BRPG features list [OLD]

[SolSec]

I quickly read the features list for your upcoming BRPG.

Comment: I am so far impressed, because as a GM of tabletop online gaming, it is obvious to me that you are trying to improve upon the "competition" (e.g. Klooge and similar competing products).

However, two things that IMHO are requirements for BRPG to become a long term "winner".


#1) Make a sensible Licensing Plan. In other words, if your Licensing Plan turns out to be one that will FORCE rank-and-file players to individually pay $15 just so they can connect to their GM.... then I will predict that the product will fail miserably.

Do not force individual players to shell out CASH just so they can join an RPG campaign, which they aren't even sure about staying with. Create a licensing plan where the GM has the option to purchase "licenses" in advance, and thus the GM (assuming he is a rich nerd) can buy player licenses and then use them as "Player Connection Slots". Klooge kinda works this way.


#2) GRIP is an old ancient outdated Tabletop RPG software, but it got one thing right: Character Sheets, Lovely Gorgeous Beautiful Functional Easy to Customize and Macro-functional Character Sheet Interfaces.

Again, after reading BRPG's feature list.... it seems that you guys hardly mentioned anything about Character Sheets. Why?

Any old school tabletop veteran can tell you one thing: The "feel" of tabletop gaming is best enhanced by going back to the days of those awesome tabletop pen-and-paper character sheets.

I can tell you that GRIP got this aspect right! They allowed for easy to contruct character sheets, which were used as fantastic "interfaces" for the Player client software. The Character Sheet was at the heart of the GRIP software, and everyone knew it!

Let's all remember that in REAL tabletop gaming.... all players had one very important "interface". They were holding something in their hands whilst playing a tabletop RPG. Care to guess what that thing is?? You guessed it. It was their own beloved Character's Sheet.

Once again... you really need to make sure that the Character Sheets feature is one of the selling points in your BRPG software. Character Sheets have always been at the heart of traditional tabletop gaming. And I hope that it has an important place in your BRPG software as well.


The rest of the features list are sensible and very tantalizing.

[heruca]

Regarding topic #1: That's the plan, to let the GM have floating licenses which will allow players with only the free demo to connect and play. If that player later decides he likes the software and wants to buy it, he can reimburse the GM for his floating license and the GM can transfer that license permanently to the player, which upgrades the Demo to a Player Client. You might want to do a forum search for "license" and/or "licensing" for more info on this topic.

Regarding topic #2: Although the details haven't been ironed out completely, I'm planning to support digital character sheets, possibly in PDF format. Again, there's more info elsewhere in the forum about this, and now is the perfect time to chime in on your needs. Just keep in mind that BRPG instends to remain system-agnostic.

By the way, there's nothing to prevent people from using their paper character sheets and/or scanned versions of them (I'd put one in the reference folder, so it's always handy). That was actually the original plan, since BRPG is intended as a virtual battlemat, and the only thing battlemats know about your characters are the figures used to represent them.

[erian_7]

For character sheets, all I'd really need is the ability to associate an object for a character (or monster/NPC) with a local file (RTF and PDF support should be sufficient). Right click or some such on the object and have the option to bring up the associated sheet. This would handle character sheets, monster stats, and could even be expanded to other non-living objects on the map (associate a small RTF description of the stats on a door or trap, the info for swimming in various sections of a river, the "read aloud" flavor text for an area since I sometimes forget the cool stuff I wanted to describe to the players, etc.). The GM could make these objects invisible so there are a ready reference for him but not visible to players if appropriate.

I know there is already a Reference folder section, but if I could link just one doc to any given object on the battlemap, that would allow all the customization I'd need to write an entire Battlegrounds-formatted adventure. Heck, if it used just d20 SRD (or other publicly available/licensable rules) they could even be distributed (either freely as marketing material or for a charge).

Of course, I'm a software development PM, so I'm always asking the developers to do stuff that sounds easy but in reality is not...

[heruca]

Excellent suggestion. To some degree, it's already planned. And the part that isn't shouldn't be too hard to implement.

As for the "read-aloud" text, isn't that better handled via the GM's chat macros, since from there it'll automatically go to the chat window for delivery without requiring an additional copy/paste operation?

[erian_7]

I'm actually thinking more along the lines of descriptive reminders (I hate actual "read-aloud" text boxes most of the time--take too much creativity from the GM!) that I'd use over a voice client. I'll almost certainly be using some type of voice option with games I run.