Another bit o' D&D software

I've been looking at kLoOge.Werks (see link above), which is quite a funky D&D app. Also, it and Gametable (link in post below) are the first I've seen of semiserious people actually distributing Java programs (rather than applets). This is very cool for me, because it's genuinely portable -- I can run kLoOge.Werks on my Linux box happily, yet normal people can use it too.

Mapping Software?

I've brought up other web formats (like wikis), and in that post described some of the basic D&D "functions" you'd like an online campaign to do easily. These are from the point of view of a player, who wants to view the page, see both the current situation and the relevant past information (like his/her current character, as well as easy access to past conversations and encounters), and then describe his/her current actions.

One point that Jacob highlighted (and I agree with) is that "relevant past information" could be anything, and being able to store all the past history and search through it later is important.

I briefly mentioned the idea of interactive map software, which might be terribly complicated, but OpenRPG (for example) has a very nice one, and I would think there would be a lot "shared whiteboard" stuff out there. But the sharing isn't what I want to talk about at the moment.

I'm interested in hearing about good map-drawing applications. If I recall correctly, Scott uses Visio, which seems a little like using an elephant gun, but it certainly seems to work well. Unfortunately, not only do I not have Visio, I doubt it's available under Linux, which I much prefer to Windows (I don't have Windows at home at all).

I've done a little Googling, and some of the (Windows) software out there includes Dundjinni, Campaign Cartographer (which, to me anyway, looks ugly), and Campaign Suite, and that seems to be just scratching the surface. Here's some more links, in case you've got a yen to go surfing:

AutoREALM
GridSmith
TavernMaker

And those are just the ones with high-PageRank individual sites. The programs appearing in long lists of available software are innumerable: if I figure out how to put some sites on a blogroll, I'll put some aggregated sites there, just for reference.

I said I wasn't talking about whiteboardy stuff, but I'm breaking my own rule because this has the benefit of being OS-independent (and apparently does mappy stuff too).
Gametable
seems to do all the cool stuff OpenRPG does, only without a special client.

Do you know of other mapping tools? Got any experiences to share? I care about functional over pretty, although I draw the line at "illegible", and speedy development is most important of all; if it's easy to draw maps, we'll see a lot of them with lots of updates, and if it's a pain, we won't.

I did have bold plans of setting up a deme.org wiki-style faux campaign, just so we could take a look and try it out. I still have that plan, but it's too late and I have a big phone interview tomorrow.

Copyright concerns

(Note to Jacob: I really will actually reply to the comments -- but I also want to keep posting the seeds of ideas, to keep a stream of topics running through the heads of the thousands of readers. Dozens of readers. OK, reader.)

Once a new online D&D campaign actually gets spawned from here, I want to incorporate as many colorful resources as I can (ideally, without too much effort). Over at dndblog, Scott's graphics have really brought things to life -- not just the maps, but pictures of mountain lions and images from the Monster Manual too.

The graphics from Wizards.com, although hard to find (hence the lack of link), generally have text around them indicating that they intend you to use them to enhance your own campaign. On the other end of the spectrum, a typical book with lots of artwork has very dire warnings against using any of its art for any purpose at all.

I want to solicit from people likely to play in the campaign where their vision of "fair use" lies. While the chances that some litigious copyright holder is going to trip upon this blog (or wiki, or whatever) are remote, I want to make sure everyone is comfortable with anything that gets uploaded from anyone. So we should all be on the same page in terms of what's appropriate. I'm going out on the limb of assuming no one's going to upload pornography to a D&D site, so next on the list is "possibly infringing material".

Let me first state my attitude. I think I tend to fall more in the "yeah, it's fair use" camp than "no, you can't use anything without permission" camp. For example, I'm of the opinion that links to images on the web (img src="somewhere.com/picture") aren't really much in the way of copying: someone's made the image available to be viewed on the web, and making it appear through a window on our page isn't meaningfully different from viewing it in situ. But that's just me. You might feel differently (and might have case law on your side; unfortunately, the courts haven't yet adopted the "Bob reasonableness standard").

