CITY OF BRASS: A New RPG Electronic Tool Suite Is Glimpsed On The Horizon!

With Trapdoor Tech and Lone Wolf cautiously circling each other with their Codename: Morningstar and Herolab/Realmworks applications respectively, another player has been quietly prepping something in the background. The City of Brass, billing itself as "the next generation of gaming apps" is working on "a fully-featured app specifically designed to manage the mechanics of pen-and-paper games while allowing you to focus on what matters".

The application, which will have public betas in early 2015, and hopefully full production midyear, has been privately in use by the developers for months for both D&D 5E and for N.E.W. The Roleplaying Game (the inclusion of the latter attracted my interest for obvious reasons, but the app is designed for multiple systems). It features a world builder, a character (and monster) builder, a story builder for creating adventures, and a campaign manager. Plus a whole bunch of stock art you can use in your creations. Lucas of City of Brass shared some screenshots with me, below.

It's an interesting time, to be sure. It seems that this particular application is pretty much built already, and is is heavy playtesting mode right now. It does look like the forefront of electronic aids development is proving to be a highly competitive area in terms of functionality and cost, and that can only be good for us potential customers!

Here's a D&D 5E character. This is the overview stuff.

And here's the actual character sheet.
​

Hoard of the Dragon Queen (D&D 5E) in the Campaign Manager.

Recaps from the Campaign Manager.

The character page. All the sheets can be viewed by the GM.

A preview of the City of Brass character sheet. This is Jack, a PC from a What's O.L.D. is N.E.W. playtest.

The tab with Jack's exploits. All the gold numbers are interactive. If you click them, they roll dice.

The Story Builder. This is the splash screen for an adventure.

An encounter in the Story Builder.

A peek at the World Builder pages. Crisp, clean, easy to navigate and simple to create and manage.

A quick glimpse of the FAQ pages which gives some hints as the licensing and pricing.

​

 

[LucasC]

Thanks Ferghis, that's good feedback and I appreciate it.

Would it, in your opinion, satisfy the need if we added one additional level of permission, maybe something like:

• Private
• Assigned (only those users you have invited to view the page)
• Affiliates
• Residents
• Global

 

[Nikosandros]

Thanks Ferghis, that's good feedback and I appreciate it.

Would it, in your opinion, satisfy the need if we added one additional level of permission, maybe something like:

• Private
• Assigned (only those users you have invited to view the page)
• Affiliates
• Residents
• Global

I'm not [MENTION=40483]Ferghis[/MENTION], but to me it sounds good, especially if it's easy to change the assigned users. On the topic of revealing information, one interesting feature that Realmworks has is to subdivide each topic into "snippets" that can be revealed separately. Thus players can look up the description of Smorfus the Fat and be reminded that he's junior master in the Pie Makers Guild, while they are not made aware that he is a werebadger.

 

[LucasC]

You've got a couple of options for holding back information.

Pages inside The City of Brass are built with sections. We have a section visible only to the owner of the record. When anyone besides yourself looks at the page, they'll see only the public information. When you look at it, you'll get the public and private.

(it's the private notes in this screenshot)

View attachment 65844

For characters there's also direct support for public / private views. Every character record has an overview page and a detailed sheet. Each of them have different permission settings. So you can easily set the overview to public but the sheet to private.

Here's the overview - you configure all the information on this page. So anything you don't want there you'll just not include.
View attachment 65845

Here's the character sheet.
View attachment 65846

 

[smartboyathome]

I think this is inadequate to handle the lore of a world in which people are privy to different information, and I press this point at this juncture because it's becoming increasingly clear to me that this feature is difficult to implement at later stages of development.

But before I get into it, let me emphasize how desireable this feature is. First, it is (or will be) highly requested. Your biggest competitor, Realmworks, moved this feature up on their to-do list despite the difficulty in implementing it based solely on the volume of user requests. The same is true on the feedback forums of many of your other competitors. Second, reasonable people can disagree, but, this is the main feature that differentiates your product from a Wiki. There are others, I'm sure. And I'm sure you will regale me with other reasons why your thing is better than a wiki, but you will find many who think that I can do the bulk of what this product does with a free Wiki. As I tried to say earlier, I'm not being cheap here: one colossal advantage of my wiki is that I have control over the risk of my content disappearing. Realmworks has a long-standing company behind it, so it garners a bit more trust on that front. This lack of trust is the main reason I have not renewed my subscription to Epicwords.com, where the admin is so absent that I fear it might disappear any day, so do not underestimate it. But I digress: this is an important feature, and its implementation will differentiate you from your competition.

Which gets me to why I'm spending the better part of an hour of my time to impress this point on you now: it's a bitch to implement properly, because it requires each LINK to verify the access rights of the user: otherwise users without access see a non-functional link, and the point of the whole secrecy thing is highly diminished. Implementing this early on makes it a lot easier. Talk to your partner (who, I take it, works the tech-end of things) about it. Do your own research to confirm what I'm saying.

