In this suggest I'm going to focus on two related but different feature requests
A) Campaign Builder - this is essentially focused on the big picture flow the DM establishes for the campagin
B) Active Session Management - the tools needs to run any given session remotely
Background: Playing D&D for over 25 years. Our group has physically drifted away to different cities (work reasons). We play 100% remotely via Skype and DropBox.
A) Campaign Builder -
So for this I have the following requests. My style is to short-hand / point-form the events of a session or campaign. I spend maybe an hour or two in prep doing this every week. My life would be made easier with:
1) Drag and drop into my adventure notes, monsters from the monstrous manual along with quantities. Auto-magically I get loot calculations done by both individual and aggregate loot. + the option to look magic items (as I'm stingy on those and give them out very carefully).
2) Connectivity to multiple folders on DropBox (I think DDB needs to integrate with external storage options otherwise over the years storage stress will kill you). One reason for this is that I use various art assets I get online (some are royalty free :P, again leave that liability on the players on their own storage spaces). that I insert into the adventure to either help me describe the scene or share with the players so they get a sense of where they might be (or what they might be looking at in the case of hand-drawn assets).
3) Assemble and drop NPCs easily into the story. This is harder as in some cases literally all I need is a name, in other cases I need a full description down to gear. Sometimes a "no-name" becomes important because they players make it so. A flexible system that lets me expand a "nobody" into a "somebody" would be great.
4) As campaign goes on an active tracking system for me at a glance to know the different NPCs they group has encountered and at what point. I had a campaign that went on literally for 20 years (went from level 1 to 30 - ended up using the high level rulebooks go to from 21-30 in 2nd Edition) that just finished last year. I had a duotang (yes a duotang... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duo-Tang) filled with NPCs from across time. I started said duotang 3-4 years into the campaign when we realized this was going to be cool and go on for a longer while.
5) Campaign timeline as time goes on. Where players and DM can mark various milestones.
6) Drag and drop common settings/scapes into the adventure (crowdsource this one DDB). I'm almost thinking the way Star Citizen creates it's procedural planets and then focuses art time on key areas.
7) a) Map-build and Community made art assets - So here I am wanting to make a map (varying levels of granularity). I want to be able to build world sized maps, but then zoom into small areas and flesh them out as needed. Please do not provide "generic" art assets. What I mean by that is if you give me a "forest" paint-brush every DM's "forest" map will look the same. If possible let me choose tree types and art styles from a player driven database of assets and set standards for the submitted formats. So if I can draw a wicked pine tree covered in snow because I'm from Canada, then let's use that. But if friend draws up the most awesome Palm Tree because they routinely enjoy their time in Puerto Rico more power to them.
b) infinite maps. What I mean here is that I need maps/spaces where I can draw-endlessly in any direction. In addition, I can zoom infinitely as well :). I would use this for encounters (large army battles)
c) map layers with permission trimming
B) Active Session Management
So this is a little different but related. My suggestion is to treat this as players connecting to a DM's session (the way one does with WebEx webconferencing). My recommendation is DDB is subscription based then only one person per group should pay. Rest just connect to the session freely (and have access to associated resources). Newbies will hate paying upfront. Maybe cap active participants to 10 so it's not abused? I've rarely seen groups larger than 4-5 in D&D (but what do I know?). If you go this route then allow for transfer of accounts to others (people come and go in D&D as life stages change).
This connection then gives DM master view of all players/sheets etc. Players via mobile device see their own details and current session details shared by DM. Within the adventure when say the DM is ready to give EX they can just assign it from their computer. Or assign items etc.
I'm still a fan of actual physical dice and trust my players enough. What I would need is a way for players within the system to let me know what they rolled. However, over time I'd love to track statistics (you know when player X just happens to roll 17 and higher most of the time). I'd love to shame them and move on :P.
Playing music/video/images for all. This was some time ago. But when an encounter was suppose to be particularly epic we'd play a video or have certain music in the background (boss music).
Invariably, if this replaces Skype or WebEx, then chat, video, polling, etc needed.
Thanks,
Envaris
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Hi,
In this suggest I'm going to focus on two related but different feature requests
A) Campaign Builder - this is essentially focused on the big picture flow the DM establishes for the campagin
B) Active Session Management - the tools needs to run any given session remotely
Background: Playing D&D for over 25 years. Our group has physically drifted away to different cities (work reasons). We play 100% remotely via Skype and DropBox.
