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Request: Adventure/Encounter Tool
It would be great to have an adventure management tool. The site as it stands can go a fair way toward managing your adventure creation, but it's not very elegant, and there are a few important factors that I believe are missing.
My idea of a good adventure management tool could:
* Store encounter descriptions
* Store hand-outs
* Allow map uploads
* Link encounters to map locations
* Link to existing wiki articles, characters, and items
* Make items visible to the players selectively. Hand-outs, maps (without encounter markers), descriptive text.
You can do something like this with the existing wiki tool, using GM-only pages. The problem is that there's no elegant way to reference your encounters, handouts, etc. If I used this site to create adventures as-is, I would soon have hundreds of pages, and my adventure pages would just be in the way for world-building, and vice-versa.
In addition, one cannot make one's maps gm-only, unless I missed a setting somewhere. So, using the map/tag feature to place your encounters would give the info away to your players.
My idea of a good adventure management tool could:
* Store encounter descriptions
* Store hand-outs
* Allow map uploads
* Link encounters to map locations
* Link to existing wiki articles, characters, and items
* Make items visible to the players selectively. Hand-outs, maps (without encounter markers), descriptive text.
You can do something like this with the existing wiki tool, using GM-only pages. The problem is that there's no elegant way to reference your encounters, handouts, etc. If I used this site to create adventures as-is, I would soon have hundreds of pages, and my adventure pages would just be in the way for world-building, and vice-versa.
In addition, one cannot make one's maps gm-only, unless I missed a setting somewhere. So, using the map/tag feature to place your encounters would give the info away to your players.
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Comments
Regarding selectively visible items, hand outs, etc... unfortunately, I don't think such things are going to happen anytime soon as Micah explains on the "OP blog":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/?p=312
I have a lot of handouts stored on OP, mostly in the form of player information gathering results. I personally feel that including such information only enhances the world building aspect of OP rather than detracting from it. For the sessions I have run through OP, I typically put all my game notes in the Adventure log which will eventually become the upcoming session's recap with wiki slugs linking to the relevant handout or other pages, all of which are set to GM only until after they are revealed.
As far as making GM only maps:
One way to achieve this is to host your images in Picasa or another similar site and link as an image to a GM only wiki page if you don't want your players to be able to see them.
For linking maps and locations, I highly recommend checking out "This Thread":http://forums.obsidianportal.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=1251&page=1#Item_11 and specifically DiceMasterNick's wonderful example of "putting this technique into practice":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/yggdrasil-saga/wikis/khorvaire
Your solution to the map marking issue is ingenious and interesting. Well done.