Not a question about why this is coming up, im aware of that. My question is why we cannot link official or homebrew content to any homebrew, instead of being able to link it and making people who have it in their collection unable to use spells which they do not own, but able to use linked official ones, its kind of annoying being restricted with spells in my homebrew to the base demo rules.
If theres some obvious reason for this being the way it is and i just dont realise, i apologise
I agree, this is extremely annoying. I assume its a limitation of the website, since it has to detect that you don't own the content then alter the homebrew in a way for only you that its locked.
It should be noted that there are three different ways to cross link content within homebrew and each has their own restrictions:
Hyperlinks. This is the least fancy, but most robust option; you can simply hyperlink your homebrew to another piece of content. However, you will not be able to publish this because hyperlinks (as opposed to internal site links) can be unsafe and we don't want people adding homebrew to their content that links to unsafe content.
Tooltips. Tool tips (when you put a magic item, spell or rule name between two tags) lets you not only link to content, but also get that snazy mouse over dialogue. You can only put in tooltip links to official content for two reasons. Firstly, the homebrew database is massive and trying to index it all to generate tooltips would be completely infeasible. Secondly, and more importantly, the homebrew database does not enforce unique names. This means if you put in a tooltip for "Geoffs Spell of Amazingness", the system would have no way of knowing which of the ten copies of "Geoffs Spell of Amazingness" to tooltip to. However, with tooltips, you can link to official non-SRD content and publish said content. So if you want to make an NPC that can cast dream of the blue veil, you can totally do so.
Embedded Content. It's possible within the homebrew tools to embed content mechanically within an option; say you give a subclass a spell for example. You can add homebrew and non-SRD content this way, but you cannot publish it. The reason is that embedding such content could cause issues if someone adds it to their collection, but doesn't have the necessary linked content. SRD/Basic Rules content is allowed to be linked via embedding because it's freely available to everyone, so we can guarantee every user has access to it.
So yeah, if you want to link content, you're best off using SRD/Basic Rules content. However, if you want to embed non-SRD content or hyperlink some homebrew, you can totally do so, you just can't publish it. However, you can still share it within your campaigns.
Not a question about why this is coming up, im aware of that. My question is why we cannot link official or homebrew content to any homebrew, instead of being able to link it and making people who have it in their collection unable to use spells which they do not own, but able to use linked official ones, its kind of annoying being restricted with spells in my homebrew to the base demo rules.
If theres some obvious reason for this being the way it is and i just dont realise, i apologise
I agree, this is extremely annoying. I assume its a limitation of the website, since it has to detect that you don't own the content then alter the homebrew in a way for only you that its locked.
It should be noted that there are three different ways to cross link content within homebrew and each has their own restrictions:
However, with tooltips, you can link to official non-SRD content and publish said content. So if you want to make an NPC that can cast dream of the blue veil, you can totally do so.
So yeah, if you want to link content, you're best off using SRD/Basic Rules content. However, if you want to embed non-SRD content or hyperlink some homebrew, you can totally do so, you just can't publish it. However, you can still share it within your campaigns.
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