Roll20 Design Philosophy?

I was wondering what the design philosophy around Roll20 looks like? This is more of a general discussion thought, and I was curious how people feel such a product should work. Often, the artist and the art buyer have different opinions of what they want from a given work of art. The basic idea I get from reading the main page, listening to the videos, and seeing how people are talking about it is: Roll20 is a surrogate for having a place inside of which to play our favorite games, and a surface on which to play them; not specific games, but pointedly any game. It is the room in which we gather (spread across the entire world) and the table, on which we organize our gaming parts. Many of us have found ways to use the Internet to game in the past. This is an entirely new method; the VOIP/scifi-vid-phone grade answer we have been looking for, which others have cobbled together out of Skype and other third party apps. This is the same sort of solution, only with all of the extra crud shaved off that we don't need; specialized to our goals. Also, a more personal goal... a place for many of us to rally around to play. So... is Roll20 the room? The table? More? Less? PS - Thanks for doing this guys, for the community, and for finding a way to bring a lot of us together. I'm sure those of us who will hit this Beta are folks who care about the topic pretty strongly, many of us having played for decades, and you just gave us the equivalent of that loaner basement where everyone can gather to game. Only you included the airfare for bringing our friends to that basement from all over the planet. That is... commendable, if not heroic.

Riley and I talk about the "table" a lot. We want to gather people around the table. To put things on the table and share them between us. There are things in our "laps" so to speak that aren't on the table, to torture the metaphor. But that's where our focus lies. At some point I'm going to play some checkers on the table, just because. :) "System agnostic" and "storytelling" are the two other buzz phrases we throw around a lot. We used some other systems previously to try to play tabletop games, and they were a huge pain. I was GMing at that point and while I could do it... the time was intensive. Then the games themselves were buggy and plagued with constant player drops which took effort to recover from. Simplicity has been a big push. Also feel like pointing out that this is all Riley. Honestly, 90% of the brute force, sheer will programming is him. I'm just a dude that he wants to play tabletop games with that can help with organization and brainstorming. We're collecting all suggestions at this point, but I'd say in the next month (if not the next week) we'll be clearly establishing our "we're not doing this" lines. And most of them will be things that have no place at a table. Will there be some more macros? Sure. But to take it to the levels some people are requesting has nothing to do with tabletop gaming. The GM for my current real world every-other-week table top games dropped in our livestream the other night and commented that "for better or worse, I felt like I was watching a bunch of folks play their regular game." And that's the perfect response to Roll20. People will find other uses and ways to fiddle with the system... but "for better or worse", I'd love for that to be the feeling we most often get from observers.

Also feel like pointing out that this is all Riley. Honestly, 90% of the brute force, sheer will programming is him. I'm just a dude that he wants to play tabletop games with that can help with organization and brainstorming. That makes you the Staff Dreamer/Community Manager--you're answering the community questions right now, as well as Riley. So buck up, you've got your own role to play here. Pun not originally intended, of course. I've been watching discussion on the other feeds and talking Roll20 over with my own crew, many of whom have 10-20 years or so of play under them... by that, I mean they are incredibly stuck in their ways. I know I can be at times. However, it has drawn my attention to a tendency for people to encourage feature creep. When you mentioned finding the "we're not doing this" line, that was what prompted me to even talk about this topic. Where will the line be? My brain took it somewhere on my own--feel free to ignore it... This is what I was thinking: If Roll20 is a table, and it is where people come to play, then you might want to avoid ever adding -anything- more than a table can be used for. You can put stuff on it (mapping), you can roll on it (dice), you can sit at it (video/audio), you can pass notes (chat), etc... You guys seem to have all of the basics covered along there. However, in reality... I can also stick my laptop on it and access my entire library. People haven't yet begun asking for the really unreasonable kind of stuff over in suggestions yet, but I anticipate they well without remembering they have the whole rest of the Internet to use. I saw a modules notation when I first signed in... Will there be any community-accessible API modules? Maybe a module for incorporating sections (alternate pages at the side) while logged in, using other website's api? I hate to use that "social-networking" idea that people kick around so much these days... but it seems very convenient that all of that is out there, in the net, and you could simply be the fast way for people to redirect to it. Rather than doing what everyone else is focusing on, you (and by you, I mean Riley) could build a few modules to let people have those things they want and let other people do the heavy lifting. Might take care of a lot of the potential "Well, we're not doing ." kind of requests... Pointing out at the Internet, nodding and smiling, while saying "Go get it, boy. Free stuff out on the Internet." ;) Regardless... thanks for the work you (everybody) are doing. This is shaping up pretty well so far, and I see a bright future ahead for it.

