
D&D Meets the Electronic Age - ergoproxy
http://odd74.proboards.com/thread/11485/meets-electronic-age
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meesterdude
One of my favorite RPG games is Space Station 13; in that part of the game is
to ACTUALLY role play your job, instead of just being a wizard and having
certain abilities and thats as far as you go. That's one of the best things
about getting together with a bunch of friends in a D&D match; coming up with
entertaining quests. But it's rare to find a game that actually encourages the
role playing aspect, and a large part of SS13 is the stuff that other players
/ admins will do to spice up the gameplay for others.

For the unfamiliar, here's an example of some of the gameplay of a janitor:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpBxqZYgem8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpBxqZYgem8)

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dozzie
What you look for is not a game _system_ , but a game _master_. At the
beginning of every decent rule book is a sentence equivalent to this: "this
book is by no means definitive; if tearing it apart and throwing it out of the
window is what brings you and your team most joy, you should tear it apart".

If you enjoy playing a character and you want it to be the most important
aspect of the game, you need to look for something called "storytelling" and
you need to find a game master who favours this playing style.

You can easily do storytelling in (otherwise heavily formalized) D&D/d20, it
only takes rest of your team to agree.

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DGAP
One of the first programs my father wrote in the 70s/80s was a DnD dice
rolling simulator, I believe in assembly. I've heard similar stories from
others who began programming in that era. It's interesting how many "nerds"
got their start in development through RPGs.

~~~
pmiller2
Makes sense. Why spend several minutes rolling dice and writing stuff down
when you can have the computer do the dice rolling in under a second, and then
print out a character sheet?

It makes even more sense for point buy systems, where you frequently want to
run a lot of "what-if" scenarios, and getting the math right is tedious.

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Udo
One of my favorite hobby projects is a dice-rolling gaming aid that morphed to
a place where people can play RPGs online together over the years:

[https://rolz.org/](https://rolz.org/)

Due to time constraints I've been neglecting it during the last months, but
I'm looking forward to jumping back into development at some point.

When it started out, it was barely more than a Google search-like input box
that would parse and execute RPG-style dice codes that I needed for GMing my
own games. Over time, users had a lot of feature requests and this is how it
got to today's state...

~~~
patio11
Have you seen
[http://gamesbyemail.com/news/diceomatic](http://gamesbyemail.com/news/diceomatic)
? It may bring a little bit of joy to your life.

~~~
Udo
Yes :) thanks anyway!

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ourmandave
One thing that frustrates me is my endless quest to find a decent electronic
character sheet. They're like the to-do list app that's never quite what you
want.

~~~
Daneel_
Fight Club 5 on iOS is pretty good, I'd recommend trying it out if you have an
iPhone/iPad. A bonus nicety is that it can back up to iCloud so you can sync
between devices easily (and without a service that might one day go down).

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mpnordland
Funny that this should come up as I am currently building a game master assist
for Cosmic Patrol (cosmic-patrol.com). I'm fairly new to rpgs and I didn't
have the dice needed to play so I hacked out some python functions to roll the
right dice and I've kept expanding it to handle more stuff.

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pmiller2
FYI, a little googling will find the original article from 1979.

