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Create categories for NPCs
It's great that you can separate PC characters from NPC characters. But I would love to create a category/header for my NPCs to keep them organized for the players from the main character page view. Thank you!
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Can you give some examples of how you would use this? Would the Characters (PCs or NPCs) be in more than one Category?
I've seen GMs create wiki pages with lists of PCs/NPCs as "guilds" or "groups".
Another option is to use "tags" and tag all the NPCs/PCs as a particular group/category. Then you can use the search to find only those Characters.
And lastly, if you just want to have the NPCs sort in groups differently on the Characters page, there's a hack that some GMs use where they put spaces in front of the Character's name. Characters with no spaces will be grouped together, then 1 space will be grouped, then 2 spaces, etc. The spaces are ignored by the HTML/display, so no one sees them in the pages (except in the Edit as you would expect), but the spaces are not ignored by the sorting.
Obsidian Portal Developer
I can see separating whole categories for families, guilds, factions, allies, etc.. tags are good for searching, and you can use the spacing trick in front of names, but it would be nice to see the actual separation by title instead of having to look for the tiny tag. Especially since you can't edit tags or that child group with CSS
I think I would put it this way. Once you have a bunch of characters in there, when you first load the page, it's just a big jumbled mess. Tags are useful here sort of like a machete going through the jungle, but maybe if it didn't start as an impenetrable jungle you wouldn't need to start swinging that machete.
The big limitation of tags is the same as their advantage. They are totally unstructured. You can do anything, but that means any given fact may or may not be tagged, and may or may not be tagged in a consistent fashion. Especially if you have a couple players adding characters, the tags are going to be utterly inconsistent.
That makes sense on the tags not being a great solution.
My concern is that the next request is going to be to have a Character show up in multiple Sections or Categories.
For example, say there's a "Nightblades Guild" section, and one of the PCs is actually a member of the Guild, so then for correctness/completeness, we want the PC to show up in the "PCs" section and then also in the "Nightblades Guild" section. And programmatically, that's possible, but it requires some UI to allow the GM/Players to choose which sections a Character is in and ways to add/delete/edit the section names. But then we're basically recreating the Wiki organizing ability inside of the Characters page. So it seems like the Wiki is already the solution for grouping particular Characters together. Whereas the Characters page is really just meant to be an "index" of all the Characters in one place.
So I'm wondering what is missing from the Wiki that makes the Characters page seem like it should be the place to do these groupings?
Do we need a wiki page template that displays Characters in a Wiki page the same way they are displayed on the Characters page?
Do we need a Custom Navigation Menu Item that points directly to the Wiki Guilds/Organizations page?
Thoughts?
Obsidian Portal Developer
Hi all,
I wonder if this might not be implemented (at least as a workaround) using the backlinks feature requested here.
You could then create a page for a group (Guild, organization, location, etc.) and when you add a link for that page to a character, it would automagically appear on the group page. You could even create higher level index pages (e.g. A Guilds page or a Locations page), and add a link "Locations" or "Guilds" to each location or guild - at that point those would show up on their index pages.
Just my $.02
Great suggestion @ragnarhawk!
Obsidian Portal Developer
I agree with Ragnarhawk- that is a better workaround that avoids the troubles that Thaen brought up.
Just trying to help out.
I like this idea, and it shouldn't even be that difficult to implement.
Right now, the characters show up in alphabetical order, which is fine.
All you really need to do is add a sorting option based on tags.
This will solve both issues: the tags can be used as the groups that they want, AND it will allow characters to show up in multiple groups at once.
@NimrodYanai, I'm not sure I'm following.
Where would the sorting option be? Under the "Character Quick Search"?
And how would the "headings" for each section be defined...just based off converting the tag to a capitalized version?
Currently, it's already possible to "filter" by tags on the Characters page. So, this kind of seems like it's already available...just not all on the page at the same time. Feel free to point out if I'm missing something or how that doesn't meet the need here.
Obsidian Portal Developer
No, I think you have it right. It will just be a drop down menu above the characters where you can choose to sort via name or tag.
This kind of functionality can actually be helpful for future updates.
For example, if one day you will add a "race/origin/class/whatever" field to the characters page, you could add this to the sort function as well.