## darjr

I wonder if google maps could be of any use?


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## Maidhc O Casain

Morrus said:


> I see nothing there that doesn't look easy to do here with a little time.
> 
> Although I don't understand how the character sheets there work - are they simply uploading images of their character sheets, doing character generation, or entering the data into forms, or what?




As far as I know there's not a sheet for Pathfinder characters, so for those I use a plain text format and ask my players to fill it in.

One of the users has developed a really nice web-based 4E sheet. No calculations, you enter your info into a form in his web site and it inserts your entries into the html code for the sheet. You copy the code and paste it onto your character page. The output looks like this.

Other than that I really don't know what's out there in the way of character sheets.


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## Morrus

Mowgli said:


> As far as I know there's not a sheet for Pathfinder characters, so for those I use a plain text format and ask my players to fill it in.
> 
> One of the users has developed a really nice web-based 4E sheet. No calculations, you enter your info into a form in his web site and it inserts your entries into the html code for the sheet. You copy the code and paste it onto your character page. The output looks like this.
> 
> Other than that I really don't know what's out there in the way of character sheets.




It sounds eminently possible, then, as long as we can find someone do to that initial formatting/layout. Who did it?  Maybe they'd be open to a little freelance layout work.


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## Maidhc O Casain

Great! I think it's awesome that you're looking at this. I run two campaigns, and play in 5 or 6 more. The campaign management and aliases look like they'll be extremely helpful to me.

It's been mentioned before, but I'll reiterate it - an integrated battlemat would be awesome!


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## evilbob

pneumatik said:


> I've been thinking about how to implement an online battlemat easily and cheaply...



Can't you already put background images on a table?  That would solve a lot of the complicated stuff you had.

As for the images, honestly I'd assume that ENworld just provided the framework and others provided the images.  However, that leads me to another idea:

- a common repository for tokens/images/etc that anyone can get to and anyone can add to

Basically, a shared store space for useful files.  It'd need to be organized well and if that's too crazy of an idea you could limit it to a few files, but having a common set of useful tokens would be nice.  Then again, maybe it's silly to replicate parts of the internet - but on the other hand, the idea is to keep people on this site, right?


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## Velmont

evilbob said:


> - a common repository for tokens/images/etc that anyone can get to and anyone can add to




I totally agree with that idea.


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## renau1g

evilbob said:


> - a common repository for tokens/images/etc that anyone can get to and anyone can add to




Just gotta watch out for copyright issues.


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## Arkhandus

pneumatik said:


> And, uh, [MENTION=29098]Rhun[/MENTION] and [MENTION=84167]HolyMan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=13966]Arkhandus[/MENTION], getthehellouthere!
> 
> Oh! The one thing that drives me the most crazy is when sigs aren't displayed while I'm composing a post. That's where I keep handy links to the rogue's gallery and OOC thread (with campaign reference). If there would be some way to keep the link to the main campaign page while composing a post it would be super-awesome.



Yes, you rang? 

I'm too busy this week to read through this thread or provide any significant input.  But I do agree that it would be nice if we could still see signatures while composing or editing a post, since I keep a lot of campaign-related links in my sig.

On another note, I don't particularly want to have to find and install Plugins for Firefox just to see, let alone edit, any posts or sheets or the like. -_-  I won't be able to afford a new computer until at least December, at the very earliest, and probably more like next summer or next fall, so I'm stuck running IE6 and Firefox 2 as my only web-browsers on this outdated machine/OS.  Can't update my Flash player to the most-recent versions either due to my old OS.  Though I doubt the average ENWorlder has the same kinda old machine and cashflow issues I do, it is possible that others are stuck running old OS's/browsers too.


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## HolyMan

That's odd you quoted that and it said I was mentioned again. Guess computers aren't as smart as everyone says they are. 

HM


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## pneumatik

evilbob said:


> Can't you already put background images on a table?  That would solve a lot of the complicated stuff you had.



Yeah, I checked and you can.

You inspired me to hack together a couple of examples and attached them. Well, that and [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] asked for advice on how to build a battlemap in enworld. Lop off the .txt at the end of each file and open them in a browser. Both use tables with a background image to position text into the center of each square on the map. One file uses a map that already had a grid, and the other draws the grid on top of a gridless image. Both images are hotlinked from the cartographersguild.com.

I did all the math and layout by hand, but it should be pretty straightforward to automate it. After a user pics a file, php's getimagesize should provide its dimensions. The user also has to pick either the number of rows or the number of columns. The image dimension on the appropriate side divided by the number of rows or columns (as appropriate) will give the dimension of each square in the grid. I set each square size with WIDTH and HEIGHT, but there may be better ways. Then a script builds the table.

PCs could be a letter or an image in a square (I filled a letter in every square in my examples). A user can click on their own PC (controlled via the board's existing access management system) and then either clicks on the square its going to or enters the coordinates into a text field.


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## evilbob

This is sort of a side bar, but I have no problem with only one person being able to update the map.  I've played online games with maps where PCs can move themselves, and I've played online games with static maps that only the DM can update, and in my experience players moving their own tokens can be nice but it doesn't really add much.  If it is easy to do then go ahead and throw it in; if it is in any way difficult, that would be the first feature to cut.

(And I'm guessing it'd be difficult, since it would be permissions-based and at the very least it would involve an extra interface for assigning permissions to an individual token.)


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## ryryguy

Sorry to be slow to answer the summons...

Regarding the character sheet issue, if it's kept flexible enough, people who like to use the wiki style (and have already invested a lot of effort there) could simply put links to the wiki pages in the character info sections.  This would still be a nice gain in organization to have all those links in one convenient place for the DM and other players.

