Campaign Management Software
- Thread starter elbandit
- Start date
What you actually expect to see in good campaign management software is itself an open, interesting, and perhaps very personal question.
RPG is itself such a wide and open genre, with different people hoping to find emphasis that suits their particular needs.
For RPM I have the following:
- The ability to create and print a massive tree view of flexible campaign information, capable of rich text editing and images. The tree is to organize categories of any information required, from rules to history to geography.
- The ability to extend a massive core RPG database with material specific to a particular campaign setting (such as items, magic, weapons, armor, spells, feats, skills and classes).
- The ability to put game mechanics behind new stuff, so that you can generate characters, encounters and adventures that come out properly calculated for you.
- The ability to easily create generator tables from your RPG database, for virtually any purpose, from NPCs to large encounters, to towns, or complete dungeon levels (maps, rooms, .features, treasure, traps and monsters).
- The ability to copy and customize tables to suit different areas of your campaign world (such as magic shops, general towns and perhaps even store generated dungeons.
In all honesty, I haven't yet completed the bit that allows you to store generated things in your campaign and/or adventure trees and then view or edit as required, but a massive amount of work in this area is already done.
The RPM approach is to offer a large and flexible tool for doing everything from sci-fi worlds to fantasy worlds. Those comfortable with such tools can get immediate benefit.
Over time, more user interfaces appear to "drill down" to nicely and easily access common specifics (such as generating the contents of a magic shop).
If you have great ideas in this area, please feel free to contact me and see if it can be put into RPM, or is already there.
Regards,
RPG is itself such a wide and open genre, with different people hoping to find emphasis that suits their particular needs.
For RPM I have the following:
- The ability to create and print a massive tree view of flexible campaign information, capable of rich text editing and images. The tree is to organize categories of any information required, from rules to history to geography.
- The ability to extend a massive core RPG database with material specific to a particular campaign setting (such as items, magic, weapons, armor, spells, feats, skills and classes).
- The ability to put game mechanics behind new stuff, so that you can generate characters, encounters and adventures that come out properly calculated for you.
- The ability to easily create generator tables from your RPG database, for virtually any purpose, from NPCs to large encounters, to towns, or complete dungeon levels (maps, rooms, .features, treasure, traps and monsters).
- The ability to copy and customize tables to suit different areas of your campaign world (such as magic shops, general towns and perhaps even store generated dungeons.
In all honesty, I haven't yet completed the bit that allows you to store generated things in your campaign and/or adventure trees and then view or edit as required, but a massive amount of work in this area is already done.
The RPM approach is to offer a large and flexible tool for doing everything from sci-fi worlds to fantasy worlds. Those comfortable with such tools can get immediate benefit.
Over time, more user interfaces appear to "drill down" to nicely and easily access common specifics (such as generating the contents of a magic shop).
If you have great ideas in this area, please feel free to contact me and see if it can be put into RPM, or is already there.
Regards,
As Luke said, it depends on exactly what you want in "Campaign Management". It seems to mean a lot of different things to different people. Are you going to have a computer at the gaming table?
If you're just looking to keep track of notes and such, a little program called MyInfo is used by a fair number of folks.
My program, DM's Familiar, has a similar tree outline/text tool for keeping track of notes.
DMF has a full reference library of Spells, Monsters, Feats, etc. so that you have rules instantly at your fingertips (your players hate it when you can look up their spell info faster than them). The reference library is integrated with the tree tool so that you can store links back to all these things.
DMF also has full combat management to make your combats run faster and smoother but that falls outside of campaign management in my mind.
Most of us have demos of our programs available. Download them all, take a test spin, and see which ones meet your needs.
If you're just looking to keep track of notes and such, a little program called MyInfo is used by a fair number of folks.
My program, DM's Familiar, has a similar tree outline/text tool for keeping track of notes.
DMF has a full reference library of Spells, Monsters, Feats, etc. so that you have rules instantly at your fingertips (your players hate it when you can look up their spell info faster than them). The reference library is integrated with the tree tool so that you can store links back to all these things.
DMF also has full combat management to make your combats run faster and smoother but that falls outside of campaign management in my mind.
Most of us have demos of our programs available. Download them all, take a test spin, and see which ones meet your needs.
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