One of the things I love the most so far is the simplicity of it. I'm coming from Maptool, and there's a lot of things you CAN do, but I'm no longer convinced you SHOULD do. I always tried to apply the KISS mentality, but I still used auto revealing fog of war, vision blocking layers, and dynamic light sources. I also spent at least twice as long creating a dungeon in Maptool as I did in Roll20 (and that's barely knowing what I'm doing in here and learning by exploration.) There's also the curse of complexity. Some of my Maptool maps sucked ram at an alarming pace, and I'd be suffering severe lag, crashes and playability issues. At some point, I stopped and asked myself "Do vision blocking layers and dynamic lighting enhance my game? Are they worth having to stop in the middle of a battle so I can relaunch the application because it stopped responding?" In the real world, if I was playing around the table with my friends, we'd have tiles, or a poster map, or a hastily scribbled dungeon on poster paper or a wet-erase map. If I didn't want you to see a mini, I'd take it off the table. Fog of war meant not drawing the next room until the party got there. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that more isn't always better. Fast, intuitive and easy are. Thanks for making a VT that just works the way I imagine it should, and allows me to get together around the table with my friends to kill some goblins, despite the fact that we live hundreds of miles away from each other. Considering how early in the beta we are, I'm really impressed with how well it works already.

Well, I hesitate to pronounce what that philosophy of the project is, since I am not so close to the designers as to know. And I really couldn't dictate what the philosophy ought to be. All I can reasonably address is what I am hoping for. I am hoping for an on-line roleplaying environment that solves the problems that arise out of the players not being in the same room. I am not nearly so interested in attempts to make the game even better than actually being there. And I'm not very interested at all in a product that solves problems arising out of complicated and cumbersome game rules. I suggest that that would be the dividing line. When someone asks them to code a solution to a problem which, in a face-to-face game, we just cope with, the developers should feel free to say "no".

Because you you wouldn't do something at the real table doesn't mean it shouldn't be incorporated in to a VT. You have to play to the mediums strengths. The following are things I wouldn't / couldn't do at the table but do (or would like to do with a VT) (and most are already covered in Roll20) I wouldn't read verbatim preprepard text, I would cut and paste that text into the chat window. I wouldn't be constantly taking players to one side and telling them indivually snippets of information, I would whisper it to them through chat. I wouldn't prepare as many handouts in a table game, compared to the amount of images I share in a VT. I wouldn't consider sound at the table (most of my F2F gaming is at noisy Cons) I would use it for wolf howls and the like on a VT. I'm sure I could come up with more, but I'll stop! When playing with a VT your attention is more focused and to a specific item, use that item to enhance the game! And to finish with something that isn't yet supported (I think), having the rules and character sheet at the table would be good (PDF/doc integration).

Given that everyone using Roll20 must perforce have a networked computer, e-mail and a PDF reader is sufficient to share rules and character sheets (inasmuch as sharing copyright rules is legal at all). All OS are multithreaded anyway, so having a PDF reader open in another window is no problem to anyone. Duplicating standard functions and bolting everything together into a Swiss army knife application doesn't improve the user experience, it just makes programming and maintenance difficult and blows out bandwidth with redundant downloads. Playing to the strengths of networked computers gives you WoW and "Star Wars: the Old Republic". Those are fine, but we don't need to have them re-invented.

So why have video and chat in R20, you could use Skype, google, etc. I thought the idea was to have everything you need in one window, you don't play with multiple tables... ;)

