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GM-Only NPC Tags?
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_Cold Blood_ has just over 50 public NPCs at the moment, and I use the tags to keep them organized. However, most of them have something to hide. So, if there's one that the PCs haven't exposed as an Anarchist (for example), it might help me to tag him with a _secret_ "Anarchist" tag so he'd show up among the other Anarchist NPCs, without showing my hand to the players.
Again, this may not be possible, but I hadn't seen it discussed before, so I thought I'd run it up the flagpole.
Thanks, I should have clarified what I was talking about. This would be putting "private" tags on "public" NPCs.
For example, "here":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/cold-blood/npc-tracker/Illuminated is a list of public NPCs with the "Illuminated" tag.
Now, "Lissandra":http://www.obsidianportal.com/game_contents/show/lissandra is NOT an Illuminated agent, but let's suppose that she _was,_ and that the PCs hadn't figured that out yet. What I'd like to do in such cases is put an "Illuminated" tag on her that only I could see.
I like to create NPC pages as soon as the players learn about them, to provide a space where they can reference whatever information they've gained about those characters. After all, now I have the option to put their stats in the GM-only field until they've been encountered, and preferably defeated. This would just give me another method for managing campaign secrets.
On another note, I'm trying to rethink some of the tag-based browsing to make it friendlier (like the recent redesign of the NPC page), and it's good to know that people are actually using the tags. Their one of my favorite features, but then again, I'm a big Web 2.0 nut for sites like "del.icio.us":http://del.icio.us/ and such.
I'd also be cool to associate NPCs and PCs in the same page -- both all together and when sorted by specific tags. I definately would like to see such changes.
Thanks, that's what I meant to say in the first place.
h3. Add PCs to the list of NPCs
This is a good idea, and I've been thinking about it for a while. I'd like to change the name of the "NPC Tracker" to just something like "Characters" and have the PCs in there. They would need to be set-apart somehow, as has been mentioned. Honestly, this shouldn't be too hard, except for figuring out a way to make it look good.
Also, they would be filterable with tags, just like the rest of the NPCs.
h3. GM-only tags
Also a good idea, but harder to do. Sounds very useful, so I'll try to puzzle out a way of doing it. However, don't look for it anytime soon.
I wish I could hide tags from players, too. I know Micah said not to look for it anytime soon, but it's been a bit. Any progress, or is it already done or have another work around I'm just missing?
Thank you.
Type the tags in the "GM-only" section. Then you can search them using google, but restrict the search to the characters directory of your campaign. For example, type this into the google search box to search for all elves in my campaign:
elf site:http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/saga-of-jaraah/characters
If players do this search, they will be able to see the results, but they won't be able to see the information. For example, they'll know all of the characters tagged with elf (in the above example), but they still won't be able to see the GM only section. This isn't perfect. If they wanted to, they could still find things out, but they wouldn't accidentally stumble onto the information. You could also mis-spell the tags to throw them off.
"kenurion":http://www.obsidianportal.com/profile/kenurion
"Saga of Jaraah":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/saga-of-jaraah
"Compendium of PbP and On-Line Campaigns":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/compendium-of-pbp-on-line-campaigns
~Weasel0
A Parade of Black | ShadowRunHack |
Where I play with CSS code
_~Mae_
_Player of_ "Outremer":https://outremer.obsidianportal.com/
~Mae
CotM Selection Committee
Data driven:
A place where you can actually edit all the tags you have (I can't find such a place at the moment) that can be in settings or whatever. You'd have two spots - normal tags, and GM tags. You could add things to the GM tags. GMs would pull from both lists in all cases, Players would only pull from the first.
Convention driven:
Putting "GM-" in the front of a tag would cause it to not show up for the players. This isn't necessarily "clean" but it's a convention that's been used for web development forever haha. Also it seems like it require the least amount of back end work.
But otherwise, yeah, without this feature it's basically impossible to tag NPCs that are secret. Not only because you can't put "SecretlyACultist" as a tag, but you can't even put "SecretTagA" because then the players automatically know that everyone connected to SecretTagA are together. (And once they expose one, they basically know them all.)
So, yeah you can't tag any NPC for any mystery if players can see all tags, without giving away (possibly crucial) information to the players.
I mean, yes, you can put it in the GM only section, but unless that's searched on, which it doesn't seem like, that makes it useless in a search sense. Same with Wiki pages. I can't then connect a location to like "SecretTagA" because then they'll know, "Well, that's their headquarters."
So yeah, secrets cannot be searched, filtered, or sorted with public only tags. And uh ... this has been requested now and again for uh ... six years now. Any idea where it might be in the queue?