Dogs in the Vineyard, in the words of its creator, is a game in which the characters are “God’s Watchdogs in a West that never quite was.” It’s a really interesting game, well worth the time to check it out for yourself.

In the screenshot above (you can click on that to get a better look), the tabletop shows a Dogs in the Vineyard conflict in progress. In Dogs in the Vineyard, conflict resolution is handled by a roll of the dice followed by a poker-like series of “raising” and “seeing”. The conflict starts with both the player and the GM building a dice pool from traits that are relevant to the conflict. You can see in this example that the player with the gold dice has managed to bring in a d8 to bolster 6d6. The GM, with the dark red dice, has 8d6 to bring to the conflict. Both roll their dice. Now, they take turns raising and seeing. In this example, the player with the gold dice says what his character is doing and puts forward a 4 and an 8 for a total of 12. The GM is unable to match a total of 12 with just two of his dice, so he has to put forward a third die. He puts forward a 5, a 4, and a 3, describing how the NPC responds. This continues until one side gives or is unable to match the raise.

I’ve greatly oversimplified the conflict resolution of Dogs in the Vineyard. It’s a really interesting mechanic, and it has the effect of making a player keep reevaluating just how far he’s willing to take a given conflict. The point, though, from an EpicTable development perspective, is that this is a game that requires more of the tabletop than just a landing spot for the dice. EpicTable supports that with a shared surface that allows you to place and move and roll dice. Along the way, I’ve added some creature comforts like different surface textures. What you see in this screen shot is a light brown distressed leather, which seemed more appropriate to the Western setting than a wooden tabletop. The red and gold dice are (to this colorblind developer’s eyes) matched to the colors of the Dogs’ coats.

If you’re interested in this kind of tailoring of the virtual tabletop to the game, stay tuned. One of my goals for EpicTable is to make it easy for you to create support for the games you want to play. In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about the options you’ll have for creating character sheets, adding your own surface textures, game pieces, etc.

Closing Thoughts

As always, I appreciate any questions and feedback that you have. Please chime in on the forum via the comments link below.

Credits and Sources: Dogs in the Vineyard is a game by D. Vincent Baker. Die images by Brennen Reece. Leather texture from iStockphoto.

EpicTable’s Virtual Tabletop Surface

Here’s an example of EpicTable’s general purpose tabletop. Now would be a fine time to click on that screenshot to get a better view….
What you’re looking at is a close-cropped view of the virtual tabletop. Instead of a map, you have a tabletop with a smattering of game pieces. The ribbon control at the top of the window contains galleries of table surfaces and game pieces from which you can choose. You can drag these around the virtual tabletop, stack them, clone them, and so on. Certain items such as dice—a few of which you can see hanging out on the right side of the screen—have additional actions that you can take; for instance, rolling them.

Questions and Answers

Will EpicTable come with any game pieces or table surfaces?

Yes. EpicTable will ship with a set of table surfaces, which currently include various types of wood, cloth, leather, and parchment. There will be some metal too for sci-fi games. Game pieces include coins, colored stones, and fanmail tokens.

Will I be able to add my own game pieces and surfaces?

Absolutely.

Will there be RPG-centric or game-specific game pieces?

Yes. Fanmail is fairly common and Brennen had already created a fanmail game piece, so that’s there already. I plan to let add-ons for specific games add their own resources as well.

Can I resize, rotate, and stack these game pieces?

Yes, yes, and yes. There may be some exceptions—it might be awkward to stack dice, for instance, if you can roll several at once.

Will there be support for cards?

Yes—I’m just not promising when. Cards weren’t part of the initial EpicTable version 1.0 plan, and I’m running a bit behind on that 1.0 release, so I really don’t want to add cards to 1.0. (But I really want to add cards to 1.0.)

Those galleries look a little small….

They’ve auto-shrunk because I resized the window to get a smaller screenshot and still get the whole ribbon in. They normally show five items across. The arrow keys allow you to scroll through items, and the lower arrow key pops open a window showing more at a time. In addition, the galleries support filtering, so if you’re only interested in coins, for instance, you can filter out the stones, fanmail, etc. All this applies to the table surfaces too.

Here’s an example:

Closing Thoughts

As always, I appreciate any questions and feedback that you have. Please chime in on the forum via the comments link below.

Credits and Sources: Die images and fanmail token by Brennen Reece. Coins, stones and textures from iStockphoto.

The dice cup designer won’t be the only way to create a dice roll in EpicTable. If you need a quick d20 or 3d6, there’s no need for the designer. But when you have to put together something really interesting, you can pop this open and build up a dice cup that does just what you need.