We don't use Skype because it doesn't support videoconferencing on the Mac. And we don't use iChat AV because it doesn't run on Windows machines. So we have been using Google+ Hangouts, but the sound and video quality are not very good and not well synced, and video keeps freezing. We tried meetings.io but we kept losing video feeds. We have tried using Twiddla and Scriblink for the tabletop, but they don't support moveable tokens and the erasing-and-redrawing was a pest. Roll20 looks as though it is going to offer us video with sharp pictures and smooth movement, properly synchronised with clear sound, and also a whiteboard that we can move tokens on. While we are playing "Spirit of the Century" two players will use the dice roller because they don't have FUDGE dice and doing so will be more convenient than using the online javascript FUDGE dice emulator that one of them wrote. Also, I hope I'm going to be able to adapt the decks and hands of cards engine to keeping track of Fate points, which is clunky in videoconferencing. When we shift back to something like "ForeSight" or "HindSight" those things won't matter so much, except for the whiteboard with tokens. I find the hope that it is going to do things well more appealing than the hope that it will do them all. Note that I don't say "When someone asks them to code a solution to a problem which, in a face-to-face game, we just cope with, the developers *ought to* say 'no'". Only that they should *feel free to* do so. Frills are okay if they are cheap, quick, easy, simple to use, and never go wrong. But they ought not to divert resources away from solving the problem that the app is for. Fixing the problems of physical separation is core mission; making virtuality better than real life is mission creep.

I'm coming from Maptool, and there's a lot of things you CAN do, but I'm no longer convinced you SHOULD do. I think this sums up my position quite succinctly as well, especially with regard to automating and extensive macros. To indulge just a bit of name-dropping, I'm "Rumble" over in the RPTools community, and I'm one of the 5 or so members who really leaped into the "let's automate all the things!" movement that the macro language enabled when it really got powerful. And man, it can be a ton of fun to do that, and see it working well, and getting feedback from people who say "this is amazing." But like Ken, I'm no longer seeing that as a capability that naturally fits in the VTT world (or, in other words, I no longer think VTT requires automation or a scripting language to be complete). The problem I began to see is that as cool as it is to drop automation on everything, frequently (especially when something didn't work) the game session became about the automation, rather than playing. This is not to denigrate the RPTools devs or community, because if I need certain capabilities, MapTool is one hell of an awesome project and the people who surround it are terrific, and it can be used to just play a game without the scripting and FOW animation and so forth and it works beautifully in that role as well. So this is totally not a put-down. But Roll20 is awesome too, and the beta in just a couple days has been sweet, and I think I see the concept behind it taking shape. I look forward to seeing the design direction crystallize the Want to Do and Will Not Do lists, because it will be for the better of the system. Good luck!

But like Ken, I'm no longer seeing that as a capability that naturally fits in the VTT world (or, in other words, I no longer think VTT requires automation or a scripting language to be complete). The problem I began to see is that as cool as it is to drop automation on everything, frequently (especially when something didn't work) the game session became about the automation, rather than playing. Sounds like turning a tabletop game into a video game, really. Automating all of the system takes away a lot of the opportunities for the system side of ad-libbing on the GM's part. I constantly tweak and modify things, but if I used a huge developed macro structure to run my games, I'd never want to tweak anything. Mostly out of fear of the debugging process it could bring on every time I did it. I've programmed--I wouldn't want it to be my hobby. My biggest worry with taking the game from the table to the virtual-table has come down to the tendency for RPG to have two meanings, roleplaying game, and roleplaying VIDEOgame. The first is a series of oral traditions with a balancing system to figure out if anyone is making unfair assertions in play, coupled with a reward system to keep people interested; whereas the second is a railroaded narrative with an end goal and fully automated counterbalances. It's like driving manual versus automatic. One you can get your hands dirty with, the other prevents you from seeing the innards. I'd much rather, as a GM, that my hands get dirty all the time... The story comes first, that is where the enjoyment comes from, the system is just how we do it. I think I may have to adopt some of the 'System Agnosticism' idea into my game design work. It feels very compatible with the newer more narrative-targeted tabletop RPGs I've come across. I think the reason many of us love to GM/DM/ST/Keep/etc so much is because we get to play in the world mechanics.

I think that it basically comes down to solidifying the idea that the virtual table is representative of a physical table, and that anything on the table needs to have the equivalent of 'physical' properties. A lot of VTTs focus on the miniature map as a sort of virtual world, which is fine, as long as the mechanics of the game are meant to simulate the mechanics of this imagined world (the mechanics are 'in-world'). But for games that are either not miniature based, or which have a lot of meta-object (bennies, cards, gem tokens, notecards, etc), the focus on 'the map is the world' can make using many VTTs for these sorts of games too inconvenient to use. Automating specific mechanics and other such conveniences is cool, but those are fundamentally less important to system agnosticism than recreating the sense of physical space that allows the full scope of tabletop games, from D&D to wargames to poker, to work.

