There are a great many things that during the initial design for Sagas had to be set aside in an effort to make the game as accessible as possible as well as keep things to a state where I was not including things not necessary to most players who would play a fantasy rpg. In the design we did things like make armor a piece meal concept where you bought and fitted armor pieces into suits. This was scrapped or rather refitted to a design where you just bought a suit of armor. Another concept was to actually have limits to things you can carry in packs. As it stands, only rational thinking allows a GM to say a character cannot simply place whatever they want in their packs. In effect, the backpack is what some of us like to call in most similar situations, a Bond Pocket (named after the N64 game Goldeneye due to James Bond wearing a suit but somehow having an arsenal equipped in the pockets such as 5 or six guns, grenades, and a rocket launcher). Well, I was able to put in a pack inventory system that I wanted but still allow it to basically be ignored if wanted to.

Digital Pen n Paper, by nature of being a computer program, can take these seemingly over-complicated concepts and shrink them down into manageable and accessible ways. It is one of the joys to me of the system. I can now explore all of these things that I wanted to put in and allow them to work for players in a way that can be ignored, or employed at the groups leisure. It satisfies both groups of people without having the seeming unwritten obligation that for some reason having them in a rule book seems to imply. The Sagas rule-books are a collection of examples created with the system, with every component being something you can ignore or forget about it even existing. Yet, somehow, people are convinced that because it is in the book that it must be there for a reason. The truth is, the only reason it is there is to provide examples of how things are created. It doesn’t mean you have to use them or even create them the same way.

DPnP will help with this because I can include all of those things I was afraid to put into the game that would make it seem overly complicated. In suits of armor the original idea is still in place. However, I just created the piecemeal suits for you. So now, I can let you either use the suits and concepts as they stand, or create your own piecemeal suits just like I did. Furthermore, you get it easier as in Digital Pen n Paper the calculations are made for you. Just check a box and away you go.

I wish I had this thing during original design for both Fantasy and Modern. Well, now I will have it for Sci-fi.

Also, coming up, a discussion on release formats for DPnP. There are a ton of ways to get this to market and I want to explore the most attractive concept to the customer. My thought is that the program is useless if no one buys it because it cost too much. Cost will be determined by what the programs offers. So maybe offering smaller versions  of the program, or components is a good way to go. However, like I said, a discussion for a later time. I will be laying out options and setting up a survey for this as I get closer to rolling out the Player Character Generator.

One last note, tons of new stuff rolling out with the character generator. Many new items, new races, etc.

Happy Gaming!

On Tuesday the world changed. To say that it has not is to put your head in the sand and ignore the sheer power and influence that Americans have in the world. We, as a country, have a power that I was utterly shocked to see. It was not a power or influenced imposed on the world. Instead, I saw the world reveal to us that we have a huge impact on the individual people that make up the world. This is not to say that we have a power politically, or a control. Instead this power is the power of influence, and obligation. The world watched with baited breath as we elected our president. The world cheered, and cried, and cheered some more.

I don’t honestly believe that the opinion of the world determined who our president was going to be. What I do believe is that they were as concerned for the direction of our country as we were. They don’t have the right to choose our president, and yet they went through this election with us. They prayed and hoped and watched, hoping that we would make a choice that would help us all.

This is because America is not apart from the world. The citizens of the world seem to believe in something Americans have forgotten. We are the leaders of the free world. Our country stands for something beyond just our own meager boundaries. Our influences, our choices, affect the world like no other country before it. Villagers in Africa feel the weight of our decisions just as strongly as the small towns in Ohio. It has shown me that beyond any doubt America is a guiding light and hope for all countries. Our success is a mark of hope to all people all over the world. When we fail, the world weeps, when we succeed the world cheers.

America showed itself to be the heroes of the world during the Greatest Generation. We changed the fabric of the world. Many would argue that we saved the world. America is the hero of legend to so many people the world over. They watched over the course of the election to see what choice their hero would make.

We have made mistakes in the past. We may have even made a mistake here. However, what matters most is not our mistakes. What matters most is that we learn and grow from them. That is what Tuesday meant to a lot of people. One of America’s greatest mistakes is often referred to as the Great Stain. This week we saw a chapter close on American history. The Great Stain is still there, but we have moved past it. We have grown. We are Americans after all.

