Sure, there are Game Masters and there are Players, but you need to keep in mind that there is a third option, the Solo player who is both Game Master and Player. We want to use Obsidian to organize all of the things in our world as well, and that world is unfolding as we play. We want to easily keep track of our character(s), time tracking, maps as they are generated, and journaling the character's adventures. So, I get that as a DM, you don't want to keep a copy of your player's character sheets, but as a Solo player, I do.
I am, indeed, that note taker that my DM is fearful of LOL. The entire party consults me for notes from our sessions, including the DM on little bits maybe they forgot about. It's extremely fun and helps me keep our very complex campaigns in order. This is extremely helpful insight for me as a player, wanting to only manage my own character sheet in Obsidian when I am doing 100% homebrew. Thanks for the video! I agree, as a DM, it's a fools errand.
My goodness! What a beast that character sheet is! I bet it was a fun project, but as a GM who wants to keep track of character sheets, there's no need for a whole... _character sheet!_ I've made my PCs basically wiki pages with statblocks in my vault, but I don't need every little number written down like _I'm_ going to play them. Having access to a shared sheet online is obviously ideal, but I do want to take my own notes as well, and sometimes having stuff built directly into Obsidian has advantages. (Being able to link to a note with info on a class, for example, instead of having to copy down parts of it onto the character sheet itself.) I'm testing now the idea of a shared Vault in a Google Drive folder -- I keep my personal vaults in a Dropbox to use on different computers and I have a shared Vault with my co-writer on a novel project, so I have a little experience with it already. Even if it doesn't end up being the character sheet solution we use, it's fun to work on. :D It's certainly not a chore I'd pay to make go away! One thing I think you're 100% right on is that if a GM wants to build some kind of player-facing tool, it _has to be_ user-friendly. If you have to go into source mode to edit it, that's no bueno. Ideally, it shouldn't change much at all between viewing and editing. I love those wikipedia-style ITS callouts, but they gotta go for the character sheet I'm building for the shared Vault project. Since you seem a bit baffled about it, the context for GMs wanting to reference their PCs' character sheets during session prep is that if you're not running from a module (either because you don't like them or because you're playing a game that's not built around that style of play), the PCs _are_ your toolbox. What they have access to defines what bespoke challenges you can craft for them (because including stuff nobody can interact with or has any interest in is wasted prep and wasted play time.) Thanks for the tutorials and insights, as always!
I just made a statblock in Fantasy Statblocks about my players, with just some basic stuff like Name, Race, AC, HP, Lvl, XP, languages they speak, preferred weapon, rare item I gave them, something special that they can do and some backstory. I really don't need much more as a GM, but I must say I kind of like your Excalidraw thing for the NPCs that sometime travels with them and help them fight, and for my solo characters.
I solved this differently. I created a Google Sheets file for the character sheets and linked the Google Sheets doc for each character into Obsidian. Initially, I was using PDFs for sheets and kept having linking issues. having to rebuild the links into obsidian each time a player updated the PDF and re-uploaded it to the GDrive I have set up for Player Characters and handouts for the players. With the Google sheet, the link into Obsidian is a direct link to the sheet which the player updates directly in the browser. I don't give the players direct access to my Obsidian DB, too much stuff in there that they shouldn't see...
I’m using meta bind just to keep ac and hp live in my vault to keep the encounter building side current. I refuse to track equipment etc. that’s on my players
Cool and interesting video. I have a question though: using the excalidraw plugin for making a character sheet, I embedded the spellbook like you did, and the skill list as well so I could have a functional checkbox for proficiencies, which works wonderful. However, in my excalidraw note, the background of the embedded files are set to white, unlike yours which are transparant. I can't seem to change it, no matter what I do (using different background colors, using the default Obsidian one, changing it to match the canvas or the element, turning the opacity down, ...) Would you mind explaining how you got yours to be transparant? Thanks in advance!
@@JoshPlunkett Yeah I tried that as well thinking it would work, but it only changes the outer borders to transparant. The part where you can read the text still has a white background. It seems I'm all out of luck. Thanks for the reply! EDIT: Had a feeling it had something to do with some appearance settings I may have been f'ing around with. Apparantly the culprit was ITS theme settings, so after resetting them to default the problem was fixed. Thanks for the help anyways!
Really interesting video. Quite liked it, it’s just a bit long for my opinion. Is there any video where you talk about how to organize your Obsidian Vault eg. for one or even multiple DnD campaigns and how you create that cool overview page seen at the beginning?
If you have a look at the bottom of this page there is posts on vault structure and a post about one vault or many. obsidianttrpgtutorials.com/Obsidian+TTRPG+Tutorials/Getting+Started/Getting+Started Agree it's too long, I tend to ramble. Ive been trying to make shorter videos for years, but a TikToker I am not lol. The overview page is available for your to download via my Patreon Vault if you want it. Alternatively my site has a heap of example Dataview Queries. Pretty sure majority of that home page is covered there.
Love this video, especially how NOT to do it! Quick question, Josh; Using Custom Frames & ensuring I have my Twitch account registered in D&D Beyond, when I link to a character webpage within the frame, it wants me to login to D&D Beyond. What am I doing wrong?
I am having an issue where I can see the character sheet just fine, but if I login using my Twitch account, then the character sheet only shows up for a moment and then the whole frame goes completely grey. Any ideas why this might be?
Now that's a new one. I'd be having a look through the Custom Frames github site. Search the open and closed issues to see if anyone has experienced it before and hopefully there's a solution.
@@JoshPlunkett Good. I will continue to be the responsible 'drug dealer' who offers free samples but also tell you that you shouldn't use it, and if you do you do it at your own volition.
Hey! You mentioned a discord channel but I can't find a link, would you be so kind to share? Thank you in advance por such an interesting video (I'm still going down the rabbit hole tho =) )