Riley and I talk about the "table" a lot. We want to gather people around the table. To put things on the table and share them between us. There are things in our "laps" so to speak that aren't on the table, to torture the metaphor. But that's where our focus lies. At some point I'm going to play some checkers on the table, just because. :) "System agnostic" and "storytelling" are the two other buzz phrases we throw around a lot. Given the emphasis you place on storytelling I am rather surprised to find the beta product places so much emphasis on the boardgamey aspects of D&D. I expected more influence from the Story Games movement.

Many of the Story emphasized games I've played had so little in the way of system that you could almost play it over any sort of group voice environment. Although, the immediate example that wouldn't work over Roll20 that comes to mind is Dread. If you've never seen Dread, it's an amazingly simple game, if a little heavy on the DM pre-game, but... well, it uses Jenga as its primary mechanic. If you knock the tower over, your character dies. Its unnerved the hell out of players. Most of the other story games don't seem to require even that much work most of the time. Be curious if someone found a way to successfully run a game of A Flower for Mara over Roll20. Might lose something in translation, though. Agemegos, what kind of stuff would you suggest building into something like Roll20 to help with story games? It's a very curious thought, and I'm drawing kind of a blank, personally.

I can't speak for Agemegos, but here's my take on how a virtual tabletop could support some story games. Fiasco: all I need to be able to do is put some index cards on the table and write on them. It'd also be nice if each video chat window could be arranged on the page as well, so as to imitate sitting around the table. The game revolves around the relationships that you have with those sitting next to you. Everything else can already be handled by Roll20. Primetime Adventures: Need to freely handle a deck of cards between players. Fan-mail (a sort of currency) could be handled pretty easily by tokens. Danger Patrol: Again, index cards with arbitrary text placed in spatially-significant locations. 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars: One range-map and a handful of gem-tokens. Smallville: The first session is almost nothing but placing index cards and drawing lines between them to create a convoluted relationship map. Basically, it all comes down to space. No, most of the story games would not really benefit from the sort of automation and macros that being on a computer can provide. But to me, ~that's not the point of a virtual tabletop~. For these sorts of games, all that the virtual tabletop needs to be is right there in the name: a virtual tabletop. They need a way to recreate that meeting place, that sense that "we are all ~here~ to play a game." They need to facilitate intuitive and fast interaction between people...not between mechanics. **Now, don't get me wrong, the tabletops that have crazy macros to automate in-world mechanics are really quite cool; I just think that that particular niche has already been filled several times over.

I've suggested a few things that have been taken up: tokens that the GM can issue and players exchange like poker chips; decks of cards that can be face up, face down, in players' hands, on the table, in the discard pile, etc. 'Fiasco' and I think 'Dogs in the Vineyard' would benefit from dice that could be thrown onto the table and then moved around like counters. A convenient way to lay out the hooks and flags of PCs so that they can all be seen at once. A convenient way of laying out all the Aspects of the PCs, the scene etc., dynamically revealing Aspects, and allowing Declarations, with a way to non-verbally signal compels, tags, and invokes would be handy for FATE. In fact one of my players is talking of writing just such a thing using the Google+ Hangouts API—when he has finished his book. But I don't really expect all that from a system-agnostic virtual RPG environment. Just video-conferencing, a shared whiteboard with tokens you can move without having to erase and redraw, notes you can write on and move, cards that you can treat like playing cards, and counters like poker chips. My surprise was not so much that anything that storytelling needs was missing, but that so much that storytelling doesn't need was provided. Snap-to-grid. A jukebox. Fog-of-war. HP/fatigue/mana tracking, auras, status indicators. I have no complaints about those things. It's just that I'm not used to their being involved in RP—I think of them as computer-game things—so I was surprised to see a facility ostensibly tasked to story-telling place so much emphasis on computer-assisted boardgaming.

Sorry. The "quote"and "edit" links in this forum are invisible on the iPad. I guessed where "edit" might be and got the wrong one.

