"Shanghai | Hazy Lujiazui — PuDong, Shanghai" by Ikiller123 on Flickr

I wrote a little while ago about a model for an RPG handled entirely via apps and software, in which all the mechanics are run by computers and the humans just see the results.

This is conceptually elegant; let computers handle the number-crunching they’re good at.

But there are problems.

For one, the system has to have apps for many different devices. In the current market, that’s a lot of work. This means, at minimum, an iPhone app, an iPad app, and at least one Android app for each major version of Android on phones out there.

(Required caveats: Yes, I know you can develop one app for both iPhone and iPad, but you need separate UI designs for each class of device to be effective. I’m not familiar with Android development, but I understand that different phones are locked into different major versions of Android, so you can’t always have one Android app for every Android phone.)

You have to get every single player to download the apps, set them up, etc. It’s not as easy as loaning someone a book and a printed-off character sheet. Harder adoption rate.

If it’s a paid system, the developer has to choose effective prices, which would be harder in an unproven frontier like this than in the more tried-and-true markets that currently exist. What are players willing to pay for? Which parts of the system do you charge for?

GMs can’t fudge the system, or invent their own house rules. This is a major problem for a lot of gamers; adjusting a game to one’s play style is an important part of the experience. Can a system be built that people wouldn’t houserule?

You have to trust the software. When every calculation is opaque, it’s easy to wonder how fair the software is. Or if you’ve set up your character correctly.

Imagine an RPG system that’s handled completely with digital tools. Not only is your character sheet displayed on a screen, the mechanics are handled there, too.

Imagine this: a group sits around a table, each participant holding a smartphone, PDA, or tablet.

The GM touches “Moderate difficulty” on his tablet and asks Maria for a Perception test. She touches her Perception stat; it immediately rolls and flashes the result, “19,” at her. A wireless message is sent through the ether, and the GM sees “Success!” on his tablet.

Everything would run on an app. Characters could be created directly on these devices, or developed on a desktop or laptop then accessed on those devices.

How about a virtual tabletop? This is a bit harder to envision, but it’s certainly possible that a company will build and sell a tablet that’s much larger than today’s iPads. Such a thing could easily be used as a virtual tabletop, and wirelessly sync with each players’ device to automatically show markers, bloodied creatures, etc.

These digital systems would revolutionize LARPing. Just reach into your pocket and touch your smart phone to determine if you hit or miss an opponent.

(Obviously, there’d be purists; this wouldn’t kill traditional LARPing. But it could add a new experience.)

The technology is really already in place for all of this. Would it work? That’s another post.

"Fantasy battle" by krukof2 on DeviantArt

This applies to GMs and to designers.

For GMs: What fights do you want? Take a moment to imagine the feel of those fights. A big, roaring monster? Swarms of mooks rushing at the heroes? A cackling, insulting controller with a bunch of minions? A squad of enemies, each with its own attack patterns? Choose monsters that fit that theme.

For designers, this gets more interesting.

What sort of conflict do you want in your game? What would that look like in your world?

Will your world include a lot of subtle social conflict? Will there be monsters (e.g., non-sentient, antagonist creatures)? How dynamic will your combat be? Will your setting have a lot of easy-to-kill minions? Should combat be brief or long and complex? How deadly should physical combat be?

Not only will you benefit from designing your conflict system around these considerations, you’ll also want to design your monsters and enemies to support this.

If you want dynamic physical combat, something like D&D 4E’s powers will help a lot. If you want combat to go quickly, a status-based system might work better than HP.

It all comes down to what you want.

"Castle Durnstein (with YPaul)" by muppetspanker on Flickr

I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on historical castles, and it’s changed how I think about castles in an RPG setting.

Debate about castles rages, naturally, so take all this with a grain of salt, but:

Castles were not just fortifications. Indeed, fortification was a relatively minor element of their function. Castles were homes and symbols of power. Many of them were built to look imposing, and were actually hard to defend.

Castles became symbols of power and stability. Not only did they say “The noble is wealthy,” they said, “This noble can protect his peasants.”