One might ask whether worrying about copyright is even relevant: I mean, the vast majority of stuff is going to be created by us, and what little snippet pictures from magazines or books or what have you we throw in has gotta be fair use, right? That may well be your point of view, and certainly in terms of a local D&D game, using some visual aids with your group seems like fair use to me. However, if our online stuff is accessible to everybody in the world, scanning your favorite Boris Vallejo print and putting it up on the campaign website lets more unscrupulous people, unassociated with our D&D campaign, grab that art and print it on T shirts. Are they violating copyright laws? Of course. Might they try to pin it on us and get us involved? Maybe. Might _we_ get unfriendly cease and desist letters? Unlikely, I think, but possible.

Some possible resolutions to this:
- don't put possibly copyrighted material on the blog at all. This is somewhat annoying, since, for example, I'd like to use images from coffee table books about the Crown Jewels to show the cool treasure you've just discovered. Also, it's hard to tell what's copyrightable/copyrighted/usable and what's not. What about the geomorphs at the back of the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, or a map made from them? How about a picture taken of lead figures on the tiles from Dungeon Floor Plans? (That said, Flickr.com and Google's Advanced Search options, and everything Creative Commons does, can help find images that are explicitly usable. And convenience in and of itself is no excuse -- it's cheaper for me to steal food instead of buy it, but that doesn't make it right.)

- make a secured, "login" part of the page (or the whole campaign website), so that only a small group of people have access. Now you're not sharing a picture of your Boris Vallejo print with the whole world, but only with 6-10 people. Trying to justify to yourself that this is fair use is a lot easier. Of course, this means you have to login to the page, and someone has to figure out how to manage Web security, at least a little.

- analogous to this, the page could have only public domain/licensed to share stuff, and occasional color material could be delivered by snail mail (or email). I kind of like the idea of players getting occasional mysterious funky envelopes with arcane bits of parchment inside, and/or pictures of treasure or monsters or whatever.

- Possibly, I'm blowing this whole issue out of proportion. We put up what we like, and in the unlikely event someone complains about it, we take it down. No harm, no foul -- at least, that's our story and we're stickin' to it.

The most important thing is, everyone feels comfortable with the policy we take at the outset. I know some of us are professionals and copyright holders ourselves, and might feel strongly about these things. I don't want someone not playing D&D, or worse, quitting D&D, because I put something up on the web that they don't want to be a party to. I would like to be sensitive to all concerns.

But if it's no big deal and we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I'm okay with that too. Whatever you want.

Ug

I am being, as they say, "beaten like a ginger-haired stepchild" at work. Not literally. And I don't mean any offense to, as I would call them, redheads.

But I will not let _another_ day go by without putting out some incoherent D&D thoughts. So here they are:

I wanted to put something more coherent here, but I simply don't have the time, so let's assume it'll shape up on its own, wiki-like...

Actually, that's point one. Is the blog format the _best_ way to implement a web-based D&D game? I've looked a bit at wikis, openRPG, and the crazily interesting Deme (on groupspace.org), and you should too. Had I been able, I wanted to make a little sample campaign deme site, wiki, and blog, and compare how they felt to use.

Seems to me some of the functionality you want from a D&D campaign website is:

A) effective character viewing/manipulation (probably have to be a dynamic webpage with a database backend)
B) an easy "post action" interface (which blog does well)
C) make it easy to see the current situation so you know what action to post: this ties in with seeing your character, but also might involve graphics: having a powerful way to view a map, maybe even draw on it so you can clearly indicate what you want, where you want, would rock. OpenRPG has this, but that's all XML and seems to be tied to the OpenRPG server, which makes it not as usefully asynchronous as the web (OpenRPG seems to need the players and DM to be online at the same time, interacting through chat.)

A downside to the blog is that it's hard to see what the deal is, _now_. I find myself flipping through the blog all the time, looking to see what got used when, scrolling down to the last map, etc. The nice thing about a wiki is that you can insert your action, the DM can shuffle them around on the same document, and you end up with a nice description of what started out as everyone's separate actions. Similarly, a map graphic (if not an interactive whiteboard) could at least be downloaded, modified, then uploaded by players to show their movement or lightning bolt or whatever.

