Dungeon Master Assistance
A place to share thoughts and ideas about Dungeons and Dragons
Campaign Website
Posted by on November 14, 2016
The Alabaster Portal
I thought you might like to see the website I am using to manage my tabletop game. I call it the Alabaster Portal. It is a free, private, google site that I set up for my players and me to use for our game. I looked at the popular Obsidian Portal and decided that I wanted a little more control over my site that that allowed.
Many thanks to sharklops over at Reddit for his Pathfinder RPG Campaign Website Template. I started with that then modified it extensively to work with my 5th edition campaign.
I set up a WIKI ten years ago and never used it much. I liked the idea, but it wasn’t very “pretty”. Google sites allows me to set page level access permissions, so I can set the permissions for each player to modify and add to his character’s information and also edit pages such as the adventure log. It has been popular with my players so far.
I had a request to make my site available as a template. If you want to create your own, similar to mine – you can use this template :
https://www.sites.google.com/site/5etemplatesite/
What do you think? Do you use a WIKI or Obsidian Portal, or something else, or is this all too much work for something not very useful?
Any chance this template could be shared with other DM’s? Is that even technically possible?
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Yes, it can be done and I will save it as a template. I will strip out all of my game specific information and post a link to it as soon as it is ready. If you are in a hurry, you can do as I did and start with the Pathfinder template.
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I updated the post with a link. I saved a modified version as a template. I hope it works for you.
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Nice site. How easy are you finding it to maintain (I would check by creating a Google site myself, but I’m so time poor I don’t have time to do that!).
We tend to use OneNote for all our campaign and related notes and info. That also works, though has a habit of getting messy as we can all update it whenever we like. The site approach is better for published information however, so I’m going to ponder a blended approach
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It’s a little tricky to set up the permissions, but once that is done it is easy to maintain. What you will like is that you can set permissions on a per-page basis so only you can edit the campaign related pages and each player can edit his own character pages (but not the other characters pages) and you can allow all of the players to edit some pages. For instance, I allow each player to edit these pages: Contact Info., Party Loot Log, Chronicle, Memorable NPC’s, Role Playing, The Tavern (OOC), and their PC. They can also add sub-pages and attach files to these pages. All of the other pages only the DM can edit.
You can also add pages that no one can see but you. That is what I do with PC pages when they drop out of the game. You can also do that for any pages you don’t want the players to see.
If you are new to google sites, expect to spend some tie learning its features. The only problem my players had was in editing their PC page. They didn’t realise that you can’t just log in and then click on the page to edit it. you must click on the “edit” button at the top of the page first and then click on the “save” button when you are finished. Other than that, my group had no problems at all.
I also like OneNote a lot but I have only ever used it privately – never shared it.
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Im having difficulty accessing the template. It is giving me a “redirect loop” error. Any suggestions?
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Are you saying that you get that error when you click on the link in my post? When I click on it, it goes straight to the template.
Is anyone else having this problem?
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Yessir. Ill try it on a different computer, possibly other web browsers, and see if that fixes the issue
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Let us all know what (if anything) you do to solve the problem. If you are having trouble, I am sure others are too.
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