Development

[icycalm]

Fantasy Grounds
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/

Roll20
http://roll20.net/

Roll20 is free and web-based. Fantasy Grounds requires installation and I think it costs something. Post more here if you find them and let's try to pick one. Obviously, we should try the web-based, free one first before we make up our minds.

[icycalm]

Fantasy Grounds is even on Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/252690/

€119,90 for 4 copies...

[icycalm]

I'll say one thing about Roll20: I don't like the video chat feature. It is even an advantage of playing online that you don't have to see people. Voices-only is far more immersive. There are other advantages too, especially if I get back home and can use my 3 42" screens. I could have a dozen books open at the same time, at the exact pages I need, etc. This would be impossible on a real table.

[icycalm]

Watched the video on the Roll20 site. It's insane. It looks just like a videogame, but without the preprogramming. You can even have music kick in whenever you want to. Even the player sprites look great. And shadows on the hallway, etc.

Basically, Neverwinter Nights with a human DM sounds very close to this, only more limited.

[icycalm]

If we disable video and voice chat, and play only with text chat, I think we can make this feel, to the players, almost like a computer game. It would be more immersive, in some respects, since instead of hearing my voice coming from every NPC in the game, you'd be reading their text and imagining their voices, exactly as with computer games. I could be copy-pasting descriptions from the adventures right into chat, which would give you a better feel of what's going on than if I read them aloud or paraphrased them.

Not sure how well it would work in practice, so we'd have to give it a try. But I think there's a good chance it would be superior to voice chat.

[icycalm]

I think I've found the best format. The perfect format, even.

Everything the PCs and NPCs say and do goes in the text chat, as well as descriptions of surroundings, etc.

Meanwhile, we are all on Mumble on push-to-talk. And when a player needs to ask if his character can do something, or discuss rules or whatever, or whether we should take a snack break, we talk about it on Mumble.

There is a command in the text chat on Roll20 to speak "out of character", the /ooc command, but that would interfere with the "in character" chat, and would clog up the text and make things harder to understand. Also, people would get tired from typing too much.

This way of playing is really a dream come true, to the point where I would say it is superior to playing in person. Even if we were all living in the same town, I am not sure I would prefer to play in person at this point.

[icycalm]

This thread was originally called "Virtual table-tops", but I've renamed it so it can be used for all types of software that can help with role-playing, and there is a LOT of it, and of MANY different kinds, as I am now finding. And we'll use almost all of it lol. Let me explain how we got here.

The problem I was facing had to do with the Empire phase. In the Empire phase, each group will build its own empire, and the game will start incorporating strategy elements that begin with city-building. The problem was that our chosen program for that aspect, TaleSpire, only has one kind of style for every type of structure. One kind of castle walls and gates, one kind of docks, etc. This wouldn't suffice even for a single setting, since each area in a setting has its own architectural style, not to mention each CONTINENT in a setting. The Forgotten Realms and Pathfinder for example have Arabian-themed areas, or Asian-themed, etc., but even in the traditional European-themed medieval areas there is great divergence between areas. It would look ridiculous if every castle in the entire Faerûn region of the Forgotten Realms had the exact same gate! And it would be even more ridiculous if the castles in Greyhawk or Dragonlance had the same damn gate! This without even mentioning weird worlds like Dark Sun, where European CASTLES THEMSELVES would look ridiculous (apart from ruined ones from past ages, that is).

Now, eventually, I have no doubt that TaleSpire will add more variations of all its different building pieces. But this will take years. Until then, it only makes sense to use the program with only ONE group. But which group will be the lucky one? And what will the other groups do?

That's when I thought of the unlocking system. The unlocking system is how I apportion scant resources, the best stuff in the game, to the various groups. They compete for those resources before they've even had a direct fight; they compete indirectly through the epic points system. So we simply add TaleSpire to those unlockables. And of course, it will be attached to the campaign which unlocks the Empire phase itself: Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Whichever group beats Kingmaker will get exclusive use of TaleSpire.

But what will the rest of the groups do?

That's when I remembered of an alternative to TaleSpire that I recently talked about, BattleMapp. Unlike TaleSpire, this is already out and ready to use, and moreover it includes animation, which TaleSpire won't. So in some ways it is superior. But the aesthetics/art assets are decidedly inferior. It's not ugly or anything, it just isn't as gorgeous as TaleSpire. The main thing for us however is that the art assets are DIFFERENT to TaleSpire's! The castle walls and gates and houses are completely different. So that's what some other group can use! Again only one group though, and again we will let the unlocking system decide which. I will attach BattleMapp to the Birthright setting, so that whoever unlocks Birthright gets exclusive use of the BattleMap VTT. Birthright is the OTHER product, apart from Kingmaker, that gives players a kingdom, and includes rules for running kingdoms and massive battles. In some ways it is the superior product because it GIVES players a kingdom AT THE START. They don't have to fight for it and build it themselves as in Kingmaker. They get it at character creation lol. So that's a plus, but the negative is that the players don't get to enjoy the great Kingmaker campaign, and so I have given this setting a somewhat inferior VTT. So it's up to the groups to decide which deal seems best for them.

So that takes care of two groups. We have three groups though, and we might get more in future. So what do we do about them?

Well, the above thoughts made me realize that all I really need is a third VTT lol, so I started googling around, and that's when I fell into a rabbit hole leading to a myriad of tools I'd never heard of. The role-playing world has been EXPLODING with tools the past few years, and the choices are many, and in different categories. There's VTTs up the wazoo, plus other categories of tools I've found like "campaign makers" and mapmakers, and so on. So not only had I solved the Empire style issue, but I had stumbled onto powerful tools that could transform our game and the way we run it. And I'll proceed to reveal all those tools in a series of separate threads today, and then we'll take it from there. But right off the bat I can tell you for example that the mapmaking tool I found a while back, Dungeondraft, could probably be used to design entire towns and castles. This is a fantastically easy-to-use tool that spits out gorgeous interior and exterior layouts—not just of dungeons but of any kind of D&D-type building—and of course in a different style than TaleSpire and Battlemapp, so it can be used by the third group, when they get to the Empire phase. Of course, it's 2D, as compared with the other two tools, that are 3D. But aesthetically at least I believe it is superior to Battlemapp, so it's up to the groups to decide which deal they prefer, and pursue it. And of course finally we have the art assets included in the Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign rule book itself (on which the Empire phase will be based). Those look fine, it's just that they are little squares on a page you cut out and paste onto a generic grid. It gets the job done, and I like the art style too, but it's not interactive enough. Not detailed enough, etc. But in a pinch, it can work as assets for a future fourth group. This is what it looks like, btw.





Googling for these images just now I found a Steam Workshop item that seems to somehow turn these assets into a VTT-style thing: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 1170287858

Not sure how that works but it needs looking into.

In either case, it's a good, solid alternative solution, and moreover it is only THIS method that can be adapted for use with the wilder settings like Dark Sun, because you can get some image editing expert to go over the Dark Sun material and crop out map assets like houses and whatnot, and then paste them in a sheet like those above included in the Ultimate Campaign book. And this last method covers pretty much ALL settings and areas within settings. So adequate solutions of various functionality and fidelity exist for all situations, some requiring more or less work than others, of course.

In short, we're making even VTTs and other software tools unlockable, and you'll be seeing them shortly pop up as such on the various options you will get on the Battlegrounds site. Plus, thanks to searching for all this stuff, I found even more software tools that we can use to enrich the game, some of which I will be revealing later today in separate threads, so look out for those.