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Style guide

How pages here are written, so that a hundred pages by twenty people still read as one reference.

The rules that matter

  1. Never restate a number the generator already publishes. If a value lives in the module's 2da files, link the generated page instead of copying the number into prose. A copied number is a number that will be wrong after the next patch, and nothing will catch it.
  2. Say what the game does, not what D&D does. Where ADOH differs from stock Neverwinter Nights, the difference IS the article. Where it does not, one line and a link is enough. Give the difference its own short table where you can: a reader who has played elsewhere is scanning for what will catch them out, and prose hides that.
  3. Write for a player, never for a programmer. Nobody reading this wiki is looking at the server's files, and a reader who meets one of their names stops trusting the page to be for them. Never name a data file, a table, a column, a script or an internal constant. Say what the game does and let the generated pages carry the values.
Do not writeWrite
read from skills.2da row 3(nothing - just state the value)
listed in each class's cls_skill_*.2daone skill point per rank for these classes
the LightSens column is setdrow are light sensitive
ECL +1you count as one level higher when experience is awarded

Say skill point, rank, saving throw, attack roll - the words the character sheet uses. Explain an abbreviation the first time it appears on a page, then use it.

  1. Mark what you are unsure of. A sentence that says "unconfirmed" is useful. A confident sentence that turns out to be wrong costs a reader a character.
  2. One page per thing, and name it what players call it. Put the other names in aliases in the frontmatter - that is what makes the term link itself everywhere else on the wiki.
  3. British or American spelling, either, consistently within a page. Not worth a rule beyond that.
  4. No advice - except where the page admits it in its first paragraph. A page states what the game does and leaves the decisions to the reader: no "take this at level 12", no "the best race for it is". Two places may recommend, and both open by saying so: Builds, because a build IS an opinion and names its author, and Getting started, which is the collected habit of the people who play here. Neither is checked against the code the way the rest of the wiki is. Everything else states and does not suggest - a page that finds itself wanting to recommend should link one of those two instead of growing an opinion of its own.

Pictures

A picture is ![what it shows](url) on a line of its own. The description is not decoration: it is what a reader who cannot see the picture is given instead, and it is what a caption shows.

Layout words go in braces straight after it, in any order:

![The bag menu](url){half right caption}
full half third quarter smallhow much of the column it takes. full is the default
left rightthe text runs beside it. On a phone it goes full width instead
centercentred, with nothing beside it
captionshow the description under the picture

Two or more pictures on consecutive lines become a row that shares the width. Leave a blank line between them and they stack, one after another, which is what a lone picture does anyway.

![Before](one.png)
![After](two.png)

A word the renderer does not know is ignored and the picture comes out plain, so check the spelling

  • the editor's checks panel does it for you.

Frontmatter

Every page begins with it. title and aliases feed the auto-linker; category places the page in the portal; source is authored for pages people write and generated for pages the pipeline writes - never edit a generated page by hand, because the next run overwrites it.