Dice Rolls Integrated

June 29, 2010

Last time, I showed you EpicTable’s dice roll editor. Since then, I’ve integrated it into the rest of EpicTable. This video demonstrates a number of dice rolls–on the tabletop, ad-hoc rolls to the chat window, and the shortcut gallery for rolls created with the dice roll editor.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

First Flight

June 25, 2010

Last night, my group’s regular Thursday night game was disrupted by one player absent and another delayed. But there’s a silver lining to this story. We took EpicTable out for an initial spin instead of playing!

No, it’s not quite ready for prime time, but the basics–chat, dice rolling, game formation, local tabletop interaction–worked pretty well. Even handouts “worked” if you call showing up at the other participants’ computers as a base64 encoded blob in the log “working”.

The new messaging layer, which has contributed to much of the delay in getting EpicTable out the door, performed flawlessly–which is to say, it was invisible. No port forwarding, no messing with firewalls, no mysterious disconnects.

Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty missing–I hadn’t planned to use it quite yet, so there were still buttons going nowhere, there was no installer, some tabs that were experimental were visible; but for a first flight, it wasn’t too bad. While I’ve “shown” EpicTable a lot via shared screen demos, I’ve never actually put it in the hands of anyone else before now. Thanks go to the guys in my gaming group for pushing me off the cliff while I was still talking about the imperfections in my wings.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development  

Dice Roll Editor Screencast

June 17, 2010

One of my goals for EpicTable is to allow you to play pretty much any RPG you want to play. Part of meeting that goal is supporting rich dice mechanics. If you’re rolling 3d6 or 1d20+5, you can just type that, but many games out there have some pretty interesting dice mechanics that really aren’t practical to enter as text.

Enter the Dice Roll Editor. This editor allows you to build a really wide variety of complex dice rolls. You can save these for easy access later, and ultimately, I’ll integrate the Dice Roll Editor with the Character Sheet Editor, and then you’ll really see something cool. But for now, I’d like to show you how to build a dice roll using the editor.

Actually, I’ll show you how to build several interesting rolls. Here’s a quick catalog:

  1. D&D attack roll (simple sum with modifier)
  2. D&D stat creation roll (“keep 3″ and “reroll 1s”)
  3. World of Darkness “9-again” roll (spawning and success counting)
  4. Don’t Rest Your Head, Discipline/Exhaustion/Madness roll (multiple dice pools of different color, success counting)
  5. My Life with Master roll to “resist the master” with Desperation (multiple dice pools of different die types, “drop 4s”)

I spent some time gathering screenshots, but while a picture may be worth a thousand words, in this case, a video is worth a thousand pictures. So, rather than a horde of screenshots, I have a screencast for you. Let me know what you think. Also, let me know what you think about the length of the screencast too. This one is just over 13 minutes. I have a feeling it should be a little shorter, so some of the later screencasts are apt to be more bite-sized–in the 2-5 minute range.

Credits and Sources: Die images and music by Brennen Reece.

Posted by John Lammers | Filed Under EpicTable Development