Is this possible?

Thanuir

Thanuir

I have a game going with some interesting structural features. Namely: There is no clear line between players and GMs and there is no clear line between player and non-player characters.

In more detail: There are named characters that are tied to particular players (and GM and player are not formally different). There are named characters that are not tied to any player/GM. I guess they could be called NPCs. Can I implement this structure in this site? If so, is there something specific I should avoid or do?

bevinflannery

As a relative newcomer to the site, I'll throw my 2 cents in. I don't see any reason why you couldn't implement it. I think that for the site, the designation of GM makes a difference in only two respects. First, whoever carries the GM designation is the one who creates the campaign listing and has the ability to issue "invitations." Second, whoever carries the GM designation is the one who has access to post and view material in the "GM only" sections. Wait, I think there's a third -- the GM also has the ability to edit a player-affiliated character.


Aside from that, I think that everyone who has joined a campaign has the ability to add/edit. The players in my campaign can edit the adventure logs, the Wiki and even the NPCs, and I can do the same for the campaigns where I am "only" a player.

Lialos

You can promote your players to GM status as well, if you want them to have full control over your site. Although, they can all modify the Wiki anyways, it does just give them access to the GM only pages. Insofar as NPCs vs PCs, just call them all PCs and handle things accordingly.

FemmeLegion

Observations on listing a character as a PC versus a NPC:

I helped Florimel set up his account, so I still have his password, and so I decided to look at the NPC Tracker both as him and as myself. Looking at "Noi'fei":http://www.obsidianportal.com/character/3054 as my example, and looking twice just to be sure: I'm pretty sure the GM of the campaign is allowed to edit Noi'fei, but a player is not.

I verified this by going (as Florimel) to a campaign where he was listed as GM and I was not. I've listed "Tisk":http://www.obsidianportal.com/character/tisk as both a PC and a NPC in the Encyclopedia Yggdraversica campaign, and Florimel is able to edit her even though FemmeLegion is the author.

What does this mean?

It means that if you want only Player Alex having the power to update Character Melissa, then you want to have Alex create Melissa as one of his PCs. And you probably want to just divvy up the "real NPCs" between everybody expressly for this purpose. If you have Support Staff Paul who's strictly a NPC, then only the person listed as GM of the campaign can make changes to him, so that's a bunch of extra work dumped on whoever got cajoled into creating the campaign wiki here.

As bevinflannery and Lialos both pointed out, players are already able to modify wiki pages - they just don't get the GM-only options. So really the only difference is how much latitude a GM versus a player gets in editing PCs or NPCs. And since this sounds like a very character-driven game, I think folks could just stash their private notes in the GM-only fields of their PCs.

Let me know if this didn't make sense. I know it took me a while to feel like I knew what you were asking, so I could well have missed the mark. =)

Micah

Permissions and such have grown _organically_ (which is a nice way of saying _with little or no planning_). From the get-go we wanted to minimize permissions as they are a real pain to deal with.

Further, characters and campaigns have always been very loosely coupled. Our original plan was to have a database of characters for people to use in their games. The whole campaign blogging thing was a bit of an afterthought, but that's what I came to like the most and it seems that most others feel the same way.

So, the end result is that things aren't as smooth as they could be with relation to characters being editable or owned in campaigns. It seems to me that any character in a campaign (PC or NPC) should be editable by anyone in the group, but many people here feel strongly that only the GM and a particular player should be able to edit a PC. So, that's where we stand right now.

We have had requests in the past to allow for multiple GMs or something similar, but I've resisted this, as it's useful to have one person who is responsible for everything in the campaign. Besides, the concept of a single GM/DM/Storyteller/Official/Referee is nearly universal among game systems, and we have to try and keep the system as simple as possible while serving as many people as we can.