Dice rolls already implemented in EpicTable

Simple rolls

For example, d4, 2d8, etc. EpicTable supports rolling any number of the following dice: d2 (maybe more properly called a coin), d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, d30, d100, and dF (a Fudge die)

Rolls with modifiers

Example: 1d20+5 or 2d4-1

Drop highest or lowest die

I actually don’t have an example of dropping the highest die, but dropping the lowest is fairly common. For instance, in d20 character creation, you sometimes roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die.

Drop specific values

In My Life with Master, you roll d4s and drop any 4s that come up.

Dice rolls still to-be-implemented in EpicTable

“Open-ended” dice rolls

In Savage Worlds, when you roll the highest number on the die (e.g., a 6 on a d6, an 8 on a d8, and so on), you can roll that die again and add it to the original roll.

“Mixed” dice

For instance, you might roll a d4 and a d6 together.

Specific die rolls

Sometimes a roll calls for a specific die. For instance, My Life with Master uses a different colored die for certain bonuses, and In a Wicked Age distinguishes between the d6 with numbers and the d6 with pips.

Die Selection and Dice Roll Evaluation

I use the term “die selection” to denote the process of selecting those dice that are applicable to the roll. For instance, dropping 4s for a My Life with Master roll and dropping the lowest d6 during d20 character creation are instances of what I’m calling “die selection”.

Dice roll evaluation is the term I use for applying any type of function to the results of the roll. For instance, many games simply sum the dice and add any modifiers to come up with a total. I’ve already implemented this behavior for EpicTable. Other games, like Sorcerer and In a Wicked Age, don’t sum their dice but compare them to other players’ rolls. To make this easier, EpicTable will provide a sort evaluator as an alternative to the sum evaluator.

What about resolution mechanics?

Resolution mechanics are the rules by which the success or failure of the dice roll is determined. For instance, the total might be compared against a target or against another player’s roll, or there might be a die-by-die comparison with another player’s roll. EpicTable is unlikely to include resolution mechanics. There are just so many dice mechanics out there, and so many variables that can go into resolving a roll, that it’s a job best left to the GM.

Where do the dice rolls go?

At this moment, EpicTable sends all dice rolls to the chat window. However, for the sake of secret rolls and for games with unusual dice mechanics, such as Dogs in the Vineyard, I’m likely to implement a dice table–a surface on which the dice can be placed and moved around.

How are dice rolled?

It’s possible to enter a dice roll directly from the chat window by typing “/roll 2d8“, for instance. However, I believe it will be more common for you to roll dice from predefined “dice cups” on your character sheet or by selecting dice on the tabletop and using a key or mouse gesture to roll them.

Call for feedback

That pretty much sums up where things stand with respect to EpicTable and dice. I’d love to hear your feedback. What have I forgotten? What other dice functionality do you need to play your game with EpicTable?

I recently saw the third of the Brendan Fraser mummy movies, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which had a scene involving yetis, and well…at least it got me thinking about yetis….

I can’t say that I’d recommend The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I won’t argue that the first two were great, but the combination of mummies, Egypt, and Rachel Weisz destroys my objectivity in a way that China and Maria Bello cannot.

The best thing about this movie, for me, was the yetis. Here we see one making his intimidate check against a villainous goon. The yetis do a nice job of leaping about and throwing bad guys this way and that. (I’m steadfastly refusing to acknowledge that the yetis play American rules football—don’t ruin them for me, they’re all I’ve taken away from that 112 minutes.) Also, the concept of a Tibetan girl who can call the yetis in times of need is an awesome one. Very much a summon nature’s ally kind of trick and one that I’d love to use in a game.

So, fresh from the movie and full of enthusiasm for all things yetian, I collected some yeti lore for you, the kind readers of the EpicTable blog.

