I've been having great fun coding up a utility for the new Traveller rules this past month or so, and a similar thread over on RPG.net has prompted me to wonder how we could more effectively make use of computers to enrich our tabletop roleplaying. I'm not just thinking about utilities like battle-boarders or chat programs that could be used during play, but also resource creation utilities that could be used to assist in the creation of things like scenarios, maps, character concepts and that kind of thing. So...
1) What kind of system-specific software would you find useful?
2) What kind of general software utilities would be useful?
3) Does anyone have any projects that would benefit from something like this?
Ash
Oracles
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Wed, 04/06/2008 - 17:54.
Things like the Oracles for In a Wicked Age are the sort of situation generation on the fly that computers can do well. If someone could program them for a PDA or mobile phone that would be a dream.
I had a computer scientist GM (long ago) who wrote a program to do Shadowrun rolls for us. You just plugged in the number of dice and the difficulty, and it spat out the successes. Saved a lot of rolling, adding and exploding 6s. Most players were wary of it though and wanted to roll for themselves, even though it took longer and was quite laborious.
I think games with a lot of number crunching might benefit from this stuff.
A Wicked Age
Submitted by Destriarch on Thu, 05/06/2008 - 11:04.
I'm not familiar with that one, I'll look it up.
Never tried programming for a portable device, but I'll bet that there are a few free utilities lying around the net for doing it. I'd probably have to dual-OS my computer to Linux in order to do that though. I'd been thinking of doing this anyway since my iLiad reader uses a Linux OS and I was thinking of developing stuff for that.
Ash
IaWA
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Thu, 05/06/2008 - 11:11.
In a Wicked Age is here, and integral to play is situation generation at the start of the session. You can do it with playing crads, or using the Oracles Online.
The online oracles are an example of the sort of cool thing that computers can throw up quickly.
D&D
Submitted by Neil Gow on Thu, 05/06/2008 - 11:24.
We played a D&D 18th level one shot about a year ago and we used computers to help with that. We had a dice rolling program to aid with the gazillion d6s we were throwing around and we had a load of the stats for summonable monsters prepped and ready to go at the touch of a button. This really helped us have the flexibility we wanted without masses of paper etc. to wade through.
I've always thought that something like Burning Wheels lifepath character creation could do with a computer application behind it, if only to help with the 1001 options.
Neil
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