It's just that I'm not used to their being involved in RP—I think of them as computer-game things—so I was surprised to see a facility ostensibly tasked to story-telling place so much emphasis on computer-assisted boardgaming. Well, as we saw in the videos early on, the dev team is playing D&D currently and have been throughout development, so it makes sense that some of the "common sense" features to first pop up would be to facilitate D&D. Having started in blue book land once upon a time, most of it just seemed completely reasonable to me out of hand. It's only been in recent years that I've started to do the Story Game thing myself. My own custom system is pretty minimalist and could be run on here very easily, with 90% of the features not doing anything for me. As you've said before, Agem, whiteboard and voice chat. However, I think between you and Zachary, we may have identified a new need: tangible note cards/handouts. Right now our handouts have no place on the table , so to speak. Not even the option of it. A lot of the notecard mechanics could work just fine if we just had a manner with which to tag tokens (symbolic of notecards) and have them trigger the opening of specific Handouts for the player. Either to simulate the experience of picking up a notecard and reading it, or to create placeable notes ala the Help Wanted on a tavern wall. That would cover a lot of our needs in reference to more Story-Oriented games. Story Games tend to use a lot of tangible mechanics, whereas D&D uses a lot of abstracted mechanics, so the philosophies of how the games are played and what your goals are can be very different. Your goal in a Story Game is often to get everyone's hands dirty, so to speak, with everyone poking at the plot, discussing character developments, method roleplaying, etc. In D&D, it is to generate a story, while using the statistics and mechanics to prevent player-on-player collisions over what does or does not happen, and to represent the environmental effects of a world. D&D translates more easily into video games for very good reason. TSR figured that out pretty early on themselves. If it hasn't been addressed over in the suggestions area, we might want to frame it this way: "For the games that don't rely on simulationist mechanics, we need a way to have a manner in which people can place or stack symbolic notecard tokens on the table that can link to handouts. An analogous example would be stacking cards on a boardgame, which players have to pick up on their turns, letting them read whether or not they got hit with a Luxury Tax or a Get Out of Jail Free card." I've noticed that boardgames get by far the most exposure across all of gaming culture.

Perhaps, though my friends tend more to be LARPers than boardgamers. One of the things that strikes me as strange in this beta test is that many of the participants are calling for Roll20 to include capacities that they have obviously been doing without for years while playing in person. You don't have fog-of-war, dynamic lighting, a sight-blocking layer, invisible tokens, automatic handling of trueseeing and infravision, separate line-of-sight handling for each PC, area-effect hit-point adjustment, automatic damage-over-time calculation, status indicators, self-timing status effects, text chat, text macros, a funky tape-measure that measures not according to distance but according to a kludgey metric based on counting because the game assumes that you can't measure, or a gadget to add up dice, count successes, and re-roll 10s and 1s as the game rules require at any game table. Yet we all get by very happily. But a *lot* of beta testers say that they want such things in Roll20. It really seems to me that they want, and believe this project is intended to deliver, not a virtual gaming table, not a solution to the problem that their players are in different cities and states, but a tool to make their game more like a computer game. Okay, they want what they want. And unless performance nosedives it's no skin off my nose. But it seems to me that that is a dead end. The bottleneck where the GM communicates his or her designs to the computer means that set-up time becomes prohibitive, and that the flow of the game is constantly halted while the GM fiddles with the mapping and reveal tools. The more you make an RPG like an MMO the less the GM can compete with teams of professional designers, and the more your game turns from a superior alternative to computer adventure games into an inferior rival to them. If others want to take that risk that is of course their choice. I'm explaining my choice, not urging that others share it. The thing is that Roll20 /says/ that it's about games that tell a story. That being the case I'm just surprised to see so much emphasis on location-driven adventures (which I conceive as the opposite of plot-driven adventures) and the "there was a big fight and we won" resolution.

But a *lot* of beta testers say that they want such things in Roll20. Well, I'm curious then what everyone's background is, then. Because we probably all come from a variety of game settings. Although, I totally agree on the unless-performance-nosedives point... I suspect its why Riley and Nolan keep mentioning the need for simplicity. Every time something at the frontend gets more complicated, it ups the hardware requirements of the users, and any time something at the backend gets more complicated, or adds more variables, the server requirements go up. Which is a big part of the business aspect of this little venture. ...I'm just surprised to see so much emphasis on location-driven adventures (which I conceive as the opposite of plot-driven adventures) and the "there was a big fight and we won" resolution. You just described D&D, and the predominant forms of gaming culture around it. You said it yourself, more of your friends are into LARP than boardgames. I have friends who do indie Story Games, and they all favor LARP, while most of the friends I play with on occasion that are hardcore D&D typically run wargames. It's the two factions we're seeing coalesce out of the suggestions and requests area right now. But at the same time, I've known D&D players who could not, for the life of them, separate the story in play from the battlemat they played it on. It could be what we're discussing is a subcultural difference. Which will likely mean we need to remind ourselves to be the civil ones; it's really easy to get into an ideological argument when you start questioning not whether the site is a good table, but what a table is to begin with. Y'know?