• The Yeti entry in occultopedia has an interesting timeline of yeti reports and searches that may be of use to people crafting a yeti-focused adventure
• There’s a recent (August 12, 2008) ABC article about the yeti, if you can believe that: “Losing the Yeti in Forgotten Nation of Bhutan“
• Also from August 2008, it seems that Japanese Explorers are searching the Himalayas for yeti
• The Cryptid Zoo article on the yeti has some info about yeti subtypes and lots of links to other material on them.
• I dug up some D20 yeti stats. These are available in print in the D20 Menace Manual.
• As of the time of this writing, you can learn all about one man’s search for the yeti for approximately 28 cents plus shipping (which is kind of sad, really…)

Yeti Artwork

At considerable risk to my own sense of self-worth, I have slogged through thousands of yeti pics to bring you the very best yeti art the web has to offer. (No warranty express or implied is made by Realityforge LLC regarding the extent to which these are, indeed, the best yeti pictures available, nor as to the number of yeti pics actually perused in pursuit of those shown here.)

Hover for a quick blurb about each.

Customizing Your Speech, Multiple Personas, and Tabs

Notice that in the first line shown in the chat log, Feldspar is outraged at Drayla’s earlier suggestion that they hide from an approaching monster (the ettin). This was accomplished through Feldspar’s player using the Tone of Voice feature. You can see the Tone of Voice selector in the chat input pane near the bottom of the screen. The GM used this same selector to convey the ettin’s anger at finding the adventurers in his cave.

Let’s talk more about that chat input pane. This smaller pane is where players and the GM enter their messages. In this screenshot, we see the GM’s view. He’s opened several tabs so that he can quickly switch between different kinds of interaction. He has his GM tab, a tab in which he’s carrying on a private conversation with Scot (Drayla’s player), and a tab for the ettin. He can add, remove and rename tabs as he sees fit during the game. Players have the same capability to open multiple tabs for different lines of communication.

Each tab allows the user to control whether they’re speaking in-character or out-of-character (the toggle button with the comedy/tragedy masks), which persona they’re speaking as, their tone of voice, and whether they’re speaking to everyone or carrying on a private conversation.

Integrated Dice Rolls

Now, lets take another look at the chat log. Notice the integrated dice rolls. The chat windows shows the result of each die as well as any modifiers and the total score. This example uses rolls from a D20 game, but the dice roller can handle rolls for many games (more about the dice roller later).

Dice rolls can come from a number of sources. One can enter dice rolls directly from the chat input window, but players are likely to make most rolls directly from their character sheet. I’ll show you the dice roller and the integration of dice rolls and character sheets in a later post.

Q & A

Finally, lets see if I can proactively answer a couple questions that I’m guessing you may have:

Can I eliminate or control the size of the portraits in the chat window?

Yes. You won’t be able to make them a lot larger, just from a screen real estate perspective, but you’ll be able to make them smaller or hide them completely.

That chat window looks awfully large…. or My group uses voice chat….

You can resize the chat window, auto-hide it, even close it completely if text chat doesn’t fit into your game.

Can one player play multiple characters?

Absolutely. And he can open a tab (or more) for each character.

How do I keep my players from taking on the personas of NPCs or characters that aren’t theirs?

A player’s choice of personas is limited to the characters he currently controls. The GM can use the GM persona or that of any of the NPCs or monsters currently "in the scene".

What do you mean by "in the scene"?

EpicTable uses the concept of scenes to organize available NPCs, monsters, etc. For example, the PCs are normally in the scene, and the GM brought the ettin into this scene when he started the encounter.

I sometimes write long messages. How do I manage responding to incoming messages? Also, that chat input window looks pretty small….

Not to worry. First off, you can just open up a separate tab or tabs for your lengthier messages and use another to respond to more urgent matters. To give you more room to write, there’s a slider between the input and output panes, so you can make the input pane larger if you need to. Also, the input pane scrolls, so even if you keep it rather small, you don’t have to worry about running up against a brick wall. You can write to your heart’s content.

Credits: Portraits by Fiery Dragon Productions. You can find them on my Links page.

I hadn’t been to GenCon since 1987, when it was still in Milwaukee. (Curiously, neither Milwaukee nor Indianapolis, where GenCon is currently held, is a particularly nice-smelling city…though arguably two weeks in 21 years isn’t a large enough sample size for a fair and balanced olfactory review.)

