My Online Pen And Paper RPG Toolset

Being a geek, and a fan of pen and paper rpg games like Dungeons and Dragons and the like, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to play with my friends, due to geographic difficulties, we all live far apart.

After some research I’ve found a number of online programs that help facilitate the kind of pen and paper role playing experience, but they all had their own short comings.

Probably the closest thing to something usable was this site called fantasygrounds. Yet not only being a pay product, but also somewhat difficult to use, as well as requiring java and installation on your system, but also everyone who also wishes to play, i found it to be lacking in what i wanted out of a pen and paper online experience.

So I started working on my own version of something similar to fantasy grounds, but completely web based.

At the moment my creation is about a year and half old and still in development. It runs off of active Server Page Technology, MS SQl 2005 Database and with various Javascript/XML Ajax portions for software application like functionality.

my vision was to have a system that could handle character sheets, online chat, dynamic dice rolling, monster creation, town creation, treasure generator, equipment log, combat calculator, campaign editor, world generator.

Well at the moment i woudl say the product is version 0.5 and still in alpha stage of development.

The Chat application works, and is able to handle rather complex dice rolling algorithms such as roll 1d20+2d6+3d4+5 and will randomly generate a value from a twenty sided die, added with the values of two six sided dice with three four sided dice adding five to the total. This is all don with graphical representations of the dice, what they rolled and the final sum of the roll. It also handles the legend of the five rings d10 system of roll x keep y style of dicing.

At the moment however my main issues are that i cannot currently post my site online for use as I donnot have a host that serves sql 2005. also I cannot host at home due to complications of my ISP and my lack of SQL 2005 license for a hosted website.

In retrospect I wish I designed this platform off of PHP, but my knowledge of PHP is somewhat lacking for the more complex portions of design so ASP is where I started and where i intend to end it.

While it would be nice to use the tool sets for some sort of monetary gain, since i am the only developer at the moment, and i use large quantities of images and materials i have collected from online I am unsure if I could ever get a license to make money off of this thing without wotc or other companies hunting me down for reusing their work.

anyway though I do plan to use this product with my friends eventually to facilitate online pen and paper play sometime within the next year or so, and if successful I may port the product to a public royalties free version devoid of any copyrighted material.

anyway i’ll keep posting information about my P&P toolset here in this blog so stay tuned for developments.