Statistically, most castles were earth-and-timber affairs. Stone was just too expensive. In later centuries, many earth-and-timber castles were slowly converted section by section to stone. That conversion was, of course, messy and slow. So one might enter a “castle” that consisted of an earthen wall surrounding a stone keep.

Speaking of keeps: an important aspect of every castle was its relation to the noble who owned it. Each gate and wall was another layer keeping you from the noble, so the deeper you were allowed inside a castle, the more important you presumably were. The inner keep was a very special political place, because of what it said about anyone allowed to get inside it.

As the Middle Ages wore on, sieges grew increasingly popular, and castles became obsolete as a result of two primary practices: cannons and slash-and-burn tactics. As important as cannons were for wearing down a castle’s defenses, destroying all the surrounding property was arguably the larger problem. It does little good to lock oneself in a castle only to watch the destruction of your long-term food supply. Thus, castles became superfluous.

Implications for role-playing games:

• If running a castle siege story line, why aren’t the besiegers destroying the surrounding countryside? What do the besiegers want out of that countryside?
• How much food is in the castle’s stores? Many castles would keep months’ worth of food, but many others had only a few weeks’ worth. What happens when the besieged run out of food?
• What if the castle is in the middle of conversion to stone, or partly built? How easy is it to defend? Might the castle need human protectors for its weak spots?
• Where does the noble hold court? Where does he live and sleep? Where does he keep his valuables?

What questions would you add to this list?

"Death Face Vector Image" by Vectorportal on Flickr

D&D 4th Edition makes death rare. A player-character can be knocked unconscious, and one can be dying, but actual character death is generally uncommon.

Character death is a big driving force for players, and provides the primary dramatic tension. Death is always scary. For a long time, the possible death of your character (usually via poor Hit Point rolls and good monster Hit Dice rolls) created a lot of the tension in D&D–will the next monster murder my character? Will this boss crush her?

Now that 4E makes death rare, combat is less of a risk than before, and death is no longer a driving force. That means that DMs must now make the overall story more interesting.

The story itself must be dramatically interesting now. DMs can’t rely on possible death for drama.

I wonder if 4E’s designers intended this, or if it was a lucky result of incorporating player feedback that random character death in the middle of a dungeon isn’t fun.

Just thinking.

(I\’m really unhappy with the way this blog post turned out. But I can\’t think of a better way to write it, and I\’d rather have it released than sitting in my drafts folder for months. So, here you are.)

Last night, as I waited on yet another piece of software, I looked in on the Four Winds Tavern, a freeform IRC channel gamefiend of At Will runs on his 4eAtWill.net IRC server. Folks were conversing, and I asked if they\’d be interested in my running a quick story. They agreed.

We proceeded to play D&D 4E for an hour in an IRC chatroom.

I\’m fully aware that this should be insane. This is about as far from the ideal as you can get. And I learned a few things:

The biggest advantage came from the players, who focused on role-playing as opposed to making rolls. We rolled almost no dice until just before combat. So the story just flowed.

Time for the evergreen refrain: combat took longer than I would have liked. That said, since there were only 2 PCs, it moved quickly enough that it never felt boring. Fortunately, too, the other players had to leave after the second round.

In the future, I plan to halve any enemy\’s HP and increase damage by 50%. Combat just needs to move quickly.

Once combat began, the channel filled with mostly OOC chatter. gamefiend later suggested that we open a channel purely for combat OOC discussion. This would work far better, judging from how well that worked on my Google Wave games. There\’s just that much rolling in a 4E game.

The grid posed no problems; we just described where players were relative to each other, using squares mostly to calculate distance. Precise positioning will certainly be more difficult to model over IRC, but I trust that players and DMs can be as fine-grained as necessary.

Overall, I was very happy with the time we spent. I had fun, and the players wanted to play again. Success.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I finally finished my Dark Sun adventure. I was so excited that I looked around for other half-finished adventures, and found one.

But it wasn’t half-finished. It was 99.9% finished. Literally, I just had to update some stat blocks and I was done.

So. If you’re interested in holding off a war party of hobgoblins, then tracking them to their underground lair, check out The Hobgoblins of Ravenspointe at RPGNow.com.

Huzzah for actually finishing things!