Just finished it last weekend, and I just finished the HOWTO article:

http://www.rpgenome.c...

Let me know what you think! I'll be bringing it to AFnG Monday night for its first test run with Rob's campaign. W00t!

Sean

Sean, this should be on every D&Ders wish list.

I had some reservations, but seeing and playing on it was the best D&D experience I've ever had as a DM. It allows so much strategic freedom to the players and DM during encounters.

Also, I loved the way I could keep track of player's and npc effects during the game.

I definitely need to make me one of these. I don't want to play with a regular map anymore LOL.

Rob

http://www.youtube.co...

It was cool playing on the digital map.

REALLY COOL! Let me plant a bug in your ear by saying that the system you have created is not limited to maps. You could, for example, show pictures, or even animations of the beasties the PCs are about to face. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and a lot of the pictures from digitalblasphemy.com could inspire an entire adventure, or at least be a really good vignette.

In fact, even just with Powerpoint you could include music in specific parts of the adventure, miniature movies (as when the princess is rescued, the major villian dies). You could also use autoshapes to say "The fireball is here. All characters bathed in red, please make saves." With animations, you might even do some really cool ship to ship combat, potentially making space based games more visually appealing. Think of your maps including a backdrop of a nebula with a foreign sun, the hulk of a derelict battlecruiser in the foreground and the characters in spacesuits of a small ship with attack craft coming in for the kill!

What might be really fun is to take this to a con like Dragoncon with some vignettes you and your friends have acted out. Let reps from gaming companies see what you can do with this. Why? Their business model seems to be to revise their rules about every 5 years so they can make money selling rulebooks. What if instead they produced adventures for systems like this at a level players cannot? We pay more for the adventures buy fewer rulebooks and get WAY more out of the adventures! Part RPG, part video game, part movie. Take this to the extreme an include video conferencing and you have, say the possibility of playing out a few key scenes with an actor on the other end of the line. Stargate with Amanda Tapping anyone?

Did I mention I think big sometimes?

Nice, now get to work on the software and then share ;)

Sean

Hey guys, I just posted a Youtube video with a highlight of Friday night's game using the map:

http://www.youtube.co...

Sean

If I thought I could design better software than Powerpoint, I'd be dreaming big indeed! Seriously. You could start with a map like in your video pasted into a Powerpoint slide, as for the next slide, who knows?

Perhaps the characters come upon a strange fungus...



Or maybe the cave opens up onto a lake:

http://www.digitalbla...


All sorts of possibilities!