New Section in Characters for "Deceased"

jasonvey

In long-term campaigns we often see important NPCs who die for one reason or another, but their information still is important to the past chronicle of the game. Currently the "Characters" page has sections for Player Characters and Non-Player Characters. How about a check box in the character stat form when you go in to edit a character that would move them to a third section: Deceased Characters? We already have one for Player Character, one for GM Character, etc. This would just be a "Deceased" check box and a third stratification on the actual page. 



It would go a long way towards helping to organize campaigns and not have to search through pages upon pages of characters to find one that might be dead. Even alphebetized, the NPC lists can get very long. Anyway, just a thought. 

Vanillabean

Hey Jasonvey! Thanks for the suggestion- that's interesting, and I can see why that would be potentially useful! I can't give you any guarantees on if and when we might implement, but I can tell you that we've definitely taken note of your suggestions! :)

thaen

One option for this is to create a "Deceased" tag.  Then you can use the Character Filters Deceased tag checkbox to show just the Deceased Characters.

Some of the Ascendant Campaigns will also pair a tag like Deceased with some Custom CSS to show those tagged Character tiles as dimmed or bloodstained.

 

GamingMegaverse

I did this through wiki organisation (organization) by making the characters page a wiki page  https://a-god-rebuilt.obsidianportal.com/wikis/performers

thaen

Something else you can do ...

When you click a filter on Characters, it updates the url in the browser, so that you can use that same url to auto-check those filters when someone visits that url.

Then, you can combine those urls with the Custom Navigation and have links in your navigation that go to specifically filtered Character pages.

Here's an example of a Campaign that's doing this:

https://inovertheirheads.obsidianportal.com/

Players, Comrades, Officers, etc are all filtered versions of the Character page.

jasonvey

Hi, all,

All great workarounds in the meanwhile. I hope the team, however, lets us actually have a Deceased section on the main characters page. I just feel like it'd be a handy feature. 

Thanks!

 

Abersade

As a further enhancement I would like to be able to specify what the title of the group is, depending on the game maybe I need a section for monsters instead of a group for deceased NPCs, or for a specific set of NPCs, etc.

Teh_DM

I came to forums to suggest just the same thing.

twiggyleaf

I can see why some people would want this sort of section in the Wiki, although, I myself am quite happy using the filters (similar to GamingMegaverse) in which I just have the dead characters named as "deceased" in their description, and added the filter "DEAD".

      See Example Here

For me, I don't think my players really care too much about the DEAD characters, so it would not be important enough in my campaign to have a separate section, but I can understand how it might be more important for other campaigns.

 

ElMuggs

I agree being able to flag a character as 'dead' is a very useful feature! But moreso we need ways to 'group' characters on the character screen by more then just PC/NPC as my list is already getting very long and the tag's don't automatically filter by character?

It would be awesome if we could group characters into 'parties' rather then just having them split by PC/NPC - as in many campaigns (like mine) there is more then one 'main' group of PC's and the players often have NPC's as part of their group - such as summons, NPC allies and pets? 

For NPC's it would be nice to be able to split your 'minor NPC' who showed up for a session or two then died - from your BBEGs who have a bigger role in the story.

twiggyleaf

I agree with you, @ElMuggs that it would be neat to have sorting done in terms of PC groups, rather than just a distinguishing between NPCs and PCs.

Keryth987

@Twiggyleaf

@thaen

Stupid question probably, but how do you get those additional Filters?

And since Thaen used the one page as an example, how EXACTLY do you do what is on that In Over Their Heads page?

thaen

@Keryth987

https://inovertheirheads.obsidianportal.com/characters?filters=tag_Comrade

See the "tag_Comrade" on there?

If you go to that page, you'll see that all of the Characters have been filtered to only ones tagged with "Comrade".

So, for all of the Characters that you want to include on a specific page, you add a tag to each of those Characters.  For example, "Deceased".

Then, you go to the normal Characters page, and expand the Filters section, and click the "Deaceased" checkbox.  This will filter to only the Characters that have the "Deceased" tag AND it will update the url in your browser to have "?tag_Deceased" on it. 

You can now copy that url, and every time anyone goes to that url, it will automatically filter by "Deceased" tagged Characters.

Then, you can take that url, and create an additional menu item in your Custom Navigation and use that url as the url for that menu item.

And then repeat that for as many different collections of Characters as you want to have in the navigation.

 

twiggyleaf

thaen

Just added a slight update to this "filter by url" feature.  It now adds a body level CSS class to the page  for each filter that you INITIALLY visit the page with.

So, if you wanted, you could style a page, like the DEAD page with gloomy colors.

Or, instead of using Custom JavaScript, you could have CSS that hides the Character Quick Search panel completely if the page is visited with a "filtered url".

Dungeon_Master_Loki

Love the idea. I appreciate the workarounds, but most of them require more spare time / code knowledge than I have and my life is insanely busy. 

My Spelljoined campaign has been around long enough to celebrate the ten year anniversary of getting Campaign of the Year. There are as many dead and departed characters as there are living participants. The ability to create sectioning beyond PC/NPC would be magnificently helpful. If it can be user defined titles even better. 

Thanks again for the workarounds, but I am a LOUD proponent of this. 

NimrodYanai

I have been using tags to indicate the status of NPCs.

Dead NPCs simply get the "Dead" tag, so it's very easy to filter or search for them (just write "Dead" in the search bar and you'll see all of your dead characters).



In general, the tags are great. Easy to use and make it very easy to search later on.