We also use little spoiler "ministats" blocks like the following:

[sblock=Ingot stat block]*Ingot*- Neuter Warforged Cleric 5
Passive Perception: 15, Passive Insight: 15
AC:20, Fort:17, Reflex:15, Will:19 -- Speed:5
HP:40/color]+5/47, Bloodied:23, Surge Value:11, Surges left: 8/9
Initiative +1
Action Points: 0, Daily Item Uses: Used, Second Wind: Not Used
Powers: Sacred Flame, Righteous Brand, 
Healing Word(x2)
Healing Strike, Split the Sky, Warforged Resolve, Channel Divinity (Divine Fortune/Turn Undead)
Avenging Flame, Shield of Faith, Hallowed Advance
Acidic Fullblade, Acidic Fullblade, Flame Bracers
[/sblock]

In addition to a summary, they also track current status - note the crossed out powers, indicating they are spent.  A form that could be used to display this would be awesome - typing out and deleting those little {s}{/s} are a pain.  (Tracking used powers is a little bit D&D specific but might be useful for other games... and if we're talking a simple template, having some D&D specific options including color to implement power types might be cheap enough to be worth the effort?)

This kind of summary changes frequently and there's no need to track history, so there's no need to keep it on a wiki.

Also:

I second these items from pneumatik:



pneumatik said:


> Anyway, if I could boot PCs out of my game when they stop playing it would help keep things neat.
> 
> Oh! The one thing that drives me the most crazy is when sigs aren't displayed while I'm composing a post. That's where I keep handy links to the rogue's gallery and OOC thread (with campaign reference). If there would be some way to keep the link to the main campaign page while composing a post it would be super-awesome.






Morrus said:


> I don't see that as being difficult, but would not a designated "Reward Tracking" page in the Campaign Manager achieve that more elegantly?




This is another thing that would be extremely useful.  It might be fine just to have a tab in that campaign manager page from the mockup with freeform text entry... a more structured form might be nice too, but not necessary.

In the living world games judges have to approve the rewards.  That's probably part of the desire to have "bookmarks" of specific posts - we place links to the judges "I approve" posts on character sheets for judges to check when reviewing a character.  So, a super feature would be to link rewards back to characters somehow - I imagine this would be useful even in non-judged games.  A double super feature would also allow optional judge review of each entry - basically an "I approve" checkbox, with appropriate permissions.  That would actually be a significant step towards no longer needing the wiki for tracking.

(Not sure how all this stuff gets implemented under the hood, but the idea is having a rewards table, with one record for each reward.  Boolean field in this table is "judge approved", with ability to set the default at campaign level, so a non judged game just defaults to "true" and it's effectively ignored.  Character records contain references to rewards records, from both the present and past campaigns.  Probably one-to-one relationship would be fine, meaning when awarding XP to a group of 5, you have 5 separate records, but many-to-one would be a bit slicker.  A final slick feature would be having a numeric field with an associated tag such as "XP" or "GP", and auto-sum the values per character per tag to feed running totals back to the character sheet!)



Morrus said:


> So basically a DM draft/notes section, where you can save it privately for the DM and he can "publish" it to the campaign when he's ready?




Would be awesome!  In fact I already use BBCeditor to do this for longer posts, but it's not the best tool, because it doesn't speak all the same BBCode that enworld uses.  Having one built in, that uses enworld's own message editor, obviously would not have that problem!


----------



## Morrus

OK, I anticipate preliminary work on the new CAMPAIGN MANAGER to begin this week. It will be developed elsewhere in a test environment, and you will be welcome to join us there to watch/suggest/try etc.

It will be developed in stages - not every feature will be available at launch. For example, I don't even plan to start thinking about the mapping aspects for the initial release, as that will be an aspect as complicated as the rest of the system put together. 

Now, the primary goal isn't to develop something cool and hope you use it; it's to develop something you need/want to use. So continued input will be vital (especially since this is not going to be cheap).

I'll keep you posted on developments. It will probably be a while before there is anything to actually see.

One slight quandary I have is how the Campaign Manager will actually interact with threads.  There's not much point it existing in isloation separate to the the actual PbP games it relates to.  Expecially, many of the suggested features are permission-based (game invites or applications, ability for a GM to boot people from a game); from a permissions POV that pretty much means a GM has complete moderator control over a messageboard thread, but via the interface of the Campaign Manager's join/boot/etc. functions.  To accomplish this, though, new PbP threads would need to be created in the CM itself (they'd still appear in the forum normally, but they'd be _managed_ by the GM via the Campaign Manager).


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## Merkuri

Morrus said:


> To accomplish this, though, new PbP threads would need to be created in the CM itself (they'd still appear in the forum normally, but they'd be _managed_ by the GM via the Campaign Manager).




I think that's a perfectly acceptable caveat.  If you want to use the Campaign Manager for a PbP thread then you have to use it right from the start, you can't "add" it later.

Once this goes live we might want to add a sticky thread at the top of the PbP forum entitled "How do I add Campaign Manager to my thread?" that would explain you can't actually do it and you need to start a new thread from the Campaign Manager to get the necessary functionality.  I anticipate that question will be asked a lot, and having a sticky to link/point to will probably be helpful.


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## renau1g

I'm sure it will get asked asked at least as much as "Hey Morrus? Can I put the dice rolls in sblocks or make them smaller?"


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## pneumatik

Morrus said:


> So basically a DM draft/notes section, where you can save it privately for the DM and he can "publish" it to the campaign when he's ready?



Right now I use blog posts for this and make them as private as the system lets me. Particularly for longer IC thread posts it's nice to have a draft version that I can work on for 30-60 minutes and not worry about having to finish and post (not that I really "polish" posts before they go final). Having some sort of scratch pad would be great.


----------