Dice Cup Designer In Action

The first screenshot shows the designer with a dice cup for the game, Don’t Rest Your Head (which I’m completely enthralled with—but that’s a topic for another post). As you can see in the screenshot, there are some things still under development. Here’s an annotated version of that same dice cup designer screenshot (click either for their full-size version).

As you click on a die in the lower pane of the designer, a corresponding die is added to the dice cup panel at the top. Hopefully, it’s clear that the dice in the top panel of the designer are to-be-rolled dice. That is, we’re building up a set of dice to roll, not actually rolling them yet. There are dice for all the well-known polyhedral dice, plus a Fudge die.

Dice Color Schemes

You can choose the color of the die to be added, as well as the color of the numbers. This can be totally aesthetic—choosing a color scheme that suits the game or your character. However, you can also use this capability to build dice cups for game mechanics that differentiate dice by color. In this example, I’ve build a dice cup for Don’t Rest Your Head with 3 white dice for discipline, 2 black exhaustion dice, and a single red madness die.

How many choices? I haven’t done the math. There are dozens of pre-defined, named colors that I think may originate from the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) specification. In addition, you can define your own by RGB value.

Special Evaluation Examples

Here are another couple examples. Note that the “Special Evaluation / Finishing” pane is used in both of these to accomplish the special handling needed for the roll.

This one shows a roll for My Life with Master, where the player has invoked the desperation die (the orange d6).

Rolling stats for a d20 character: 4d6, drop the lowest die.

User Experience Questions

Special Handling for Just Some Dice

There are some things that are making me scratch my head a bit from a user experience perspective. Take another look at that My Life with Master dice cup with the orange d6. The special handling clause “drop 4s” only applies to the d4s. My current notion for how to signal that is to let users select multiple dice in the dice cup and apply the “Special Handling” section to just the selected dice. That’s not horrifying, but it’s not apparent in the user interface once you’ve moved on to something else. Another notion would be to turn that textual representation into something more structured—basically, click a clause, and see the corresponding dice light up and the “special handling” selection updated accordingly. That’s a lot of work for something that’s maybe still not that intuitive. If you have suggestions, please let me know.

Evaluation vs. Resolution

Another issue I wonder about is how clear the line is between dice roll evaluation and resolution. The way I think about this, evaluation is anything I can do on the dice in isolation—in other words, doing helpful things like summing or counting or sorting dice. Resolution involves comparing the roll to other characters’ rolls, or to difficulties or targets set by the GM. I don’t want to get into the latter, because it’s very game system specific and situation specific. I don’t want the tool to ever get in the way of the GM, and I think this might be a case where trying to get the tool to do exactly what you want in every situation is more painful than helpful to the GM. Also, I have no interest in actually replacing the need for the rule books. EpicTable is an environment, not a game unto itself.

The Slippery Slope of Success (Counting Successes)

The grey area for me is a roll that where you count successes. For instance, if you’re rolling 12d6 and a success is a 1, 2, or 3 on each die, it’s pretty helpful for EpicTable to count those for you. I really want to do that, but different games have different success targets…and sometimes they change, so I’d need to also allow you to tweak the success target occasionally. There’s the first bit of grey.

The next bit is introduced by games like Don’t Rest Your Head, which evaluates individual dice pools in addition to the dice roll in its entirety. In the example I gave above, the dice cup had 3 discipline dice, 2 exhaustion dice, and 1 madness die. Well, in DRYH, successes are 1, 2, or 3, but it also matters which of those pools has the highest single die result.

For example, if I roll 1, 4, 5 white, 2 and 3 black, and 6 red, I have 3 successes, and the red pool (madness) is dominant, since it had the high roll. I don’t think I want to go that far. Enough games use successes that I really would like to implement something in terms of success counting. Game-specific stuff like dice pool dominance is a step too far, I think, even though it still stops short of resolution (because it hasn’t been compared to the opponent’s roll yet).

Beyond the Dice Cup Designer

So, beyond just building up an ad-hoc dice cup in the designer, what are your options in EpicTable? You may or may not have noticed the little dice cup icons at the top of the EpicTable window in previous EpicTable screenshots. Those represent dice cups that you’ve built and want to keep handy. In addition, EpicTable character sheets will support dice cups that incorporate character attributes. That’s a topic that warrants its own discussion. I’ll talk about how you can create dice cups for EpicTable character sheets in a later post.

Closing Thoughts

As always, I appreciate any questions and feedback that you have. Please chime in on the forum via the comments link below.

Credits: Die images by Brennen Reece.