Well, I'm curious then what everyone's background is, then. Because we probably all come from a variety of game settings. Interesting, but probably grist for another mill. I'll start a discussion to save derailing this one. Although, I totally agree on the unless-performance-nosedives point... Word. If I don't like a feature, or don't see a need for a feature, I'm just going to not use that feature. No problem for anyone. But if Roll20 crashes during games, delivers unintelligible or badly-lagged audio, loses or mislays tokens, scrambles the draw layer on the tabletop, or chews unreasonably at my download allowance I'm not going to use it at all. And neither are a lot of other gamers. ...I'm just surprised to see so much emphasis on location-driven adventures (which I conceive as the opposite of plot-driven adventures) and the "there was a big fight and we won" resolution. You just described D&D, and the predominant forms of gaming culture around it. I'm aware of that. I used to play D&D myself until 1982. I know what D&D is like, and that there is lots of it out there. It's just a surprise to open a tin that says "RPGs that tell a story" and find D&D inside. You said it yourself, more of your friends are into LARP than boardgames. Yeah, though one plays D&D once a month because she can't find a group to play anything else, and several of them are into WoW and SWOR. Which will likely mean we need to remind ourselves to be the civil ones; it's really easy to get into an ideological argument when you start questioning not whether the site is a good table, but what a table is to begin with. Y'know? Sorry, I'll write more guardedly in future.

Sorry, I'll write more guardedly in future. Nah, I wasn't suggesting you're being overly aggressive. Just cautiously noting that we should be careful about it. We may be able to moderate such an argument if it comes around, but the last thing we want to do is have people come in to side with one way or another, and then have to lock the thread down to keep it from imploding. I've seen that discussion turn brutal quickly on other forums when people get into it, around The Forge, et al. Personally, I'm more curious about where common ground can be found. I'm pretty much nonpartisan on the Story-vs-Simulationism argument. What do you think of the idea of being able to post cards directly to the table, that link to handouts? Would that help for any of the Story gaming you do? If so, I'll write the suggestion up long-form and post it in the Suggestions forum.

I hope you two don't mind me jumping in again... What do you think of the idea of being able to post cards directly to the table, that link to handouts? Would that help for any of the Story gaming you do? If so, I'll write the suggestion up long-form and post it in the Suggestions forum. For the games I play, merely being able to place and write on the index cards would be enough. Linking them to handouts could be useful, but it wouldn't be a feature that I'd use much, personally. Unless the player could draw on that handout. Then I'd use it quite a bit. Personally, I'm more curious about where common ground can be found. Just a quick note on common ground. If Roll20 is able to successfully reproduce the experience of being at a physical table, then, by definition, it will support every game system that can be played at a physical table. Sure, you might miss out on fog of war or dozens of dice-rolling styles, but as Agemegos said...if you did it with real dice on a real table, then you don't need the computer to do it for you. If those 'physical' aspects of the table take a second seat to the cool computer features, then those of us who really just want to play at a table with non-local friends don't have much of a place to go. And that's really my worry. If a player wants the niceties of computer automation, there are plenty of VTTs which have already implemented those, and have communities to back them up (see MapTool, OpenRPG, Fantasy Grounds, iTabletop, Battleground RPG, and many more). But if I want a pickup game of Fiasco, or a game of Warrior Heroes, or a campaign of Smallville, the software landscape becomes pretty bare. Sure, there are some solutions out there (such as Google Docs), but there is a cost to playing a game designed for a tabletop on something other than a tabletop, and often I find that cost makes playing those games prohibitively inconvenient. Now, if Roll20 can be both a table-top replacement ~and~ a mechanics automation tool, then more power to it. There are games I play where I think it'd be fun to use the cool computer-y features; but the games I most want to play online wouldn't need those, while the games which would use those features would still be playable without them.

