Pen & Paper Games and Obsidian Portal Team Up

[Farcaster]

It pleases me to announce that Pen & Paper Games and Obsidian Portal have teamed up to make it much easier for gamers to find each other. For those of you who may not have visited before, Obsidian Portal is an awesome site that allows you to not only chronicle your campaign, but manage the minutia that often gets lost in endless game notes, including managing information about your campaign’s NPCs, items, and maps! All of this is done in a wiki style and is very slick. Obsidian additionally allows GMs to post their games on a google map to advertise for other players. And that is where the team-up comes in.

When searching the Player Registry, you will now also see any Obsidian Portal campaigns that are in your search area that are currently looking for players. As you can see on the map above, Obsidian Portal campaigns are marked with a black marker on the map. Clicking on the marker will provide you with a link to the campaign and to the OP profile of the person who posted it. You will also find a list of the campaigns just below the player registry. Following the link from the Google Map or the list will take you to the Obsidian Portal website where you can make contact with the Game Master by clicking on the “Want to Join?” link on the right hand navigation bar under the party section.

Additionally, Obsidian Portal members will now be able to search the P&PG Player Registry from directly within Obsidian Portal. GMs who have created a campaign there can go into the Member Management area for their campaign and will have a new option to search for P&PG who are currently looking for a group. (Note: To be listed on Obsidian Portal, you must be set to opt-in to share your profile with third-parties on the Lonely Gamer Network.)

I am very excited about these new features as they greatly enhance both our Player Registry and Obsidian Portal’s campaign tools, and make it even easier for Pen & Paper Games members to find a game. I don’t know of there could have been a better match.

Below I have attached Obsidian Portal’s and P&PG’s joint press release. And, as always, any feedback on ways that we could improve these new features is greatly appreciated and welcome.

Obsidian Portal, the leader in tabletop RPG campaign management, and Pen & Paper Games, the leader in tabletop player matching, have teamed up to make it much easier for gamers to find each other.

This partnership, termed "The Lonely Gamer Network," means that participating Obsidian Portal campaigns are now part of the Pen & Paper Games search results, and likewise, Pen & Paper Games searching is available directly from inside Obsidian Portal. For gamers searching for each other, the pool of prospects just got a lot bigger.

Taking advantage of the new features is easy. Pen & Paper Games members should verify that their privacy options are set to be included in the Lonely Gamer Network by logging in and setting their preferences in the User CP > Edit Options section. Obsidian Portal members need to update their campaigns, making sure they are set to public, and that the two boxes are checked for Looking for Players and Publish. Within minutes, the Pen & Paper Games profile or Obsidian Portal campaign will show up in the search results on the other site, making it much more visible to anyone who is looking for a campaign to join or a new player to recruit.

For those who are a member of neither site, joining up is simple. For individual gamers who need a game to join, singing up on Pen & Paper Games is a great first step. You'll have access to their entire player registry, plus all the participating Obsidian Portal campaigns. Likewise, for anyone with an existing group looking for new players, creating a campaign on Obsidian Portal is the way to go. In addition, to celebrate the inauguration of the Lonely Gamer Network, Obsidian Portal is giving a bonus to anyone who signs up with the promo code "lonelygamer".

Both Obsidian Portal and Pen & Paper Games benefit greatly from teaming up, and both sides are always looking for new ways to make life easier for tabletop gamers.

Contacts: Micah Wedemeyer
Co-Founder, Obsidian Portal
http://www.obsidianportal.com
biz@obsidianportal.com

Robert A. Howard
Founder, Pen & Paper Games
http://www.penandpapergames.com
gm@penandpapergames.com

[templeorder]

I think there needs to be more visibility of each on the other. I really like obsidian portal for what it is, and same for PnPg but i see soo little mention of each on the other's site.

[ronpyatt]

Obsidian Portal has online character sheet templates where you can store your characters for the system you are gaming in.

It's still in beta, but a few sheets have already been added to the list: AD&D 2nd Ed, Exalted, WoD, HERO, and others are on the way. If you know CSS and HTML, you might even be able to help in creating a few templates.

For example, my Champions character, Oni.

[tesral]

Can you download the sheet to your computer, or is it "stored" only on theirs? Vital difference.

I'm a bit disappointed. the bio was blank except for the picture. The raw stats do not a character make, it's the back story that matters.

[ronpyatt]

Encouragement. LOL, t!

But seriously, the sheets are web templates for the Obsidian Portal website. They already had the ability to store your character on their site, but now more fields and displays are possible. The characters are stored on the Obsidian Portal server, or rather the character field data are stored on their server, and if you don't like the template sheet I made, use someone else's or make your own filled in with your own bio and all the sunshinny back story you like. The layout is separate from the character data. The beauty of this is that the character fields can be used in other template sheets for the chosen game. This means you can change your character's sheet to a different template and that character data will transfer to the new sheet. Again, these are editable Online Character Sheets, custom designed templates available for others to use on the Obsidian Portal website, which allows users to type in their own editable character fields.

[tesral]

I understood all of those words. But not all of them in the order given.

The question remains. Can I download the editable sheet, be it spreadsheet, word processor or what ever to my computer and store it there?

I recall, last year I believe, some character storing site went away, and the characters so stored did too. There was much wailing, nashing of teeth, and wallowing in sackcloth and ashes. Be as it may how wonderful Obsidian Portal is; shit happens. Data not on your computer is not your data.

I've used character building sites. I whomped up eight d20 Modern characters for the recent World Steam Expo on such a site. Nothing against the concept, if and only if it doesn't hoard your character data or gives it to you only in an uneditable format, like PDF.

[templeorder]

The "character sheets" are not even that, they are just layout templates that format and organize character data. Its more complicated than Word - and if you need it that simple, then use Open Office or Word on your local system and upload/store on Office Live or google docs or something similar. This is all about OP integration. For OP, you can save the web page your character displays in as a backup. They do have a "campaign backup" function though. Yes "shit happens" - it happens on your local drive too. As with EVERYTHING digital, make backups - be it a running backup job, "File... > Copy..." manually, or "Save As..." manually every so often...

I've been using OP and love it. The maps, log, wiki, etc. for campaigns are great. As a character storage mechanism, i've seen better (but always specialized or emphasized for one system or another - theirs is for all). However, the new "character sheets" make things look nicer on their site and go a ways in dealing with that deficiency.

[tesral]

The three most important words in computing. Backup, backup, backup.

Mine runs daily at 5 AM.

[RoleMaster91]

I'm still iffy on using OP for anything. On the one hand, I like having things very organized. On the other, I don't particularly like their display. I feel like they complicated everything for no reason. They also don't have a lot of support for people that want to use custom rapid prototype figures or mini's in their games. Plus, I also don't want everyone at the table with a computer...

[Dark]

Agreed simple is somtimes better.