First off, if you find yourself going to GenCon some year, and you have any interest in registering to participate in a game, don’t try to do it on the day you arrive—even if you arrive two days before the ‘Con starts. Everything was fully booked, and shame on me for not registering for events online, but let me describe the registration process for you.

1. Find a game (better make it a whole list) that you’re interested in and go to a human handling registrations.
2. Lean forward and hold out your badge so the human can squint at your badge’s number and type it into the computer.  (Yes, the badge has a barcode, but I didn’t see a barcode reader all week.)
3. Read off the game’s 7-digit number and wait while the human (a very patient, nice human, usually) types the number into a computer—often successfully on the first try.
4. Listen while said human tells you, with something between boredom and knowing sympathy, that there are no slots left for the game.
5. Repeat this over and over…and over, until you’ve exhausted, not just your list of interesting events, but everything remotely familiar or cool-sounding before giving up.

Secondly, if you register for Trade Days, consider that it might become Trade Half-Day, leaving you in Indianapolis with a lot more time on your hands than you’d anticipated. GenCon 2007 saw such a successful Trade Day (a day for industry folks to network before the ‘Con) that the organizers expanded it to two days for 2008…until sometime this Spring, which it quietly became one day again…with events starting at 1 or 2 pm.

Despite my inability to get into any events and the fact that Trade Days all but evaporated on me, leaving me two days early in Indianapolis, GenCon was a reasonably good time. Two of the members of the EpicTable forum were with me, and since we were unable to get into any RPG events, we ended up playing a couple boardgames—often until 4 or 5 am: Arkham Horror (which I’d brought and can highly recommend) and RuneBound (brought by Jeremy and also very good way to spend several hours). The ‘Con had a game library, in which we were able to play (for free) Tannhäuser and Dust, both from Fantasy Flight Games.

In addition to the playing boardgames, I got to spend hours in what amounted to the biggest gamestore on earth. Unlike your local gamestore, though, many of the booths were manned by the games’ own developers or editors. dDemonicAngels from the Dundjinni forum was giving demos at the booth they shared with DragonRoots, whose creator, Rocco, was telling folks about the magazine that would replace Dragon. Speaking of magazines to replace dragon, Wolfgang Baur was there representing Kobold Quarterly. Michelle Nephew of Atlas Games sold me a Lovecraftian parody of "Where the Wilds Things Are" called "Where the Deep Ones Are". Fred Hicks (Evil Hat Productions)  was running the cash register at The Forge’s booth. Richard Iorio II, one of the rogues from Rogue Games, told me about his own creation, Colonial Gothic. Ron Edwards (Sorcerer) was giving demos of indie games, and Paul Czege (My Life with Master) was talking with folks in the Ashcan Front booth. Even Fantasy Flight Games, with their immense, always busy booth, brought along the game designer behind Starcraft: The Board Game.

Why does this matter? Am I just name-dropping? No. None of these people know me. To the best of my knowledge, none have sworn an oath to bring about my destruction, but neither would they know me if they saw me on the street. No, the reason I mention these folks is because GenCon brings together people from all over the game industry, and this is where the small/indie game companies really shine. Having the game designers themselves in the booth talking to people is huge. Their passion for what they do really shows. It’s not like some of the larger companies with marketing folks (presumably)  manning the booth. The small/indie game folks are there representing themselves, and there’s just no better marketing than the game’s designer talking about what he thinks is cool about the game.

Hopefully, Kobold Quarterly is old news to you by now. If it’s not, and you’re a d20 gamer, you need to check it out. KQ fills the massive void left by the discontinuation of the printed versions of Dragon and Dungeon magazines. If you’re playing d20, you’ll find loads of information that’s very relevant to your game. Even if your gaming tastes run counter to d20, Kobold Quarterly might be worth a look.

Why you should consider Kobold Quarterly

Okay, first of all, the production values are outstanding. Kobold Quarterly doesn’t have the budget that Dungeon or Dragon magazines or the Paizo Pathfinder series has. Still, it has a surprising number of the same names among its contributors, and it’s very professionally done. KQ’s fifth issue was out this summer, and while it’s been a quality publication from issue 1, it has improved with each issue.