And mark. My. Words.

I have recent experience from my day job trying to implement permissions on a previously non-permissioned API, and I would like to agree with Ferghis. If you don't think about this up front, the transition will be painful, not to mention impossible to hide completely from users. One point I'd like to emphasize, though, is that it should be done on the API level, NOT exclusively in JavaScript. This was the mistake that my team at work made a while back, and it meant anyone who was savvy enough could just make we requests against our service and do whatever they wanted. Luckily, we were internal to the corporarate network, but you don't have that luxury, so you should think about how to secure the communication (and yes, this is hard).

Also, similarly, I can see folders/subpages being requested at some point in order to organize information (and possibly for permissioning purposes as well). This is another feature that you want to implement up front, because if you don't, you'll be stuck with breaking your own API or only half implementing it (for example, at my work, we ended up with a system where all pages, regardless of folder, must have a unique name).

With all this, having an open API would be helpful for allowing access to information outside of your product, and you might even see the community create some fantastic uses for your system. I can see a plugin for Roll20 (or an equivalent system) being made where it imports all the character/world information from your site and shown when appropriate while gaming online. Of course, that is just off the top of my head, and others may come up with other uses for your product's API. Just by having them available, you would open up many, many possibilities for what your product can (and will) be used for.

Now, for a feature request from me which I *don't* expect to be implemented in the first version: the ability to print out a character sheet/generate a PDF using a template. My example for this is the D&D Adventurer's League, which requires you use the official character sheet form they distribute. Right now, I would probably generate the character on your system, then copy it over into the PDF form on my computer. It would be nice if I could just export it from your system, but, again, I do not expect this to be implemented in the first version.

I do look forward to seeing how City of Brass turns out, and I am hoping that it will fit a need that I have been forced to use PDFs for. If it ends up being as extensible as you claim, then I foresee it going far in the future.

 

[Blackbrrd]

My issue with subscription services like this is that rpg's is something you play for a long time. Say, ten years. A price of something like 6$ a month, ends up being 720$ over that period. Pretty darned pricey. And that's basically only for an application that organizes the data I put in. (Because there are no data pre-entered into the system?)

Basically, the value I get from this would be from my own effort, and to not have total control over that data (since it's web based) makes me a bit negative here.

Ah well, might be worth it if the subscription price is low enough and the data export features good enough. (shouldn't be so hard to create an xml export format that could come with a xlst transform into html). It would make it feel a lot less "risky" if you are afraid to lose your data

 

[Zaruthustran]

Agreed on the undesirability of subscription. I understand why the dev prefers that model; it makes sense for them. Not for me.

Alas. I like the clean look of this product. Maybe one day a standalone D&D app will come. Something similar to War Room.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Quick question, how much input has to be provided? In Realm Works, there is a lot of data input from the subscriber needed, will this be the same?

 

[DMZ2112]

I realize I'm drawing this from the Realm Works site and not the City of Brass site, but I feel like this paragraph really sums up why I object to paying a monthly fee for "campaign cloud services:"

Unlike like Dropbox and similar tools, the Realm Works cloud is a database back-end running on our servers. It probably makes more sense to think of it like a MMORPG, where your client does the heavy lifting of the interface that you see, but the servers host your data so there is a consistent version that your players can see with only the updates you’ve made (and made available). So it’s really nothing like a file sharing system, which means it’s nothing like Dropbox or the like.

Until the developers of one of these services can /explain/ to me why a premium "database back-end running on their servers" is /preferable/ to a free "file sharing system," and why a file sharing system fails to provide a "consistent version that my players can see with only the updates I've made (and made available)," no one gets my money.

Considering that this software is system agnostic, what is going on in that "back end?" What "heavy lifting" is there to do? Presumably I'm responsible even for hand-designing my own character sheets and monster entries. Maybe someone else in the community has put in the legwork before me, but if that's the case why aren't I paying them instead of the software developer?

All I need is a robust content search engine and a granular user access management system and I have the most flexible online campaign organization tool there is. And flexibility is /so much more important/ than organization, at least to me. All parent-child relationships and robust tagging say to me is that I'm going to spend more of my time breaking old relationships and retagging docs than I will creating and uploading more content.

Forget Dropbox or Google Drive -- any modern OS provides the necessary functionality. I don't need a company to run an "MMORPG" for me to manage my campaign in. I just need you to store my files, hide them from people without access, and tell me what's in them. Everything else is flash.

 

[LucasC]

Quick question, how much input has to be provided?

We do not have rules pre-loaded in The City of Brass, so things like powers, feats, equipment, or spells you need to enter. However, after you enter them once, they stay with your account and become available for future characters.

To give you an idea of how it all works, I recorded a quick video of creating a new character - you can watch it here:

http://youtu.be/nF_cNTm1JQQ​

 

[Hand of Evil]

Thank you