That is what makes us the heroes of the world. We move forward and grow from these mistakes. Our choices are not always right, but we always try to correct them. We are striving constantly for hope. And hope exists in the world for us. And so they cheered.

Regardless if President Elect Barrack Obama is a good President in the future, he was a good choice for today. Many wounds were healed in the world. People have hope for us again. Many countries and the people of those countries are proud of us.

In Japan they cheered in the streets. In African villages they feasted and celebrated. In Germany American flags were waved in huge parties. In Spain the front page of the morning papers were plastered with our country, our president. Do we do the same for their leaders? Do our papers headline their elections? Do we gather in groups to watch their elections/coronations? Yet they do this for us.

There are those that say that it should not matter what the world thinks. America has to make the right choice for America. This week showed me that this is not true. The hope of so many people who are not American reside in our choices. Our choices affect the world, and so, now, it does matter to me that the world approves. We are Americans. We are not a world a part. We are part of this world, and in many eyes its leader, and for most we are its hero. While some may call us villain, and many try to destroy us, it is for one simple reason that we remain who we are. WE NEVER STOP TRYING TO BE BETTER THAN WHAT WE ARE.

Right now some of us are divided. Many people opposed Obama and think that we, as a country, made a poor choice. They are afraid of the future because their ideals lost to a vote they do not agree with. For those of you who believe this I have this to say.

I do not agree with much of Obama’s plans. I also fear for some changes that he will try to make. I also do not agree with one-party rule. That being said, we cannot allow this to divide us. All Americans, and the world, fear the future. We are going to be victims of his success or failure. We are all in this together. The world, the country, you and me. We must put aside our fears and offer hope. We must come together behind this man who is our president and offer our hands to help. We may not agree, but I know one thing. If we allow our differences to build walls we will accomplish nothing. We must grit our teeth, and accept that we are not supporting a Democrat, or the ideals of the Democratic Party. We are supporting our country now. Please, do not feel betrayed by McCain’s loss. The country chose, not the Democratic Party. George Bush did not lose  the election for McCain. The world is in peril and our country decided that Obama is the man to lead us through these challenges. We do not have to agree on him, but we all agree that we must work together to help our leader lead us through.

As of today, I am no longer an Independent in my mind. I am not a Democrat or a Republican. I am not pro-Obama or against him. I am an American. And I will accept and support our President, even his changes I do not like, until the problems facing our country grow worse through his leadership. If that day should come, I will vote against him. Until that day comes, I am an American, and as an American my President is Barrack Obama. As a citizen of this world, I look to our country, and our leader, for hope. I am only one man, but Barrack Obama, for good or ill, is the voice of a nation, our nation. We must respect that. With the world we cheer for him, or we weep his failure. Above all, we hope that we have learned and that we will continue to. We are the heroes. As heroes, we must band together and fight together. We must take up the sword that lie before us and bear the burden of the honor bestowed upon us by the entire planet.

We must be Americans.

Although while seemingly finnished, I am still planning on encountering a few bugs. This may mean that I will have to pause the clock and fix the bugs. However, I believe we are ready for this test.

I am setting up the time test basically to record how long it takes to build content with the Content Creator to show how much faster and easier it is over not using it. Still, I will have to admit to some shortcuts. I won’t be retyping descriptive text. This will be cut and pasted. However, that is only a small amount of time saved. Even if I were to re-type the text it won’t be 100% accurate for our purposes as writing text is something that is not fairly measured. Besides, there is the fact that I will have to be working to keep the content as accurate tot he player guidebook as possible.

There may also be changes to some content, such as spell sizes, and such. In this respect I may have to revise the player’s guidebook with the updates. So in part, while I am also attempting to test the software, I am also working on a revision of the player’s guidebook at the same time.

So here goes. We are off and running. You can track the time in the DPnP forum by clicking here.

There is still one more wizard to do, one I hadn’t even thought of until yesterday as I was compiling it all together. I have no way to determine relationships between spells and magic skills. That means, as it stands, a player building a character that is say a song magician could have a spell to create frost shards or energy balls. Not realistic for such a character.

