L4W Discussion Thread III

[ryryguy]

Regarding using the character builder for approvals... Besides the logistical difficulties regarding who has what version and so on, there are other reasons to avoid relying on it too much. For one thing, there's no guarantee that it will be freely available indefinitely. WotC could decide to yank it at any time, and if we've built our approval system around it, game over. For another, we already have some house rules, e.g. how we handle battlerage vigor, that aren't present in the character builder. Finally, and IMO this shouldn't be underestimated, a manually written-out character sheet makes you much more familiar with the mechanics of your character than a programmatically generated one. L4W characters are intended to last a long, long time; you should know how yours works.

Those are some good points... I could quibble with a few, but if the people who are doing the character judging don't think it would work out, then that seems definitive. It seems like it would not do any harm to put the character builder summary output into a character's wiki page, though, in case a judge did find it helpful. If not, it could just be ignored.

Also, I'm still wondering about editing the wiki and wiki organization. I'd be happy to start trying to add some useful tags if no one objects. Is there a better place for that discussion? I'd think maybe one of the wiki Talk pages but those seem rather neglected...

 

[Lord Sessadore]

Honestly, I'd say the best place for discussion about the wiki would either be in this thread, or in a new thread in the L4W forum. As Joe mentioned earlier, it has been discussed and planned before, but never happened.

It was then and I'll say it again now - if you want to reorganize the wiki a bit so it's more useful and easier to navigate, by all means go ahead! The wiki is intended to be a community resource, maintained by and for the community. And it definitely could use reorganizing

 

[Erekose13]

Erekose13 would be the one to ask as he did a lot of work on them.

You've got it Lord S. When editing a saved character sheet you can see links to the templates used. Instructions on each template are available at the top of each template.

As for re-writing them to be easier, go for it. I don't have time now to work on that myself. I've wanted to get it so that you only answer specific questions and it does all the calculations. No more putting in your Dex Mod 12 times, just enter how much point buy you spend on it and it'll fill in the rest. But I'm afraid programming time is taking a back seat for a while.

 

[JoeNotCharles]

Maybe it's heresy to suggest it, but I think we should move the wiki to a different site. enworld is just too overloaded, and there's nothing saying the forums and the wiki need to be in the same place.

 

[ryryguy]

I added a category tag to all the templates I could find (all the ones used on my character page):

Category:L4W Template - ENWiki

somewhat, I did this to see how the categories work and how hard it would be to tag a bunch of pages. And yes, the wiki is pretty slow, no batch editing, going through a number of pages is painful.

however, I will still try to add some categories to the setting material eventually! Just may need a little asprin...

 

[covaithe]

Maybe it's heresy to suggest it, but I think we should move the wiki to a different site. enworld is just too overloaded, and there's nothing saying the forums and the wiki need to be in the same place.

I've certainly considered this. I haven't done anything more than think about it, mostly because it sounds like a fair amount of work in its own right to find a suitable site and do the actual moving. For one thing, we'd really want to keep using the same wiki software we're using now, since we've done a nontrivial amount of work to get the formatting nice. For another, we'd have to think about things like history, existing "perma"-links, and so forth. It's not impossible, and it might well be worth it, but it's not a simple job.

 

[ryryguy]

I added the category "L4W Setting" to all the setting pages I could find. Oh, so much fun!

Category:L4W Setting - ENWiki

Also a "category bar" template that I stuck at the top of a number of pages, including that setting category page itself. So far I only put one page in the "Gods" category and nothing yet in the "Organizations" category. Hopefully this will help get things rolling.

It would be easier to categorize things if they were broken up a bit more and possibly included in other pages for easy reference. For example, each of the Daunton NPCs could have their own separate page, each tagged with an "NPC" category and then imported or transduced or whatever back into the Daunton page. So you could still read the entries from the Daunton page, but the NPC category would automatically generate a list of all NPCs (not just from Daunton).

I'm not sure if it's worth the work to do that sort of thing. Probably not, but if those who use the wiki think it would help them out, perhaps so. (Also, I wish I knew how it would impact performance of the wiki. Probably low impact on editing, but displaying the imported stuff in the Daunton page might be slower?)

 

[renau1g]

FYI, for those interested, I've opened up my first adventure here on L4W. I'll try to post every day, excluding weekends, but it might be closer to 2 times every 3 days, as I go into my busiest time of year at work.

 

[Lord Sessadore]

I'm not sure that the wiki would allow you to import the content of other pages, though if it does that's some neat functionality. I would venture that a page with imported content would load slower than a normal page, simply because it would probably require the page to be built on the fly from all of the referenced pages, rather than being able to be stored in presentation form.

@renau, is your adventure for 5 or 6 characters?

 

[covaithe]

Who's up in the judging rotation, to take renau1g's game? I can do it, but every time I volunteer to judge a game recently, someone else jumps up and wants to do it. Which is fine; I just don't want to step on anyone's toes if they're all excited to do this.