Pretty or not, a magazine has to provide some value to your game (or to your mind, I suppose) if you’re going spend your time and money on it. The value to d20 folks is pretty apparent, but if you parted ways with D&D when it went to 2nd or 3rd edition, I think you’ll still find a lot to like here. True, many articles have a d20 focus, but there’s a good bit of system-neutral content as well, and a lot of it has the flavor of 1st Edition with the sophistication of 3rd Edition. Even if you’re into story games and the like, there’s a good bit of material that can serve as inspiration.

Let me see if I can convince you to check it out with a few examples….

d20 Players

• Character Design articles provide advice on character concepts, effective use of class abilities and feats, etc. Rather than a single column, they seem to often come in crunch/fluff pairs. For instance, Optimizing Power Attack dealt with the mathematics of combat, while “More than Dragon’s Blood” discussed the use of ancestral spirits as the source of your sorcerer’s power.
• Can you really resist “Ecology of the Cloaker”? How about “Ecology of the Lich”? Homunculus?
• “Unique Altars” will spice up that next temple your party sneaks into.
• “Lessons from Arabia” discussed using language to add depth to your setting.
• Skip Williams’ “Ask a Kobold” column provides answers and insight on rules questions.
• “Eight Ways to up the Action!” presented rules variants meant to create a more cinematic game. I started using these in my game with a wild elf character, whose player was already disposed towards cinematic actions. It wasn’t long before the other characters started running around doing intersting, creative things as well.

Old School D&D Players

• KQ is the spiritual successor of Dragon. The ecology articles, letters column, the current series of articles about the rulers of the Hells, even the black and white interior pages, ads for a wide variety of games and accessories…. It all harkens back to the early days of D&D. But don’t think this is just a rehash of the 70s and 80s. This is fresh, relevant content.
• Never made the move to d20? “Ecology…”  articles for the Cloaker, Lich, etc. are useful, regardless of which edition you’re playing.
• “Dangerous Doors” - the stats may be in d20 terms, but the ideas are universal and would make Grimtooth proud.
• C’mon–it’s a kobold on the cover. Can you really be an old school D&D player and pass up a magazine with a kobold on the cover?

Story Gamers

Honestly, if you’re really into story games, there’s not a high percentage of content of interest to you. It’s definitely a D&D focused magazine and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. However, there’s some content that’s game system neutral or nearly so, and certainly useful as inspiration if nothing else.

• “Jezebel, Princess of Poison Winters” and “Arbeyach, the Prince of Swarms” are articles about rulers of Hell that provide great inspiration for a horror campaign. I’m dying to try some variant of these two as demons in a Sorcerer game.
• Keith Baker’s article “Hardboiled Adventures” provides advice on noir campaigns. It’s useful, game system neutral info.
• In articles on “The Free City”, Wolfgang Baur (Kobold in Chief) describes aspects of a fantasy city useful to a swords and sorcery campaign.
• “Improving Your Improvisation” by Nicolas Logue offers advice on collaborative fleshing out of the setting and storyline.

I stumbled into Adam’s gallery on a site called deviantArt (about which I’ve blogged before). There’s a lot of variability between artists on these online communities, but the moment I saw Cyclops Scene (a small crop of which is at the start of this article), I knew I’d found the guy to create my mascot.

Orcs…

I was thrilled to have Adam create the EpicTable dragon—and lucky that the timing worked out. He’s since been heavily involved in a card game from TableStar Games, called “Orc Wars“. I love the work he’s done there. He does a great job with monsters and monstrous humanoids. His orcs are clearly inspired by Warcraft orcs, and he’s got some great taurens as well. But while Adam’s orcs and taurens are similar to Warcraft art, they’re different as well. Sadly, I don’t have the artistic wherewithal to tell you why, so you’ll have to go to his gallery at deviantArt and look for yourself.

…And More Than Orcs

If orcs and taurens aren’t your thing, there’s plenty more to look at. My favorites are:

• “Cyclops Scene”, the image that originally pulled me in
• Untitled - grey haired orc
• Back to the Noose, a skeletal pirate done for a band called Swashbuckle.
• Bio-Mech Merman, which reminds me of my friend Jeremy.
• Attack of the Kraken, a great pulp work
• Leap of Faith, which seems to be his signature piece

Avatars!