What do you think of the idea of being able to post cards directly to the table, that link to handouts? Would that help for any of the Story gaming you do? I'm probably not the best person to ask, since I'm really only a toe-dipping newcomer on the Indie Games and Story Games scene. My usual approach to RPGs is very talky, and I have only recently discovered the use of poker chips, of passing out index cards for players to write on, shuffle, and deal again, and that sort of thing. I think you would get more useful information from Alanna, who has done wonderful work setting up her "Fiasco" campaign.

Well, what I've been thinking about the index card thing is that resolution on the screen isn't really good for that sort of thing. Not unless everyone is rocking a 40+ inch monitor, which I doubt. So what I was thinking is that we could ask for effectively card-like tokens that we can right on the surface of, but since a notecard can HOLD more information in the physical format, we might want to be able to just use the cards to trigger the opening of more detailed documents, so that we can actually write in as much information as we want. Kind of like... clicking on the card to zoom in, and read all of the text. And I think, Agem, that you have as valid an opinion on it as any of us... We all muck around with systems for fun it seems like. We may not all have a ton of experience with this particular way of playing--I do a lot more simulation than Story, as I find few rare players to do Story games with--but that doesn't mean we cannot conceive of such things. :) @Zachary: Its possible that modules may account for some of the ability to determine which kind of game a campaign will be, at least somewhat. I see your point on things... but I suspect these kinds of conversations, as well as the others regarding what people literally have on their tables, which will point out the other things we do in relation to our tables while using them. Whispers make a great substitute for passing notes, for example. Not something we do -on- the table, though, but we do it at the table. I think that is another place for confusion in discussions about this medium... Defining if it is just the table, or if it is also the space around it in the room. The table-space, moreso than just the table. In general, I think I'll count this project successful if I can play a game of Deadlands, Pathfinder, Apocalypse World, Call of Cthulhu, and my homebrew system on it. Luckily, my homebrew is easy to please. A single d6, but only when someone sacrifices something to get it. I think versatility is the main quality I seek in it.

Tangent: how do you get the quoted author's name to show up in a blockquote? I've added the rel="name" bit, but it only sometimes seems to work... Well, what I've been thinking about the index card thing is that resolution on the screen isn't really good for that sort of thing. Not unless everyone is rocking a 40+ inch monitor, which I doubt. So what I was thinking is that we could ask for effectively card-like tokens that we can right on the surface of, but since a notecard can HOLD more information in the physical format, we might want to be able to just use the cards to trigger the opening of more detailed documents, so that we can actually write in as much information as we want. Kind of like... clicking on the card to zoom in, and read all of the text. I agree that monitor resolution will limit the ability to display all the information we might want at once on screen. If handouts become editable / drawable while we're looking at them, then I'd totally think the idea of linking tokens to handouts would work great, for many things (still might be overkill if I just need an index card with 3-5 words on it, but I can think of plenty of other uses). Another possible solution would be to make navigating the table itself easier. I know that a hand tool has been mentions (similar to the 'drag to pan' features of Google maps and others). I could also see a sort of 'bookmark' token being made, where each each bookmark corresponds to a button or hotkey. Press the key and the screen view automatically jumps to center the bookmark token. This could let a player place a bookmark on their section of the table (to hold things like plot points, image of char sheet, etc), and then quickly jump back to the 'main' part of the table, whether that be a miniature map, a pile of index cards, of whatever else they'd like to focus on. I think that is another place for confusion in discussions about this medium... Defining if it is just the table, or if it is also the space around it in the room. The table-space, moreso than just the table. Hmm, I think that 'defining the table-space' is actually a great way to put what I'd most like to see out of the system. It seems that many of the more simulated VTTs do their best to either remove or abstract away the table-space. But your point about whispering as an alternative to passing notes is a great one. No, it won't be possible to take all of that actions that we perform in a physical room and translate them to a virtual room. But analog actions are possible, and in many cases more convenient. ======================= Approaching 'philosophy of Roll20' a little differently for a moment. In another thread, Chris Clouser said: Perhaps I'm not really representative, but I don't look at a VTT for table-similar, I'm looking for "table-improved," and easing fiddle like tracking invisible tokens or keeping a stock of minis handy until needed or easily manipulating the tokens about the map, and so forth is part of that for me. The workarounds are functional, of course, but they seem like taking the long way. I think that hoping for a 'table-improved' VTT is a good thing, but I'd like to differentiate between two types of features for a moment. On the one hand, we have features that ~enable~ online play. On the other hand we have features that ~enhance~ play. (A note: by 'enable', I mean 'make it convenient enough to be worth doing'. I recognize that, if I really wanted to, I could play most any game online in some fashion. It's just that often times the frustration of trying to make it work outweighs the enjoyment of playing) It seems that a lot of the 'cool' feature requests being made are features to enhance a certain style of play, largely because the features needed to enable that style of play already exist. Specifically, it's already possible to run a D&D style miniatures game, so the people who want to do so are naturally looking to enhance the running of those games now. That is totally understandable, and I don't fault any of them for that. However, there are a great many styles of game which have enabling features that don't yet exist. Admittedly, many of that games that I wish to run fall into this category, so I am likely biased here. But I would be more interested in seeing these enabling features be added, so that the software supports a wider variety of games; especially games which aren't really supported anywhere else online. Once a wider variety of games are ~enabled~ by the software, then I'm all for enhancing the most popular ones. So, to get back to the previous discussion a little bit; I'm all for studying and creating a virtual 'table-space.' I think that by allowing players to interact with each other and the virtual space easily and efficiently, the developers will get the most bang for their buck, as far as the goal of system agnosticism goes.

