Sagas RPG.com

It is Sunday, and that usually means a blog post, then some early morning gaming with my father (we play Battlefield 2 at least once a week online) and then work. However, today, a fierce rainstorm looms on the horizon and being that I lost one motherboard to these wonderful Florida storms, I am playing it safe and shutting things down soon. However, I have just enough time, I think, to post about this week.

I finally finished up the Items DLL this week. Having re-written the DLL with the new programming tricks I learned, and learning a few new cool ones along the way, has opened up a world of possibilities in the form of future updates. With the DLL file in its current structure, I can now add things very easily with minimal work in the future. This allows me to respond to user feedback and add things quickly.

I don’t have a development team on this. I have some very vocal testers who have been invaluable in the process that have helped. However, it can’t replace having a team of people cola berating on a project. As such, we only get what I think of putting in, with only my ideas on how to implement them. This means that I expect some feedback on how things could have been done better on release. Having this in mind, I try to program with an eye towards easy updates on how things work. Only time will tell if I succeed.

I have also browsed my only real competitor in this product line. I say this because while there are people making virtual gaming software, there are no companies that I know of, except Wizards of the Coast, deliberately adding a suite of tools to their own product lines. The idea of companies supporting their own products with such software is surprisingly new in the scope in which we are attempting. So I took a look at WotC own software thingy and was less than impressed.

There were some nice things about it. Number one, it is all online so anyone can use it. However, there is a subscription. So the pro is outweighed (in my opinion) by that con. I can’t see charging $9 a month to use their software. Furthermore, their software, while pretty, does very little. It lets you create and possibly manage characters, create encounters, and something else (I can’t remember but it wasn’t that big of a deal). It is surprisingly light on anything actually creative. While there is a house rules version for creating PC’s, I saw now house rules section for actually creating said rules. I also didn’t see anything to really create your own elements like campaign worlds, skills, powers, etc.

So I left my browsing with a feeling that the WotC program is a gimmick that is tagged on to what is essentially paying $9 a month for free access to their official content. That means that what was once free (in the form of their resources) is now subscribed to. It is an interesting model, but not one I can support.

DPnP is not a gimmick. It is a full suite of tools designed to fully realize the potential of E-RPG. The two elements, the DPnP and the printed material, are so closely tied together in my business model that I don’t see how they will be separated in the future. Furthermore, it could open an entirely new way for RPG companies to do business, if they get smart and realise how little investment this can make, and how much it can provide for the players.

While thinking of this, I thought of how greatly it could improve things, I decided to put it to the test, again. It was a self assuring exercise, but I need the validation. As some may know, we have released two spell books of three spells each for about $1.50 per book. This amounts to .50c per spell. I did the original six spells by hand using the player’s guidebook and knocked each book out in about a day or two. I decided to create three new spells and so I came up with three on the spot, and created them. I finished the print ready book of three spells in less than 30 minutes. I had no pre-designed plan for the spells, I just came up with an idea and used the wizard and wrote them up. I had done the same before with races and items to the same effect.

I know it sounds like the same drum I keep beating. You’ll have to forgive my excitement. I have so much involved in this, so many ideas that are coming to fruition with this, that I truly believe that the true measure of DPnP success will not be in its retail sales, but in its effect on other RPG business models. It is something to see, and hopefully you will see it soon.

Happy Gaming!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 9:20 am and is filed under Campaign Resource Manager, DPnP, Developer Blog, Overall Development, Player Character Creator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.