Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Buat_Atiras 04-10-07, 02:13 PM	...a Living Greyhawk character repository like the one they have for the Xen'Drik campaign? Could we ask WotC to create another one?
kenobi65 04-10-07, 02:32 PM	Because LG and Xen'drik are two different kinds of campaigns. LG was started before RPGA came up with the "D&D Campaigns" system (like Xen'drik), and still uses the older style system of having the player keep track of his character's advancement manually (which was used by all the RPGA campaigns before D&D Campaigns was developed). My understanding is that, with Xen'drik, the character record *is* your official character sheet -- until information from the games you play gets entered into the RPGA system, you don't get the credit for what you've played. This can be a problem if you play several adventures in rapid succession (i.e., at a convention), or if the event co-ordinator is tardy in entering the information for your event. And, there's a lot of stories about people whose information is mis-entered or just plain wrong. I think that the online character tracker is a good idea in theory, but it still has bugs to be worked out (and that's after 4 or so years of use). I think you'd find that a lot of LG players would violently oppose going to online character tracking.
solbergb 04-10-07, 02:42 PM	oh gads, please no. All I hear about those systems is how buggy they are, reporting characters as dead etc, and of course not giving credit for games played. Given that my rewards cards only have about 70% of total games played, I'll stick to the AR system, thanks. I also think the sheer volume we do compared to the other campaigns would crash and burn their website.
UMiskatonic 04-10-07, 03:26 PM	More to the point, why would we want one? I can't think of any benefits, and I can think of a lot of drawbacks. Maintaining a computer system also requires skilled computer people and expensive equipment. Keep track of my ARs requires a pen and 3rd grade arithmetic.
King Kashue 04-10-07, 03:45 PM	If you want a character tracker, go to Nyrond.org, the database there is amazing... As for a WotC database, they can't even figure out how to keep a forum running when it has a search function, what makes you think they can track 80,000+ characters? :D
Morgen 04-11-07, 12:41 AM	I'm violently opposed to an online character tracker!
haferka 04-11-07, 10:14 AM	I'm violently opposed to an online character tracker! I'm not. It gives the campaign leadership a more detailed view of the game. More data is ALWAYS a good thing. It allows a writter to look for an audience and create a story that centers around things that matter to them. If 90% of the PCs in a region are arcane casters.. and that region has "Laws" that would prevent those PCs from casting.. perhaps a series of mods could invove "witch hunts" and ultimatly allow the PCs to overthrow that local government for a more "arcane friendly" one. If the same series of mods were used in a region that had 1% arcane casters... the results would likely end in higher sanctions agains arcane casters.. discouraging PCs from playing them even more. Depending on what the local Triad wants.. both scenarios are viable.. but without a detailed look at what characters people have.. its just a guess (based on personal experience).
kenobi65 04-11-07, 11:19 AM	It gives the campaign leadership a more detailed view of the game. More data is ALWAYS a good thing. It allows a writter to look for an audience and create a story that centers around things that matter to them. I think that there's a difference between the purpose of what you're suggesting, and the actual function of the D&D Campaigns character tracker. There's a difference between a census (to help the campaign staff understand the character base) and a mandatory online tracker that doesn't always function properly, and hampers play of your character when it's not working correctly.
haferka 04-11-07, 01:16 PM	I think that there's a difference between the purpose of what you're suggesting, and the actual function of the D&D Campaigns character tracker. There's a difference between a census (to help the campaign staff understand the character base) and a mandatory online tracker that doesn't always function properly, and hampers play of your character when it's not working correctly. I agree. I would like to see a complete character tracker... which can be done on paper or on the web. that way people could participate as much or as little as possible. the nyrond site is great. but I would want the certs entered. after the mod is reported... you would have access to the digital copy of the cert. the paper document would still be the official record.
Mithrus 04-11-07, 02:10 PM	As a player, I'm fine with a WELL-DESIGNED, WELL-DOCUMENTED, EASY TO USE, BUG-FREE tracking system that is fully integrated with the rewards program. It should also be able to record when favors are used, and allow for GM comments per AR. Now, having said that, this is NOT a character tracker per se, but more like a character-AR-favor tracker. The main nicety of something like this is having the ability to see what favors are still available, without the headache of maintaining a paper list (which typically will change every AR). A character tracker that records classes, levels, meta-org association, and maybe feats would be ok for module research, but any more detail than that would be counter productive IMO. Maybe include a role descriptor (like used on warhorn) also. Having experience as a software engineer, I shudder at fulfilling my own requirements. The database would get enormous very quickly, and the bureaucracy involved in correcting data entry errors (which is completely impossible to eliminate) would be mind-numbing. It would also tie up the already busy schedule of the local Triads, since all ARs would also need to have a data record for each favor, and each favor would have to be entered with it's own specific data for use in the tracker.
King Kashue 04-11-07, 07:05 PM	the nyrond site is great. but I would want the certs entered. after the mod is reported... you would have access to the digital copy of the cert. the paper document would still be the official record. There is no way that's possible to handle that easily (I'd almost say at all), even for something like the Nyrond site, which only has about 5,000 of the roughly 80,000 LG characters. A single AR is around 100kb in pdf form. That means for a 6th level character, you're looking at 3MB for just that character. That's 15GB of server space, just to store the ARs of the current 5,000 characters, not counting any more that might sign up. And the storage isn't even the significant issue. You'd have to have some system of filling out the ARs before they're stored for each character. Noting what favors were gained or not, disfavors, all the math, items purchased etc... The only way to do that is for everyone to do their own, or somehow equip DMs with Adobe Acrobat (or some other way to do a field completion form)... It's huge effort and logistical problems for something that is of barely marginal utility...If you want a backup of your ARs, buy a $60 scanner from Staples...
haferka 04-11-07, 08:22 PM	you don't store a copy of every ar for every character. you break every ar into a list of access items. and create a virtual ar by referencing those items. then associate the virtual ar with the character. it becomes a tangled web of connections betwee PCs and AR access items. perhaps I will work up a sample webpage to demonstrate the concept....
