What's so great about Obsidian Portal?

blalien · 15th June 2009, 08:02 PM

I set up an account to try and digitize my campaign. As far as I can tell, OP doesn't do anything a regular wiki doesn't do. It has the adventure log and NPC tracker, but that's pretty easy to implement. Is there some crazy feature I'm not seeing here? It seems to me that OP is only worthwhile if you have no capacity for scripting whatsoever or you're interested in the greater community.

MicahWedemeyer · 17th June 2009, 10:23 PM

While you're right that a regular wiki can do most (not all) of what OP offers, plus lots of stuff it doesn't, there are still plenty of reasons to use OP:

1) No setup - With OP, just create your campaign. No software to FTP to your server, no upgrading to the latest version every month, none of that.

2) GM-only info on every page. Any other wikis that have private and public stuff on the same page?

3) Adventure Log - It's a blog built right in, for tracking your adventure sessions.

4) NPC tracking - Manage your NPCs easily, keep some GM-only, and easily sort and filter based on tags.

There's even more I could go into. Yes, you could do much of this with a regular wiki, but then again, you could do it all with bare HTML as well. The point is, you don't *have* to. OP makes it easy on you.

Believe me, I tried all manner of wikis/blogs/whatevers and none did it right. So, I started building OP from scratch, and here we are today!

Bagpuss · 18th June 2009, 12:17 AM

Micah has covered a lot of what makes it great. However if you do know a bit about scripting and have the resources to set up your own wiki and blog and image hosting and forums, then there are some aspects that I might have done differently.

That's a pretty big however though. Most people don't either have the knowledge, time or resources to do all that themselves. And even if they did there is a good chance they might end up using several different sites to host things, lacking the unified look feel of the Obsidian Portal.

As it is you have all this stuff under one roof, perhaps it lacks some features and is a little tricky at first because it uses Textile, but really I've not come across anything that does most of what I want, without increase technical work on my part, meaning less time for creative work.

Oh and the community there is pretty good as well (I'm DMaple over there).

blalien · 19th June 2009, 06:50 AM

Oy, it's kind of awkward to criticize a program then have the program's creator shows up.

I did end up creating my own wiki, and yeah, the GM-only feature would be nice. Might I recommend that you streamline the NPC tracker and require fewer button clicks to change an NPC's name or tags? Better yet, offer the option to edit that page like a regular wiki, and add a code that does the fancy NPC formatting.

theshard · 20th June 2009, 06:43 AM

I just started using Obsidan Portal and so far it is great. Like a lot of other people, I work and go to school, DM a game, play in another game and still try to maintain a life. I can access OP from anywhere I have internet access and update information or look something up if my players have a question I don't know off the top of my head.