If you like what you see out there, you’ll be glad to know that I’ve not left you EpicTable readers out in the cold. Adam has agreed to let me use some of his work as avatars in the EpicTable forum. So, if you don’t have an avatar for the EpicTable forum yet, head over there and pick one out!

One more thing…

Ah—one more thing: If you find that you have a need to say Adam’s last name someday, you can take advantage of the fact I finally got around to asking. Straight from Adam himself: “My last name is pronounced (Vay-gee) with the “gee” like McGee”.

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/artist-spotlight-adam-vehige/feed/ http://www.epictable.com/dev/special-dispatch-character-sheet-development-update/ http://www.epictable.com/dev/special-dispatch-character-sheet-development-update/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:56:12 +0000 John Lammers http://www.epictable.com/?p=84 It’s time for another development update. Last time, I talked about leaving the world of mapping to delve into character sheets. Since then, I’ve been busily fleshing out the character sheet concept in EpicTable—especially user-defined character sheets.

My recent forays into indie and story games have had a profound impact on EpicTable’s character sheets and game systems. I’m not prepared to show you screenshots yet, but I can give you some insight into the direction EpicTable is headed with respect to character sheets.

Guiding Principles

I can’t tell you precisely what I mean by each of these. These aren’t features. These are a set of values that I use to evaluate my ideas about EpicTable’s character sheets.

These are not absolutes, but for the majority of character sheets (and all the most common ones)…

• No code!
• No manual editing of XML
• Improv-friendly
• End-user extensible
• Sharable
• Easy
• Building support for a game in EpicTable should promote the game, NOT eliminate the need to buy the game!

Goals

These are more specific. They’re still not at design or implementation level, but they’re goals that give form to the principles above. These aren’t promises for any particular version; they’re meant to give you some insight about the vector along which EpicTable is traveling.

• A new sheet can be built by the target audience (GMs or users slightly more technically savvy) in a small amount of time for a small number of fields–minutes not hours for the typical indie game sheet. Hours not days for a d20 sheet (proportional to the sheer number of fields and pages that comprise the sheet).
• Dice cups can be defined for the most canonical games currently on the market. (The efficacy of the dice cup feature is closely related to the scheme for managing dice mechanics; i.e., rolls, resolutions and sequences. As such, this feature must be developed somewhat in parallel to the dice cup and character sheet features to ensure that they all work together.)
• The dice cup mechanisms should be extensible to cards.
• Users can define their own dice and cards.
• All calculated values on a pen-and-paper sheet can be automated. (User can choose not to automate everything.)

Givens

These are things that I’m sure are in the product in the short term.

• You can attach dice cup buttons to the sheet, which cause a dice roll to go to the resolution area, whether that’s just the chat output window or somewhere else. This is already prototyped and shown in one of the screenshots on the front page of the EpicTable site.
• You can use the image of an existing character sheet as the basis for your EpicTable sheet.
• Areas of the sheet can be defined and then bound to character data or to values calculated from the character data (perhaps in combination with supplementary tables).
• All but the simplest sheets are game system specific.

Calling All Character Sheet Designers!

As part of the work I’m doing on character sheets, I’m working with several that I think are representative of what’s out there. The point of this is to make sure I’m aware of the breadth of the character sheet space.

While my goal is to make sure that you can adapt your favorite character sheet to EpicTable, I’d also like to include a few of these with the initial version of EpicTable for those out there who (like me) are less artistically inclined. If you’ve got a great-looking, functional character sheet, and you’re interested in having your sheet be among the base set offered to EpicTable users, drop me a line.

]]> http://www.epictable.com/dev/special-dispatch-character-sheet-development-update/feed/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/welcome-to-the-sideshow-the-dark-art-of-david-hartman/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/welcome-to-the-sideshow-the-dark-art-of-david-hartman/#comments Mon, 16 Jun 2008 03:24:31 +0000 John Lammers http://www.epictable.com/?p=83 I don’t recall how I stumbled upon David Hartman’s site: http://www.sideshowmonkey.com/. Maybe I don’t remember how I got there because I spent the next couple hours lost in this dark little world he’s created.

