Micah
We've just released (2010-01-18) a large batch of changes to the way characters are handled. Essentially, it's no longer possible to create a character separate from a campaign. Just like a wiki page or adventure log post, characters are now integral to campaigns.
*To Make A Character*
Go to the "Characters" tab in one of your campaigns and click on the "Create New Character" button. Easy to do, even if it is different from before.
If you'd like to know more, read "the full description on our blog.":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/?p=13
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Comments
Our goal is that by doing this we'll be able to enhance the characters and make them easier to work with. No specific details for now, but stay tuned.
Certain features are very difficult to do if a single character is in multiple campaigns. A perfect example is the "GM only" section that exists on a character. It's actually a very simple feature, technically. However, it would have to be much more complex in order to support multiple campaigns. Another example is privacy/visibility. The characters had their own settings, and most people found this confusing. To most people, if the campaign is private, then the characters in it should be as well. They were often surprised to find that their characters were public even though the campaign was private. Once we simplified things to the current setup, it's much easier. There are no strange cases where a character exists in both a public and private campaign.
There are other examples too. The main point is that for the vast majority of people, characters belong to a single campaign. We wanted to simplify things to support this overwhelming majority of cases. It's a case of power vs simplicity, and we chose simplicity.
Still, we understand the desire to keep characters across multiple campaigns, and we're working on some ways to make characters more mobile, and allow them to be moved from one campaign to another, or to clone a character and place them in a different campaign.