My gaming group makes extensive use of digital tools when playing. We have vast PDF libraries that keep us from breaking our backs hauling books back and forth. We use various character generation tools to assist with character creation and tracking. We use virtual game tables both for ease of play and to allow members who cannot attend locally to join in the fun remotely. Digital tools are an essential part of our game. Trapdoor Technologies, a new licensee for Dungeons & Dragons digital tools, asked on their website what we want out of Codename Morningstar. Here is my wish list.
Affordable PDFs
This is more in Wizards of the Coast court than Trapdoor Technologies.
Wizards of the Coast has a spotty history when it comes to PDFs. In third edition PDFs were priced exactly the same as the physical book. This meant that they often cost more than you could get the physical books for off of Amazon and even most local game stores. It also meant that at $30 or more a pop that most gamers had to make a choice between buying a physical book or buying the PDF. Personally, I enjoy reading a physical book but love the convenience of a searchable PDF during game play. By offering PDFs at a reasonable price Pazio and other publishers have encouraged me to purchase both.
In fourth edition Wizards of the Coast moved away from PDFs and offered up the D&D Compendium as a digital alternative. The D&D Compendium was great, but it didn’t allow you to see the rules in their original context. There is a place for a tool like the D&D Compendium, but I does not replace PDF versions of the books.
Of course Wizards of the Coast has made great strides in their PDF offerings with the D&D Classics site. However, they still tend to be a bit pricey on the newer stuff and don’t tend to release PDFs concurrently with their new releases. I hope that this will change with the release of fifth edition.
A robust and customizable character generator
I like character generators and I even liked the D&D Character Builder offered through D&D Insider. It had a major flaw though, as it did not handle house rules very well. This is why I prefer a character generator like PCGen. The ability to load my own datasets far outweighed the occasional quirkiness of the program. Strong support for house rules is a must.
A useful virtual game table
There are a lot of great virtual game table products out there. Personally, we use MapTools, but Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds are great products as well. A great virtual game table must be customizable, allow easy access to remote players, and provide useful management tools for the DM to run encounters. All three of the virtual game tables I have listed above do this.
To be honest the opportunity here is almost closed. Where there is still opportunity is to integrate this in with the vast stores of data Wizards of the Coast can provide. Making it seamless to drop in monsters with full stats and seamless integration with character sheets would make all the difference. I know it would convince me to switch.
Campaign management tools
There is probably a lot of room for improvement here. Realm Works is great for campaign prep, but Obsidian Portal is probably the leader here. It bills itself as a campaign wiki site, but it provides a lot of tools for game masters to keep track of the locations and characters while only surfacing to the players what the game master wants them to know.
Outside of the gaming software world, I have found both Workflowy (an outliner) and Evernote (a robust note taking program) to be invaluable tools for organizing campaigns. I have also been considering trying Scrivner, which is intended for authors who are organizing a novel, but would probably work just as well for a campaign.
I would look to all of these tools for inspiration.
It is more than just a Windows world
D&D Insider ran on Microsoft Silverlight. While some of my group members use Windows laptops, some use MacBooks, Ubuntu Linux laptops, iPads, and Android devices. Silverlight did not work very well for them.
Please make sure that whatever digital solutions are created are multi-platform. Make sure that these solutions are mobile friendly as well.
2 comments:
Very well thought out and thorough! These are all admirable goals, and I hope they come to light.
I am pretty sure, from reading the various threads, that this is not intended to be a VT. I thin that the competition from things like Roll20 is too high a barrier to entry to get any reasonable traction for adoption. Better to have a robust set of tools that can work alongside a groups VT of choice.
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