Comments

• 

  Yergi

  Posts: 6 May 2009

  It would be great to have better control over how NPCs are presented in the NPC Tracker section. The ability to organize them under different headers/subheaders or something similar. This way my players could more easily find pertinent NPCs and get more info on them at a quick glance, based on how they've been organized.
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  RobJustice

  Posts: 178 May 2009

  YES! AGREED!
  
  I currently augment my PC's names to sort them. (ZZZ- DEAD - NAME for example)
• 

  stumblewyk

  Posts: 21 May 2009

  Why not just tag them "Dead", or the like? You can attach as many tags as you want, and that makes it really easy to sort them by the related tags.
• 

  bevinflannery

  Posts: 114 May 2009

  DrummingDM is right - the tag system can be used quite easily for your players to find characters. For example, the NPCs in "my campaign":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker have tags that will help them find everyone who is "dead":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker/dead or is friendly enough to be an "ally":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker/Ally the PCs can rely upon to be helpful, versus who is merely "friendly":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker/friendly or answer the question of "who is related to Cassick":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker/Cassick or "Boeden":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker/Boeden or "who do we know in that city?":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker/Halveet or "who were the people killed in the sea caves?":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/rubies/npc-tracker/seacaves
• 

  RobJustice

  Posts: 178 May 2009

  Because tagging them dead means they still show up in alphabetical order on the list, I don't want my dead NPCs mixed in with my living NPCs. And for that matter I don't want my Kindred mixed with my Awakened with my Mortals. Yes, I can sort them out by a single tag but I have a few issues with it. Its slow, I have to reload the entire page just to find out who's in the Lancea Sanctum and now if I want to go look at the Circle of the Crone I have to wait again. Like Yergi said, it helps to figure things out at a glance. Allowing top-level orginization lets me load my NPCs in a better order then simply alphabetical. Then there is the issue of looking up multiple tags. I've ran a few games where the NPC list gets into the three-four hundreds. When I want to look up all the Gangrel in the Carthian Movement I have to pick one tag and manually search for the rest. If I could have my NPCs organized by Covenant I'd be able to filter my tags by Gangrel and then scroll down to my Carthian Movement section. Then back to my example of Dead NPCs. Personally, I want them at the end of my list. See, I run a lot of Vampire: The Requiem (if you couldn't tell) and sometimes Dead doesn't mean permanent. So while I still want them on the tracker since people still talk about them I want them as a lower priority then the people you have to deal with nightly.
  
  Plus, I see this as a tie-in/expansion of the tagging system. The logical next step for easier use. Allowing us to sort and create headers by Tags is all I really want. With a site thats designed to easy the storage and reference of my gaming material is it to much to ask for a little more organization? Honestly, I've thought about creating an NPC Tracker on my wiki to link back to the actual NPC tracker, in order to sort in any damn way I please, but thats a lot of damned work and constant tinkering.
• 

  Finn_Quill

  Posts: 11 May 2009

  "I would actually like this, too. I plan on running multiple campaigns in the same world, and building a new Wiki each time would be a pain. If I could organize characters by campaign without relying on tags, that'd be nice."
• 

  heratyk

  Posts: 3 July 2009

  I would also like to see the "Quick Description" field displayed for each NPC in the tracker. Tags are great, but also having a one-line description next to their name & picture would be even more useful.
• 

  Figment

  Posts: 132 July 2009

  That's a great idea to add the quick description to the NPC Tracker page. I second that motion!
• 

  farrago

  Posts: 4 August 2009

  I think this would be a great addition, and I'm all for it.
  
  Meanwhile... one thing I have done to help track factions is come up with a "portrait" image that is essentially heraldry for that faction. So all member of a faction get the same "potrait", which is then clearly visible in the NPC list. I've been thinking about doing halved/quartered icons for people in multiple factions, or a skull overlay for dead people, but I haven't quite got that far yet.
  
  Anyway, see what you think here: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/betrayers/npc-tracker
• krank

  Posts: 16 August 2009

  I'm generally an an enemy of all things tagged, since I think it's simply feels more disorganized than a simple hierarchal system, but in this case I think it works.
  
  What I'd like is the ability to show npc's as a simple list or table; the portraits take up way too much space and it's hard to get any kind of overview. A "simple list" view option would be great! Even better if it could be like the "detailed" view of, say explorer - like, a small (16x16 or so) iconized version of the portrait, then name, and a horizontal list of tags.