Initially, Fantasy Sagas allows Game Masters to make the destinction, and one would think that it would be fine to leave it alone. However, I have to think forward in that I have to remember the program’s ultimate relationship with other programs. Therefore, it has to be addressed now. So I have to create some kind of interface to limit spells and aspects across skills. Sounds easy enough, but there is a programatic relationship I still have to settle on first.

So anyways, I am trying to design this one out and keep it so it does what it needs to, but in a way familiar to all of the other wizards. It shouldn’t take long. The wizard should be simple enough to code up with very few complicated elements. It is mostly a GUI design that will take time.

BTW, at this count Fantasy Sagas content has over 10 wizards to handle adding content. About half of that is specific to Fantasy Sagas. Realistically I am looking at at least 3-5 more.

Anyways, back to work.

I ran into a snag setting up a selection component for the last wizard. It was a major component that will be used in the character creator so it had to be fixed properly. As it is, it is functioning, but with a single minor bug. Still it works. I can get the bug out in the rewrite for the character generator. Still that single component took over two days to finally work out. It is finished, so I am wrapping up the last components. Hopefully, barring any other snags, it will be done by tomorrow afternoon.

Cross your fingers and toes!.

The depth of a universal system is staggering. The depth of E-RPG is unlimited, however, it is also a game with direction. There are universal systems that are relatively vague. E-RPG considered how things worked and made a structure for them. This has been a life saver through this.

When a system seems to have unlimited potential it runs the risk of being to hard to actually deal with. That is one of the reasons for DPnP. It shrinks down the creation of content. However, that is easy to do. I could have done the same with an bunch of excel sheets or something. The truth is that an application designed to make the scope of E-RPG more accessible can do so much more. One of those things is automation.

So this week, as I wrap up the final wizards, it has been about the wizards “talking” to eachother. This means that it simplifies some redundant tasks. For instance, if you notice that in the Fantasy Sagas Player’s Guidebook the skill groups for melee weapons match the equipment groups. So, to make things easier, when you create a melee weapons group in the content creator it builds an equipment group for you. Also, notice how most melee skills (and other ranged skills for that matter) seem to have proficiencies like “per weapon”. Well, that is done for you too. Create a weapon in the item wizard and it automatically adds the weapon to the skill’s proficiency list.

Of course, this is not set in stone. You are not required to have a proficiency list made for you and then keep it. You can still manage the list, add and remove proficiencies. All this really does is take the process down a notch and makes sure you don’t have to do a bunch of back and forth, and redundant, creation.

These are the types of things I am striving for with DPnP. It is not simply an application. Doing that is not doing anything special. There are virtual table top and campaign creation stuff out there. However, while they are focused on simply making you able to do certain things, I am focusing on doing these things in a way that the user will not find it a tedious event.

Imagine the possibilities of creating a detailed campaign in an easy way! This is the type of thing that will truly break down barriers in gaming. What you can do with this would require months of creation for a single team. You can do it in half the time as a single person.

This is it folks. The last portion of the Content Creator. Once these things are talking to each other a test will proceed. I will take the entire Fantasy Sagas Player’s guidebook and create the content in DPnP for the character creator, It is a book that took me years to write. Now, let see what it takes to create the book again in DPnP. Once I finish the creator, I will post a message announcing the start of the data input. I will then keep a log in the DPnP forums on time spent on data entry. We can see how long it takes to make it all come together.

Until then….

Happy Gaming!

I can’t really say with any surety what the release date will be. It is enough for me at this point to know that there will be one. DPnP was something I dreamed up a few years ago. I though I would have to give it up.  Life seems to have put me in the right place, at exactly the right time, with precisely the resources I needed to make it finally happen. I have met the right people, had the right discussions, and even those things in my life that seemed to be a hardship have all come together to conspire a way for me to make this all happen. And now, as I have this thing coming together in such a complete way, I can’t say for certain how I should feel.