It may be that it only puts in the name the first time the person is quoted, much like in journal/science/historical articles. So if you quoted me the first time, the second time it may not work. But that's a wild guess. I've just been using the Quote button to generate the hypertext. So, to get back to the previous discussion a little bit; I'm all for studying and creating a virtual 'table-space.' I think that by allowing players to interact with each other and the virtual space easily and efficiently, the developers will get the most bang for their buck, as far as the goal of system agnosticism goes. This brings to mind the question of whether one creates tools with a very broad capability of use (whiteboard) which people can make their own, or if you create targeted tools (turn tracker) that server a specific purpose, but allow the site to minimize the impact by micromanaging how the tool works. I'm a big fan of generalized tools.. but having been a developer myself once upon a time, the idea gives me cold sweats. The targeted stuff is a known quantity, whereas you can't predict the outcome of a generalized tool that people will keep finding new uses for.

This brings to mind the question of whether one creates tools with a very broad capability of use (whiteboard) which people can make their own, or if you create targeted tools (turn tracker) that server a specific purpose, but allow the site to minimize the impact by micromanaging how the tool works. That question (generalized vs specific) is the heart of the issue I think, and it's a question that can really only be answered by the developers. They mentioned that they'd have an update sometime this month regarding the future of the product, so I guess we'll have to wait and see what they've decided. Even in the likely event that Roll20 doesn't support the breadth of games that I've advocated for, I very much still want to see the project succeed at whatever goals it does set for itself, even if it boils down to making a tabletop that can easily support D&D and other, similar games.

Agreed. Hopefully we've left enough in this thread for them to think about, that when they make their big decisions, they have an inkling what some of us think on it. That is the best we can hope for, I imagine.

One of the players in my game last night put the big issue very well. If Roll20 is to succeed in creating and holding onto its own pool of users, it has to support and draw attention to the things that a group of role-players do better than a computer. The more it focusses attention and resources on the computers doing things the more it draws itself into competition with MMOs, a competition that it can't win because no GM can possibly set things up as well and thoroughly as a team of professional content developers. The Roll20 developers have to resist the pressure to obscure the core experience of playing RPGs with people behind a layer of what looks like a computer game, because (my player says) that will only attract a class of players who really want an improved MMO experience rather than an online tabletop experience, and who will inevitably abandon Roll20 for WoW.

Which of course brings into question the overlap of RPG, Video RPG, and MMORPG. It isn't talked about a lot, but many of the MMOs started dropping the RP from RPG on purpose, to prevent the exact opposite of what you're describing, Age'. They wanted to keep people craving the content, later when free-to-play kicked in, especially. They wanted people to want the content, not the playing experience, even if they were paying on a monthly basis for a cooperative social video game. A good example would be Jack, the lead developer from Cryptic, while working on City of Heroes. Another division in the market to consider.

Sorry, drifting way off topic for a moment there.

Well, we're in the General (& Off-Topic!) forum, so no worries.