A) Campaign Builder -
So for this I have the following requests. My style is to short-hand / point-form the events of a session or campaign. I spend maybe an hour or two in prep doing this every week. My life would be made easier with:
1) Drag and drop into my adventure notes, monsters from the monstrous manual along with quantities. Auto-magically I get loot calculations done by both individual and aggregate loot. + the option to look magic items (as I'm stingy on those and give them out very carefully).
2) Connectivity to multiple folders on DropBox (I think DDB needs to integrate with external storage options otherwise over the years storage stress will kill you). One reason for this is that I use various art assets I get online (some are royalty free :P, again leave that liability on the players on their own storage spaces). that I insert into the adventure to either help me describe the scene or share with the players so they get a sense of where they might be (or what they might be looking at in the case of hand-drawn assets).
3) Assemble and drop NPCs easily into the story. This is harder as in some cases literally all I need is a name, in other cases I need a full description down to gear. Sometimes a "no-name" becomes important because they players make it so. A flexible system that lets me expand a "nobody" into a "somebody" would be great.
4) As campaign goes on an active tracking system for me at a glance to know the different NPCs they group has encountered and at what point. I had a campaign that went on literally for 20 years (went from level 1 to 30 - ended up using the high level rulebooks go to from 21-30 in 2nd Edition) that just finished last year. I had a duotang (yes a duotang... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duo-Tang) filled with NPCs from across time. I started said duotang 3-4 years into the campaign when we realized this was going to be cool and go on for a longer while.
5) Campaign timeline as time goes on. Where players and DM can mark various milestones.
6) Drag and drop common settings/scapes into the adventure (crowdsource this one DDB). I'm almost thinking the way Star Citizen creates it's procedural planets and then focuses art time on key areas.
7) a) Map-build and Community made art assets - So here I am wanting to make a map (varying levels of granularity). I want to be able to build world sized maps, but then zoom into small areas and flesh them out as needed. Please do not provide "generic" art assets. What I mean by that is if you give me a "forest" paint-brush every DM's "forest" map will look the same. If possible let me choose tree types and art styles from a player driven database of assets and set standards for the submitted formats. So if I can draw a wicked pine tree covered in snow because I'm from Canada, then let's use that. But if friend draws up the most awesome Palm Tree because they routinely enjoy their time in Puerto Rico more power to them.
b) infinite maps. What I mean here is that I need maps/spaces where I can draw-endlessly in any direction. In addition, I can zoom infinitely as well :). I would use this for encounters (large army battles)
c) map layers with permission trimming
B) Active Session Management
So this is a little different but related. My suggestion is to treat this as players connecting to a DM's session (the way one does with WebEx webconferencing). My recommendation is DDB is subscription based then only one person per group should pay. Rest just connect to the session freely (and have access to associated resources). Newbies will hate paying upfront. Maybe cap active participants to 10 so it's not abused? I've rarely seen groups larger than 4-5 in D&D (but what do I know?). If you go this route then allow for transfer of accounts to others (people come and go in D&D as life stages change).
This connection then gives DM master view of all players/sheets etc. Players via mobile device see their own details and current session details shared by DM. Within the adventure when say the DM is ready to give EX they can just assign it from their computer. Or assign items etc.
I'm still a fan of actual physical dice and trust my players enough. What I would need is a way for players within the system to let me know what they rolled. However, over time I'd love to track statistics (you know when player X just happens to roll 17 and higher most of the time). I'd love to shame them and move on :P.
Playing music/video/images for all. This was some time ago. But when an encounter was suppose to be particularly epic we'd play a video or have certain music in the background (boss music).
Invariably, if this replaces Skype or WebEx, then chat, video, polling, etc needed.
Thanks,
Envaris
Want to see Virtual Table Top like no other before it built within DnDBeyond.com? Upvote the feature request. It's 2nd highest voted so far:
https://dndbeyond.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115008597088-Virtual-Tabletop-Gameboard
NOTE: You will need to setup a zendesk account (which is not your DnDBeyond.com account, the team uses this 3rd party software). It's easy to do and your votes are needed!