Did I mention it’s dark? Yeah, a lot of David’s work is pretty dark, and it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (which is an oddly inappropriate expression to use when talking about monsters, zombies, and the like), but there’s a comic/pulp feel his work that I really like.

More than just the style, though, there’s a sense of anticipation in a lot of Hartman’s work that I think gamers will find inspiring. There’s almost always something just about to happen. It’s often something not very nice. But the people in these scenes aren’t passively awaiting their fate. As often as not, they’ve got a gun or a knife or an axe, and they’re poised to confront the awful thing that’s closing on them.

My favorites are:

• Revere - Paul Revere (one imagines) fighting off werewolves.
• Space Man - a classic sci-fi work with humans and hostile aliens (or, I don’t know, aliens and hostile humans)
• Sea Killer - Vikings having a rough day

David’s done quite a bit of commercial work for folks like Rob Zombie, MTV, and Warner Brothers. His work includes the Bruce Campbell movie, Bubba Ho-tep, several animated TV series, comic books, and even some work for game industry folks like Green Ronin Press. The biggest surprise to me though, after spending some time on his site, was learning that he directed “My Friends Tigger & Pooh”. I can only hope that the creatures from SideshowMonkey.com live far from The Hundred Acre Wood (or that Pooh is a lot more fierce than he lets on).

The fact that I stumbled upon David’s site only by accident, even though he’s obviously well-known in some circles, led me to point other gamers in his direction. I’ll go one better though–I got David’s permission to use some of his work as avatars for the EpicTable site. By the time you’ve read this, there will likely be a nice, shiny, new batch of avatars in the EpicTable forum, courtesy of David Hartman. So, if you don’t have an avatar of your own for the EpicTable forum yet, make your way over there and pick one out!

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/welcome-to-the-sideshow-the-dark-art-of-david-hartman/feed/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/pulp-gaming-inspiration-indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull/ http://www.epictable.com/blog/pulp-gaming-inspiration-indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull/#comments Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:31:36 +0000 John Lammers http://www.epictable.com/?p=82 I just saw the latest Indiana Jones movie: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now, I can’t give you a very objective critique of the movie, because it has crumbly jungle ruins, crystal skulls and monkeys. And if there’s anything that blows my objectivity, it’s crumbly jungle ruins, crystal skulls and monkeys.

So, without any trace of academic or intellectual criticism, I’ll just say, “I liked it.” It has a lot to offer the gamer or GM. The visuals are stunning, and there are enough ingenious mechanical doors and puzzles to make Grimtooth (the devious trapmaker of 80s gaming) proud. There’s even a bit of Lovecraftian “spaces in-between” talk and otherworldly forces that are like magnetism…but not.

Several times, the movie had the opportunity to go the route of the cliché or not, and it chose not. I could imagine the GM sitting there thinking, “Well, I could have it just fly off and call it a day, but that’s kind of lame…. Let’s instead have it….”

To sum up: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was entertaining, it had a good pulp gamer kind of feel to it, and I definitely could steal some ideas from it. What more does a GM need?

]]> http://www.epictable.com/blog/pulp-gaming-inspiration-indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-crystal-skull/feed/ http://www.epictable.com/epictablenews/new-feed-epictable-forums/ http://www.epictable.com/epictablenews/new-feed-epictable-forums/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:21:34 +0000 John Lammers http://www.epictable.com/?p=81 I’m trying a new feed. I noticed that I didn’t have a feed for new threads in the EpicTable forums (other than…um…my own, which get there via the blogs) This seemed needlessly self-indulgent, so I added a feed for the EpicTable forums.

The only downside is that since both blog posts and development blog posts go to the forum (for the sake of comments), the forum feed has some redundant content if you happen to be subscribed to the blog feeds already. However, this might be an option for you if you’re interested in a feed of new threads started in the forums and can bear the cost of seeing my posts twice.

You can see the full list of EpicTable feeds at: http://www.epictable.com/subscribe/

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