Let me put it simply, I had very little programming experience. The dabbling I did with Never Winter Nights was nothing compared to what I have had to do here. Sure, it was a helpful primer. However, programming like this was way beyond any scope I thought was possible. I knew when I embarked on this trip I would have to try, but I have to say that my confidence was only so strong. I often feared that I would find myself way over my head, and floundering, would wind up having to give up all over again. That was my real threat. I don’t know if I could have regained the enthusiasm for the project if I had run into a wall I couldn’t overcome. And to be clear, some of the walls that loomed up looked nearly impassable.

More than once in the past few weeks I had to rethink my general approach, wondering if it was all still possible. One wall met another, and then another. However, like I said, I had the right resources. I read. I mean I read a lot. I dabbled and tried. I threw my hands in the air. I gave up twice. But, as with everything that is worth doing, you eventually come to a point where it all clicks. You just have to hold out for that point. And when it did, it clicked hard.

As I said with the last post, this is now down to just the legwork. The first real milestone will be a content creator that will populate the information for the character generator. Once that is done, there will be new trials, and new tests. I see the walls in the distance. But just to have even this semi-complete utility working and doing exactly what I want it to do is encouragement enough. 

I am sorry if this post seems a little odd, or like I am tooting my horn. It is just something I had to get off my chest. I don’t really go into how things like this feel. When I talk of progress to family and friends it is all about what was physically done, not how I got to this point. Please, don’t think I am trying to brag. I know that to real programmers the stuff I am doing will probably seem fairly basic. Still, I can’t help but feel proud that this thing is coming together, and by my own hand at that.

As for progress: The Content creator is made up of several wizards for creating each campaign resource type. Of those resource wizards I have 3 completely done. I have 1 more almost finished, and should have it done within a day or so. That leaves one more to do completely and another to finish up. That last one is dependant on the other. The only reason that one got started at all is that it depended on two other content creation types (3 wizards for those) so I thought it would be smart to start where I would need the most interaction between content.

Some wizards take longer than others. I finished 2 yesterday, one of which was started after I finished the other. The current wizard I started yesterday and may finish tomorrow or by Tuesday. The next wizard does not seem like it should be as complicated as the current one, but you never know. The final is a biggy and may take as long as the current.

After that, the wizards are done and I can build the actually resources. This is a simple matter of adding stuff from the books into the content creator, with maybe an extra or two just to show some love. There will still be more work to do on the content creator. However, that work is only for the release version. Right now I don’t need to do anything more than get Fantasy Sagas content created and saved. The other bells and whistles can wait until the character creator is finished.

That done, the file can be opened with the character creator (which just has to be set up to take the information). Last is setting up the export files (i.e. setting up the xml and print functions). The XML and print are still beyond my scope. That, like everything else, will be a learn as you go sort of thing. It has worked so far. 

And after I finnish these two, are we done? Not by a long shot. That just gives you a free Player Character Creator. The tru program, what I think will change everything, still has several more components to build. 5 more I think. Maybe more. Some are bigger than others. Some are absolutely huge in scope.

Still, not a single one of them is as overwhelming as the one that I had to start. The one where I knew next to nothing. Now, I know something. At this point, with my excitement up, I believe it is enough from which to build on to get the rest done.

Until next time…

Happy Gaming.

As for DPnP: things are moving along nicely. I have learned more than I ever thought possible within these few weeks. The overall program is taking shape nicely, and I am all but busting to get this wrapped and sent out. The major accomplishments this week was finalizing the core code that makes up the reports and objects that represent the different campaign elements in the Campaign Resource Manager. The CRM is part of the final DPnP release but is not part of the demo release. However, it is completely needed to create all the content for the Player Character Creator. Furthermore, it is also the component that will get some new products out quickly. This is the key component at this point. I hesitate to say (for fear of having to take it back later), but it seems that the key challenges have been overcome, and I just have to fill in the rest of the code. Next I take the data files and finnish up the Player Character Creator. The integration will be the last real challenge. For now, it is all just legwork.

This weekend is actually why I did not post sooner. I was contacted by a local GM interested in the system. He and his group invited me to guest GM their game. That also meant that I was using their chararacters, quickly modified to be used with E-RPG, and running their campaign in its current context. After pages of emails explaining the situation I ran a sidetrack adventure for the group.

