I was talking with my friend tonight about D&D, and what improvements we would make in 4e, which, btw, is a long way off.
Then I hit upon the idea of an e-paper character sheet. For those who don't know, e-paper is this new polymer based display system that is in its infancy. It stores digital information and displays it, and it can be rolled folded, or whatever. I think it would be awesome to have a character sheet using this technology, because you could carry it around easily in a cool scroll carrying case (remember, it rolls up, adds flavor to the game) and you could have it reflect hit point loss, ability damage (which I, as a DM, almost never do because you have to re-tool everything on the sheet for the duration of the ability loss, combat grinds to a halt), and store multiple character sheets, so one could easily have 1-2 spare characters for high-death-rate games.
Now, the real wet-dream material comes in when one thinks of connectivity. If each book came with a little mem-card (copy-protected to death and back) that had relevant rules stored on it, one could plug it into the unit, then the unit would be able to reference those rules, like new spells, feats, stuff like that. If you wanted to cast confusion instead of hefting the PHB, you'd just tap the spell on your spell list and it would pull up a description of the power. If it could interface with a PCgen-esque program (not the lame character generator that came with 3.0 PHB, remember that thing, and how limited it was?) that would just be spectacular. This would protect WOTC's assets, because even if people pirated the rules-sets, you couldn't simply read the rules and such, they'd be embedded in the unit.
Any thoughts? WOTC, you can steal this idea and charge an arm for a leg, and I can't really sue you, not having a patent or anything...
Then I hit upon the idea of an e-paper character sheet. For those who don't know, e-paper is this new polymer based display system that is in its infancy. It stores digital information and displays it, and it can be rolled folded, or whatever. I think it would be awesome to have a character sheet using this technology, because you could carry it around easily in a cool scroll carrying case (remember, it rolls up, adds flavor to the game) and you could have it reflect hit point loss, ability damage (which I, as a DM, almost never do because you have to re-tool everything on the sheet for the duration of the ability loss, combat grinds to a halt), and store multiple character sheets, so one could easily have 1-2 spare characters for high-death-rate games.
Now, the real wet-dream material comes in when one thinks of connectivity. If each book came with a little mem-card (copy-protected to death and back) that had relevant rules stored on it, one could plug it into the unit, then the unit would be able to reference those rules, like new spells, feats, stuff like that. If you wanted to cast confusion instead of hefting the PHB, you'd just tap the spell on your spell list and it would pull up a description of the power. If it could interface with a PCgen-esque program (not the lame character generator that came with 3.0 PHB, remember that thing, and how limited it was?) that would just be spectacular. This would protect WOTC's assets, because even if people pirated the rules-sets, you couldn't simply read the rules and such, they'd be embedded in the unit.
Any thoughts? WOTC, you can steal this idea and charge an arm for a leg, and I can't really sue you, not having a patent or anything...
