nullprogram.com/blog/2010/07/20/
As I get more involved with tabletop RPGs, specifically Dungeons and
Dragons, I find there are some related attributes that I wish these
game systems had. While I'm sure there are systems do have some of
these, I wish whatever I happen to be using had all of them.
Print friendly. The source material tends to be very colorful
and graphical. While this can be a good thing, especially when
illustrating monsters (Show, not tell!), it's bad if you want to print
out your own materials. I want the crucial information available in a
crisp, clean monochrome form of some sort. Not only could I reproduce
material for use in notes and handouts, but I could create my own
condensed sets of information by composing these crisp forms.
For example, in the D&D monster manual each monster has a nice
concise block containing all the information — defenses, health,
abilities, etc. — needed to use that monster. This is great, but it's
on a brownish background, in a red-ish box. So close to being what I
want. But even then, do I have legal permission to reproduce this
information? And so ...
Licensing. The closest thing tabletop gaming has to a Free
Software license would be
the Open
Game License (OGL), which is still pretty restrictive. I would
love for the source materials to be licensed at least loosely enough
that I could print out my own copies for cheap (assuming they are
print friendly, per above). Have some new players sitting down at the
table? To get them started, give them that stapled-together player
handbook you printed out. There's RPG evangelism for you.
The Fudge role-playing
game system has both these attributes down pretty well. The Fudge
manual is very print friendly PDF with explicit permission to share it
with your friends. However, just
as yacc is a compiler
compiler, Fudge is really a game system system, a system for
creating game systems, so it's only part of what is needed to play a
game.
Useful software tools. One specific example is character
creation software. Creating a new character can be burdensome,
especially for a new player. Software that allows a player to select
some basic options from a menu and produce a printable, error-free
character sheet can save a lot of time.
Fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons has a character builder, but it is
a humongous piece of junk. It's proprietary, Windows-only, bulky, and
slow. For a program that merely generates printouts based on a few
user selections from some simple menus, it has some extremely
excessive system requirements (much higher than the ones they
claim). And it requires a reboot to install too. A human can produce
the same results by hand inside of a half hour, so for a computer
there is virtually no computation involved. So what is it doing? Worse
of all, the fourth edition license expressly forbids competing
character creation software, so no one can legally produce a
reasonable one. All this thing should be is a database of available
character abilities, some character sheet logic, and a postscript
printer.
Fortunately there are some decent, generic world generation tools for
GMs out there, such
as
random inn
generators,
random
dungeon
generators, and so
on. And
another one. I've mentioned this
before.
If you know any systems that fit the above descriptions well, go ahead
and link them in the comments!