The session lasted about 6-8 hours. The entire group was a blast to play with. There were interesting characters all around, and like my other groups, was nothing typical of your fantasy games. In fact, when selecting archetypes to represent (and then be modified) for their characters, they mostly selected NPC’s from the Paradigm sourcebook. There was alot of good role-playing using a wide range of skills. At one point a small combat encounter took place that resulted in a PC death. That was the only real game killer, and luckily it happened towards the end of the night. Once that event occured there was really no getting back on track.

Prepping for the game and then followup took a few days out of the normal development process. I still have some emails to respond to from that as it is. I spent the last two days catching up on the codework for DPnP, having just managed to solve some major roadblocks yesterday that threatened to have me beating my computer with a really big hammer. Roadblocks are past, and a good weekend of gaming, have enspired me to keep going. After I write this I will update some topics in the forums relating to DPnP development, then it is off to get some cofee, fold a load of laundry, then back into the DPnP code.

Until next time,

Happy Gaming.

I’ll have more information, such as thoughts during this development later in the week when I get some more time. Until then, sorry for being brief.

Happy Gaming!

Some may wonder why I would post about being over tasked in one post, and then follow it up with another about taking on something like this. The answer is that the latter is a result of some thought on managing the former. You see, finishing DPnP will actually make my product development faster in the long run. Even finishing the character generator demo will actually advance production by cutting some development process by at least 1/10th of what it was. Once other components are back online, the process will actually be much faster. I should be able to process these ideas of mind quicker than any other method would allow.

The only true difficulty will be the virtual tabletop application, which, as it stands, is so far beyond my ability to program I don’t realistically no a way to accomplish the task. However, that is truly the last component that is needed for development. It may even be something I could outsource or get from someone else in a partnership deal of some sort. The true key to DPnP are the applications that lead up to the actual virtual tabletop. The ability to create and manage your games, and how those are used. These are all details I cannot get into detail with for now.

Its the key components that make up the spine of DPnP. With this completed DPnP will take on its intended role within Ironwood and the gaming community. The virtual table top is a perk, not the actual draw of this project. At least in my eyes. The true draw is the ability for me to complete projects much faster, and much more coherently. In that way, it almost becomes a development tool. But even that sells short the possibilities and scope of the project.

As of this writing a basic character generator is working. It needs the campaign elements added, but overal functionality exists. I even have the actual GUIs working for much of the other components. Tying them together is still a task and requires still more learning.

Desecration testing is still on hold. This weekend I have a serious cold. I am writing this while wrapped in sickness. About the book itself…almost done. It really just needs that final rewrite that must wait until after testing. It is truly a shame to be so close to the end of this project but still be so far away. I eagerly await its release. But it must be handled properly.

The other content stuff I decided to wait until after the coinciding DPnP components are finished. After that I can really spit things out in a much faster and methodical fashion. Truly, the abundance of content one person could release once this is done is staggering. As for ROMP, well, lets just say that the core book has long been done. You won’t hear much more about this until I finish the modules for series one through three at least. At which point Romp will be released in bulk. This will also likely hinge on the development of the DPnP components as focusing on something like Romp will require other projects with DPnP to be finished first.

Will there be a Romp DPnP? Likely not for the end user. There may be a DPnP development tool for Romp games but honestly Romp doesn’t really fit into the DPnP mold. Romp could work better as an actual video game, rather than a virtual RPG simply because if it were to be played online it would leave the GM with nothing to do. This is not an admission to creating anything at all for Romp to be played online. I’m not closing that door, I am just not even looking in that direction at the moment. Romp is, at this point, intended only for table top play. Developing it into a virtual application down the line will remain up for discussion, but only down the line. Absolutely no further talk about it will be answered for until then.

I have also considered my personal programming limitations for DPnP. The truth is, if it appears beyond my resources to get the virtual tabletop to work, I may settle for releasing the development portions separately. While the character generator will remain free, other components will likely be retail. This will do two things. What that means for the xustomer will have to wait until I settle on it. The truth is, I have to weigh the customer’s needs. Does the customer want an online experience, or tools to create offline content?