IC vs OOC in Adventure Logs

Micah

Micah

There seems to be an even split between people using only IC vs both IC and OOC text in their Adventure Log posts.

For me, I've found that some of the best, most entertaining material is only tangentially related to the game. Instead, it's something stupid that I said while someone was walking by our game table. Or, it's a random quote about Star Wars. Or a rant about how I'm nerdier than everyone else I play with.

I've started trying to add a "Notable Quotes" section to the bottom of each post, where I put funny stuff that people said during the game. Here's an example from "Die Alte Welt":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/die-alte-welt/adventure-log/more-mutants-in-the-forest and another from "Arkanopolis":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/arkanopolis/adventure-log/the-sentient-warship

I've just found that I get more enjoyment from remembering the funny things that happened at the table, rather than the actual content of the game. I never really expected that, it's just the way things turned out. I guess I'm not disciplined enough to write everything up as exciting fiction.

What about all of you?

Micah

P.S. I'm even thinking about adding a special CSS class for OOC text. The idea would be to allow you to mark up your OOC text like so:

p(ooc). This is some OOC text. blah blah blah

And now back to our story...


Along with special styling to set it apart, there would be a little button or link on the sidebar that would allow for expanding/collapsing the OOC text so you can choose if you want to see it or not. Sound like a good idea?

ryryguy

That's a great idea. I would use it.

There could be some room for other, similar categories. "Spoiler"? "Rules"? (Rules maybe is just a subset of OOC, but a stat block is kind of different than "table-talk" OOC like "Here Jim put cheetos up his nose and we all just about died laughing.")

ryryguy

Oh, I was wondering, would the CSS class apply fixed formatting, or is there a way for individual users to override it? I happen to like the indented blue text you are using, but it would be a better feature if people could override it. (I don't know CSS.)

Micah

The ultimate goal is to allow some amount of theming / skinning. By using CSS, theming is much easier.

Our current plan is to offer the default theme, then have additional themes available to premium members. To entice people to come up with themes, we'll probably offer free premium time to anyone who creates a theme which is good enough to be accepted.

So, it will be a mix between user-customizable and fixed theme. IMHO, this offers the best of all worlds. Users can create their own themes, but you also don't get the standard eye-gougingly bad layouts common to places like MySpace.

Note: This is a "far future, pie-in-the-sky" feature. We know it's possible, but have a lot of groundwork to lay before we can implement it. However, there are some eager users (all props to "DungeonCrawlers":http://www.obsidianportal.com/profile/dungeoncrawlers) who have already contributed and offered to help out. We're just trying to get things to a state where we can make use of their contributions.