It's meant for both DMs and players to keep track of the timeline of events, characters, NPCs, locations, quests, party loot, etc. Written in Svelte 3, it uses Firebase and is hosted on Netlify at the moment. An iOS app was in the works, but due to numerous SwiftUI bugs, it's in the freezer for now.
The service looks great, but one pet peeve I have with 50% of landing pages, including yours: you mention that there is a free tier and a subscriber tier with no indication of what features fall where.
I have no way of telling whether a) everything I've seen on the rest of the landing page is free, and there's some hidden content that would be a killer feature for me; or b) I'll sign up only to find that I get a gimped experience compared to what I've seen.
This info is only present in a tiny site directory link in the footer, please either add that link prominently to the body, or better yet move all the content of that page to your free/sub section.
A majority of your potential users will never make it past the landing page if it isn't clear what they're actually getting.
Let me know how it goes! I've been using it with multiple D&D groups, in 5 campaigns now, and everybody in the groups likes using it. The timeline UI is not ideal when you add a whole bunch of calendar entries (a lot of scrolling...) but it all works and will be improved :)
I like the concept. You could expand it quite nicely as you go, putting maps and possibly player icons in spaces on board for saving last positions etc. I noticed there was some stuff not working but i know its early. Maybe have it rely on rock solid data such as firebase or s3 or something to make it more reliant but good start.
This is built on top of Firebase :) Curious what didn't work!
And yes, it's definitely a plan to have a map with the party position, linked to calendar entries. Like a dotted line showing where you've been over time.
I noticed when I went to different tabs, like the player wasn't editable or the tab wouldn't select but I know this is early so best of success, good idea.
Hm, well that should definitely just work, not sure what's going on. Haven't seen this or heard about this before. If you'd like to share some more details, that'd be a great help! @CritNotesApp on Twitter, or contact@critical-notes.com.
I feel so asleep, your pages are beautiful and I should have thought of using something like this and leaflet (though I have no idea what the fair use provisions are like for published maps).
Great job!
If you are not associated with the Critical Role team I think you shouldn’t call a D&D related site Critical anything. I’m not saying this on a legal level. I don’t know enough to say if you are legally allowed or not. What I know is that it feels inappropriate. Best case it will cause confusion, worst case it feels cheap and scammish.
"Critical" is a key part of anyone's gaming vocabulary. Not just D&D, but almost every RPG with combat implements crits in some ways. That's not a word that belongs to any one person.
I know someone already responded to you, and I don't mean to pile on, but commonly used words like "Critical" should never be privately owned. Not now. Not ever.
If the name were “Critical” or “Crit” I should have no objections (though it would probably fail other SEO tests, and I might ask what that has to do with notetaking).
“Critical Notes,” however, is close enough in domain and sound to “Critical Role” for legitimate questions to be raised. There is already a cottage industry of puns on the “Critical Role” name in the D&D fanbase. This would seem quite likely to be another one of them.
The name of the show is a play on the DnD feature of rolling a critical. Seems a bit unfair to criticize someone else borrowing a classic DnD term just because Critical Role got so popular.
That’s right on the origin of the term. Similary one can say that a face book is a kind of student registery with photos. It is still a bad idea to call a social network which is not related to Facebook face-something. It is an already estabilished and recognizeable brand your new thing might get confused with. If you did it unintentionally then you just caused unintentional confusion to your users. If you did it intentionally because you want to ride on the popularity of the already existing thing then you are a shyster.
Again, this is not a legal analysis. This is a decency analysis.
I might be more simpathetic with their naming choice if it would have been an accidental thing. It could be that the makers of critical-notes never heard of the brand Critical Role, they just settled on the same word because of the game term. This is unlikely to be the case. Critical notes mention on their frontpage that they support the Exandrian calendar for note taking. Exandria, and thus the exandrian calendar, is the invention of Critical Role’s Dungeon Master. The chance that they heard about Exandria but haven’t heard about Critical Role is basically zero.