Gallaway 04-11-07, 09:49 PM	xx
Gallaway 04-11-07, 09:50 PM	We have had a lot of trouble just with the rewards system and herald/master test tracking locally. We have even had GM's suddenly and inexplicably no longer show as having GM status. The system seems to ignore a lot of entries. Some we have tracked down to idiosycracies in the system. For example if you GM a game and then later play it in the same games day the order you enter the slots when reporting seems to matter. Also being senior GM seems to matter if you play games. In other cases people are registered as playing or even GMing games they have never played. Some of these errors may be due to poor reporting however if the only record of your character is online then the reporting standards and the reliability of the system itself would want to be 10 fold better than they are now.
King Kashue 04-12-07, 12:25 AM	it becomes a tangled web of connections betwee PCs and AR access items. As has been said...WotC can't keep a vBulletin forum running when it has a search function, and they can't work the reward tracking system properly... What in the world makes you think they can handle anything that could possibly be called a "tangled web" of anything? :D Especially a system for 80,000 characters.
TheBlackFlail 04-12-07, 01:59 AM	As has been said...WotC can't keep a vBulletin forum running when it has a search function, and they can't work the reward tracking system properly... There are over 3M posts on this board. To search all of them would require multiple Billions (more likely Trillions) of clock cycles, and that's for each search, assuming that the entirety of the database is in that processor's memory block (not out of the question). Given that no L1 cache of Gigabyte size exists, you would also have countless millions of memory accesses, which are far slower than ordinary instructions (not to mention tying up a memory controller). That would tie up a single processor core of a server for potentially several seconds, for each and every search conducted. While I am sure that the server companies would just love to sell WotC the computational horsepower to handle this monstrous task (cha ching!), I doubt that they wish to spend the cash just to have the search function on their boards. Wizards is hardly the first board to shut down the search function (I know some that have search, but make you pay for it). It's not a mark of incompetence on their part, simply a measure of the board size and cost concerns.
King Kashue 04-12-07, 02:05 AM	There are over 3M posts on this board. To search all of them would require multiple Billions (more likely Trillions) of clock cycles, and that's for each search, assuming that the entirety of the database is in that processor's memory block (not out of the question). Given that no L1 cache of Gigabyte size exists, you would also have countless millions of memory accesses, which are far slower than ordinary instructions (not to mention tying up a memory controller). That would tie up a single processor core of a server for potentially several seconds, for each and every search conducted. While I am sure that the server companies would just love to sell WotC the computational horsepower to handle this monstrous task (cha ching!), I doubt that they wish to spend the cash just to have the search function on their boards. Wizards is hardly the first board to shut down the search function (I know some that have search, but make you pay for it). It's not a mark of incompetence on their part, simply a measure of the board size and cost concerns. I also know far larger boards (on the magnitude of 7 times) who don't seem to have any issue (nor fee), so I'm not sure that's the most compelling argument... Nor does that explain their inability to run the reward system to their own parameters...
solbergb 04-12-07, 12:41 PM	you don't store a copy of every ar for every character. you break every ar into a list of access items. and create a virtual ar by referencing those items. then associate the virtual ar with the character. it becomes a tangled web of connections betwee PCs and AR access items. perhaps I will work up a sample webpage to demonstrate the concept.... Having been involved in designing and testing an ecommerce system that handled far less variables than the differences between one AR and another - it's nasty to make a virtual AR system reliable. It's more like a contracts system actually (something else I've been involved in deploying) and the most likely way to do it is to cram big wads of text into very generic fields, defeating most of the purpose of making it electronic in the first place. It's hard. It will take a tremendous amount of labor, not only to program, but ot maintain and adds even more delays to the already slow process of authoring/editing/playtesting a module. It's going to be buggy. And if it actually matters (unlike the Nyrond site, which is a hobby and a "FYI" kind of thing) the bugs will be a big deal, possibly interfering with play for thousands of people. Look how difficult it is just to maintain the download your module site (and even with that, only the core AR's and modules exist there, the rest are managed locally, all you get from the main site is an event ID and a placeholder file). Doing something like this commercially and deploying it for a customer base the size of LG would be a 7 figure proposition if done in the business world. It would take about a year to deploy and even then you'd be fighting weird edge cases for another year, so the development budget doesn't end at deployment.
kenobi65 04-12-07, 01:59 PM	Having been involved in designing and testing an ecommerce system that handled far less variables than the differences between one AR and another - it's nasty to make a virtual AR system reliable. It's more like a contracts system actually (something else I've been involved in deploying) and the most likely way to do it is to cram big wads of text into very generic fields, defeating most of the purpose of making it electronic in the first place. Agreed...it'd have a better chance of working if AR "items" could be categorized into different discrete types, and (more importantly) new AR items never broke from that paradigm. Every time you get a new AR item that works differently, you'd need to figure out how to deal with it.