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Rorrik
2011-11-15, 02:11 PM
A friend and I are looking to write an app that can act as supporting technology for role playing games. The idea is that the GM's tablet or smartphone could run the program and do calculations and probability work to determine things like the weather, hunger, fatigue?, and the like. We also have a vision of it allowing the GM to communicate with similarly equipped players, by pushing out monsters onto a central tablet for encounters or whispering private information to individual players. Related to this project, I have two questions: Would there be much interest in this kind of app? And what would be a good system (preferably open to the public and complicated enough to justify computer work) for which to design it?

Rorrik
2011-11-18, 12:18 PM
On thinking about the lack of response I realize that complex open source systems probably don't gain much popularity. We're considering instead writing a general program that helps with extras like whispering to individual players, generating realistic weather, and things like that. What extra elements would you find interesting in a thing like that?

erikun
2011-11-18, 12:39 PM
If you are going to be writing something that implements a set of very complex and completely optional rules - weather, hunger, fatigue - then you might be better off just making it a stand-alone program rather than an app for a celphone.

Also, almost every single means of internet group-gaming, including down to the basic IRC, has a way to send private messages to specific people.

While it's certainly not a bad idea, I'm just not seeing the point of it all. If I want everyone at the table to bring in their computer and look at that throughout the game, a simple IRC chatroom should work out just fine. You could probably even get one with a dice-roller.

Rorrik
2011-11-18, 12:44 PM
True, I'm writing programs to simplify calculations for my homebrew(I went way overboard on probabilities and indiscrete values). We wondered if some of these things would be interesting to a DM running other systems.

Trekkin
2011-11-18, 03:05 PM
Well, in my games, I have two programs open: Skype and Excel. Skype sends notes to people, and Excel is a combination notepad and calculator.

I hate to put a damper on anyone's ambitions, but I'm just not seeing an exploitable niche here. Game Masters, at least the ones I've met, tend to appropriate general tools for our own use rather than seek specific ones, and the fluid nature of the hobby makes specificity itself of questionable utility. I generate weather by deciding whether the current BBEG would look better with a backdrop of lightning or searing heat, for example; my friend just maps his gameworld to semi-random real-world locations and takes weather data from there.

Everyone has their way of augmenting dice and paper. Yours sounds like it's a program, which is great, but I don't know how many other people are going to want it rather than whatever they've put together.

valadil
2011-11-18, 03:57 PM
Private messaging aside, I can't think of a lot of uses for a generic app. What I'd find useful would be something specific to my system of choice that streamlines my workflow in that system. I feel like you could speed things up for the GM if you knew what system he was working with.

For instance, let's say you're using 4e. I'd like to build encounters on the fly using monsters from DDI. Enter some criteria - say level range, type of creature, and power keywords you're interested in - and get back a list of monsters by role. Choose a few of them to hit your XP budget. Then declare initiative and have the app roll for all the monsters and PCs. Let it control initiative and show you the current player/NPC's stat block. Maybe even click on a die roll on the sheet to roll or to mark that an expendable power is depleted.

Rorrik
2011-11-18, 05:23 PM
I feel like you could speed things up for the GM if you knew what system he was working with.

For instance, let's say you're using 4e. I'd like to build encounters on the fly using monsters from DDI.

This was our original idea, but we're just a pair of college kids messing around for now and don't figure we can swing a contract with D&D to make a program like this for them. It could sure use a program to encapsulate all the tables though. IF we could, then it would also be cool to have digitally distributed generic campaigns and such, but we're not looking for that scope, I'll stick to my program heavy homebrew and the standard dice for the rest.

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

valadil
2011-11-18, 09:27 PM
This was our original idea, but we're just a pair of college kids messing around for now and don't figure we can swing a contract with D&D to make a program like this for them.

Instead of licensing their content you might be able to get away with letting users access DDI content by providing their username and password. I'm sure I've seen other software get away with that. Not sure if that's in a free or paid context though.

And if that doesn't work for 4e there are other systems this could be applied too. One project that's been lingering around and I doubt I'll ever get to is I've wanted something to table lookups in MERP/Role Master. In those games almost every situation is resolved by looking up a d100 result on a table. Finding the page with the right table is the bottleneck, so if an app let you specify a table and a result, you'd speed things up tremendously. This would be dead simple to code, although the data entry would take some time.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-11-19, 12:42 AM
Masterplan (http://www.habitualindolence.net/masterplan/) might be a good place to start.

It's for 4e, but so far I've been more than pleased with the suite of services they've put into it. Yeah, it was a lot better before they got the C&D from WotC but if you look at it you can see a lot of potential.

Stuff like weather and hunger is all well and good but what you really need is a more general-purpose gaming program. Well "general purpose" within a system. What you've proposed is nice but I think it is too small if you're looking to sell it for money.

The full version of Masterplan, I might have spent cash for. This version, well, I'm glad it is free and it is a nice start.