Lemme know what you think.

Rebecca's awesome

So, a weekend ago I was wurfing at school ("wurfing": sorta work, mostly surfing; worth coming into school to surf sometimes because my screen there is so much bigger.) And before I come home, Rebecca drops me an IM that I should check out one of the charity shops she passed by, because it's got a bunch of D&D mapping stuff.

It was a treasure trove.

Clearly someone was clearing out a lifetime collection, because the "Save the Children" shop was selling books (AD&D Unearthed Arcana, Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, v.1 (second edition, orange spine) Players Handbook, v.1 Monster's Manual II, v.1 Fiend Folio, v.3 Players Handbook), lead figures (I'm guessing at least a hundred, mostly Grenadier AD&D, but some others too; almost all of them are very charmingly stored in old matchboxes), and the aforementioned mapping tools: Games Workshop's Dungeon Floor Plans 1,2, and 4, the last two in their original boxes and provably complete. Also, a Judge's Guild booklet w/maps for a variety of boats. And some transparencies with hexes printed on them -- I dunno if the original intent was to overlay them on maps, or for projecting onto a screen.

I'm going to return most of the books tomorrow, since I've got them already, except for the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the v.3 Players Handbook, which I'll keep. The v.3 PH is mostly for reading about the "old" rules so I can carp about how much better the "fixed" 3.5 version is. :) The DSG has the supa-cool perspective mapping advice and templates in the back (remember the crazy castle map in Ravencroft?)

The Dungeon Floor Plans are basically a lot of 1" tiles, intended for you to cut out either singly or in strips or chunks (most of them have been) and laid out as a map. So, for example, you cut two strips of flagstones, and voila! Ten foot wide passage. Put a door at the end of it, with some grass and trees outside, and there's your dungeon entrance. They recommend putting it on a black background, so the untiled space gives the impression of solid wall. Set 2 has room details (statues, tombs, pits, stairs), water, and grass & trees. Set 4 has rough tunnels and mine accessories (carts, rails, wheelbarrows).

The whole collection was 35 pounds. I'm not sure how best to leverage these things, but they're freakin' sweet. And my appreciation for Rebecca, in particular her willingness to aid and abet my dungeonphilia, cannot easily be expressed in words. :)

Okay, okay, so it takes me a while to figure out how this whole `blog' thing works.

I've been thinking about D&D in general, and dreams of this particular online campaign in particular, like every day. I write down notes on random bits of paper spread around various locations as they occur to me...and then as I was thinking "I should really put all this stuff somewhere I could always get to it", the penny dropped.

Oh, you mean, I'm supposed to actually just put random thoughts up on _the blog_, instead of just thinking about them, losing track of them, _and_ letting what could be a vaguely interesting blog to as many as three other people fall into dusty abandonment.

So, my plan is _now_ to try to post to _this_ blog way more often (like daily), and to my other random blogs once a week. (I probably shouldn't make promises I can't keep, but if I don't make 'em, I _definitely_ won't keep 'em.)

So, some D&D thoughts of the day:

When you think about it, there are a lot of weird things about the supposed culture in D&D. I mean, the bits you get from the Players Handbook, your own background notions, and various fantasy sources is that you've got a sort of pseudo-medieval feudal thing going on, with pre-gunpowder technology, lots of peasants farming out a living, but lots of magic around that does all kinds of cool stuff, and lots of fantastic beasties like dragons and stuff.

Think of how some of the most common magic would have crazy effects on society. First of all, if you can talk to animals and they can talk back, isn't there something weird about eating them? I mean, sure they're not very bright, but it still seems cannibalistic. Besides, as Rebecca points out, as an even more common bit of magic, you can make food. Explain why all those peasants are farming again?

Heck, clerics can heal wounds and cure disease. I'm not even talking about raising the dead, which is a whole new kind of brain-twisting. Try to imagine the way the world would change if every disease, and nearly every injury, could be cured, instantly, by one in every few thousand people. Then think about the Middle Ages, only without the plague. It's like talking about Russia in the 20th century, only without the Communism.

Summary: The whole construction of D&D's fictional culture has fundamental distortions that are usually swept under the rug.