Sorcerer Online - redux

[Lxndr]

Thing #2 is the planned main feature of Sorcerer Online, specifically a means to archive and describe ACTUAL PLAY to one another in a decent, interesting fashion. It will be questionnaire-driven - answer "Ron's list" of questions about your session, and post them. Then people can visit your stuff, see how it's going, and offer comments and reactions.

What's the status of this feature?  It's described in Sorcerer's Soul, and I found an old thread (from 2001) describing it, but Sorcerer Online still seems to lack this feature...

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Alexander,

It didn't work out in terms of software. This forum and the Actual Play forum pretty much fulfil all the stated goals.

I really, really wish that Sorcerer Online could receive a major functional overhaul, but other concerns keep pre-empting my efforts in that direction - including developing any clear notions on my part concerning what to do with it.

Best,
Ron

[Lxndr]

Oh, well, too bad.  If I had any applicable coding/computer skills, I'd offer them up, but sadly I'm still lacking in that area.  Got to save up the money to go back to school.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi everyone,

Any ideas? Is there any reason to keep the Sorcerer Online function at the website at all? If so, what could be added to it or changed?

Best,
Ron

[Lxndr]

These come off the top of my head:

* Cross-link Sorcerers and Demons.  If I'm looking at a sorcerer sheet, and see their demons, I want to be able to click on that demon name and read about the demon.  Similarly, Demons should have an optional "who am I bound to?" field, where one could enter a Sorcerer, and then click on that link to get to the Sorcerer.
* Search by name of Sorcerer/Demon, instead of just by user.
* A search that would show all users, but only those with sorcerers/demons.
* The ability to assign Sorcerers/Demons some sort of "Story" title, and the ability to search by such (so one could see all Sorcerers/Demons associated with a particular storyline)
* A "story character sheet" which might include questions to answer, or might just be a big blank sheet in which the person could create anything.

[Delta1]

I would like to see a bit of a clean up.  Some of the entries are by people who don't play Sorcerer(or play with a very different rulebook than I).

  Demons & Sorcerers are another good reference point, a chance to see what others have done.

[Ben Morgan]

Did someone mention, once upon a time, a place to gather together all of the various one-sheets that people have come up with? Or did I just dream it?

(I'm being just a little selfish here: I want to run Sorcerer so very badly, and I want to give my players a couple of different options as far as "well, here's a couple of ways of applying these rules.")

-- Ben

[Fabrice G.]

Maybe something could be done to allow the storing and sharing of R-maps.

As nice as it is to draw the map directly off the book, it's could be a great resource (and a gain of time) to have a lot of these available to choose from.

I don't know how hard it would be to implement graphic based on a questionaire asking "who" ? "linked to" ? and "type of link" ? , but I can see how cool it would be.

A my vote also goes to the one-sheets thing.

Take care,

Fabrice

[Lxndr]

There are family tree programs that I've used for relationship maps with wonderful effect.  The best programs allow you to describe the links between people in any way you want, so all you need to do is say "Link" (and give a date) and it'll be able to print it up or hyperlink it or whatever you want it to do.

I'd suspect something like that wouldn't be too difficult to code.  But you really can never be sure.

[Clay]

My own special favorite toy would have to be a PDF character sheet with fill-in fields.  No real coding on the web site, just something that anybody could download and fill out on their own computer and print.  Government forms use this a lot, and I found that I really like the feature.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

My suggestion - a new system completely.

I'm not cracking on Clay's system, by the way - it's great. I've just been checking out more and more software that would do a great job at handling this sort of linked, assorted data: software that makes me wish I could redo the Forge from the bottom-up.

(Man, wouldn't it be cool if Actual Play didn't look the same as the rest of the forums: it was, instead, a group of weblogs that anyone could use for their game, logging what went on, but using the same username and password as they use for the rest of the site? That'd be the same account used for submitting reviews and articles, as well as new links, too. A dream, really.)

[MrWrong]

I'lld recommend looking at www.yog-sothoth.com, a site/community for Call of Cthulhu.

It is the most effective use of open source php based software I have come across, melding phpbb (which this board uses), phpnuke ( .http://www.phpnuke.org/ content management system with plug ins, such as the journal system) and what looks like a custom built player database, seemlessly.

[Hardpoint]

My own special favorite toy would have to be a PDF character sheet with fill-in fields.  No real coding on the web site, just something that anybody could download and fill out on their own computer and print.  Government forms use this a lot, and I found that I really like the feature.

I made some of these for players to use with their characters in my game, Realms of Wonder, but the problem is you have to have the full version of Adobe Acrobat to make them and Acrobat Reader will not save any of the data input into them for some goofy reason.

There is a slight learning to curve to making them work, but you can have them do calculations and even do some Javascript, if you know how to do that kinda thing. Shame Adobe won't let you save the data in Reader, otherwise that would be the perfect electronic character sheet system.