Quick Survey

[Callum]

I currently use a ProBoards forum for my campaigns, but I'd certainly look at using Obsidian Portal instead if it was linked to Fantasy Grounds. As Blacky noted, these services can't be depended on, though. We lost many years' worth of data held on a Forumer board we were using previously when that shut down without warning.

[Valarian]

The facetious answer: What's Obsidian Portal?
Yes, I know I could Google it and go and look. I'm guessing some sort of campaign/group/faction management, like you get for the MMO market.

I just use a Google group to organise games, with Google calendar and Drive folders shared with the group.

[Blacky]

Free forum farms are one of the worse yeah. Especially since they can generate a whole lot of data (years and years of exchanges between friends, family, etc.) that goes down the drain because of a change in price, because the company goes under (or over) or is bought, or just because of a technical issue and bad backup.

Wordpress.com (beside Autmattic being quite serious guys, on the technical and admin side of things) does it right. In one click you get all your data in a nice package to download. Nobody is locked in. Anybody can backup their own data this way.

Re-reading my post, it wasn't the clearest written message ever

So, to sum it up. I think a lot of Fantasy Grounds GM aren't geek enough or don't have the time to do this themselves, and could be at least potentially interested in online services (what ignorant people nowadays call “cloud”, don't get me started on this). And it would be a way for SmiteWorks to generate more income, and monthly (or quarterly, or yearly) income at that.

One service could be what's discussed here, meaning a dedicated website for a campaign. Media (images, maps and such) hosting, articles, and yes data (as in characters, notes, campaign stories, etc.) from FG itself.

Another one would be offline (as in off FG, outside FG) talks. Basically meaning forums dedicated to a campaign. Some groups won't use it much, other will do quite heavily. I know several campaigns (or gaming groups) that spend more time gaming outside the gaming table (Amber or Vampire being perfect example, you play what's public around the gaming table, but spend a lot of time outside of it alone with the GM trying to get over one another ). Those two could be set up as public, private, or both. For example a global forum for group talks, and one subforum per player for vicious backstabbing alone with the GM; same for the website some public pages, some privates for the gaming group, and some restricted to one player or the the GM only.

Last idea was backup. It needs to be well thought because of upload bandwith issue, but having FG (for example) automatically save online a campaign (the whole campaign, maybe even ruleset, extensions, modules) to avoid the epic fail of losing a 5 years campaign because of a technical glitch, or allowing people to move from computer to computer and download their entire campaign in one click (kinda like Steam does it with your games) could help people. Especially if there's a history, meaning the GM could go back not only to the last backup but the one from 3 days, a week, a month ago, and so on (up to a point, obviously).

Again, not everyone; for one I don't think I would be interested in such offer… I do my own backup, set up my own websites and forums and mailing list, etc. But I do believe some (if not most) people either can't, think they can't, or can but don't want to be bothered doing this.

Even if priced quite fairly, this could add some butter for SmiteWorks. And generating some money each month would help I guess, since they make money only when they sell software (or extension), meaning only one time.

From the technical side of things, it won't happen just by wishing it, but it's not that big a deal. I believe the website can be done on top of a wiki software (it handle article, pages, and medias, and could hold data formatted from FG), the talks with a forum software, and the backup either on top of a rsync like software or as custom code but it's not horrible to write (although it needs good design, meaning thinking on it first on a blank sheet of paper, to handle connexion issues and small upload bandwith issues).

For example I know that Dokuwiki works for it, being a pretty good wiki software with access management (meaning pages and/or namespaces can be restricted to some users) and can be set up as a farm (meaning one install to serve hundreds or thousands of wikis). FluxBB is one very lightweight (and fast) forum software that has being set up (by a private party, code not released but shouldn't cost much) at least once or twice as a farm. This would do the bulk of the job, still needing a coder to integrate everything with a single common login (Dokuwiki being good at that kind of external auth), coding the shop and payments side of things, coding the server and the client backup thing, an admin to set up the appropriate server, updates and backup processes, and maybe a designer to visually integrate it all (but cleanly, to help reduce the maintenance cost along the way). And it would need some service client to handle payments mishaps, questions, troubles, and so one but such client service would mainly be for paying customer so it shouldn't be an issue. Reusing existing tool has also the advantage of said tools being i18n ready (utf-8, and having a lot of locale and translations already in them); I know i18n isn't a priority for SmiteWorks but some day you'll need to expand here to grow (or survive), it's always good to be ready. Another advantage is that the data format is reusable, meaning giving people their own data would be easy, it's just a zip of the files and a sql dump and they can set up their own dokuwiki, fluxbb (or whatever, mediawiki, vbulletin, whatever) and import those on.

Online tools like these could also in the future link to new FG features. I'm thinking for example of the external media loading (loading a map/image from an URL, and not from the GM hard drive) from the FG wish list.

And the good thing is that it can be a separate project. It has (apart from FG code to link it to online things, that can come later on) no impact on FG, and could be done by someone other than the current 3 SmiteWorks people.

This kind of things maybe make more sense, from a money point of view than investing JPG time into coding for an external website with no income associated. And this way JPG can stay on FG itself, looking at tocken stacking, map text laber and user ping and such

This kind of things could also help the marketing. People would link to their SmiteWorks hosted campaign in various forums, and basically leave a trace, a mark of their campaign online (and in Google for the public parts and pages), each one of those trace being played on Fantasy Grounds. It's not the main advantage, but it's probably a small plus. Hell, if these tools are really good, I'm guessing some people not using FG could be interested, and in any cases it's also a good excuse to send press release to various websites and magazines, and have them talk about Fantasy Grounds

[Valarian]

I like the ideas that Blacky and damned have posted for a Smiteworks developed & run campaign portal as a subscription service. I'd be willing to part with $5 to $10 a month to have this functionality.

What I'd like from it would be a method to upload my db.xml and chatlog.xml file after a session. For the portal to parse my db.xml and present the latest character information (could be easily done if the ruleset provides an XSL file for the XML to HTML translation).

Also, to parse the chatlog and add the latest session to the portal for editing (would need a "loaded" and "edited" indicator to avoid older chat log entries overwriting ones that have already been loaded/edited on the portal, based on the chatlog started date/time).

I'd also want a game session calendar.

[dulux-oz]

For what its worth, I think damned and Blacky's ideas are the way to go as well.

Cheers

[Mellock]

I use a Small Machines Forum, which is sufficient for the small game I'm in. I've tinkered with PMwiki for my own games, but decided a simple self-made site was sufficient.

[ddavison]

Great ideas, guys. Blacky, Damned and Valarian <-- all great ideas.

It would make sense to have a third party do that development but make it something in-house, as suggested. Uploading and auto-parsing the db.xml and presenting everything pre-parsed out into different areas of the online campaign manager would be neat. Then, perhaps the GM could further edit those auto-generated entries and mark them as public, shared or private. I'm visualizing that if you already have a story entry with boxed text, a link to an NPC or encounter and a link to a map or image, you could have it rendered that as in-line HTML and/or in Wiki format. The translation wouldn't be too difficult in that case. We'd have to see how that would look as opposed to sharing only a scrubbed version of the chat log.

Stories are more ruleset agnostic. The chat log can be rendered in a stylized text format and perhaps customized further for each ruleset.

[viresanimi]

Obsidian Portal?

I guess that was my answer...

[Blahness98]

When I ran my Dragonlance game, I used a proboard. Still have that all achieved on the board itself along with the first version of the board. It worked for my group as they liked to RP outside of FG.

[Mgrancey]

Mostly goes unused as players had very low involvement and participation, so haven't used in a while. Will probably download campaigns close the ones Ihave open.