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.
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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.

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[Nikosandros]

From that video it seems that the modifier for each stat is added manually each time? Is that so, or is there a way to automatize this process?

How flexible is the system? For example, in AD&D, each stat has several different modifiers. Is it possible to implement this?

 

[Deadshot]

I understand that there is a subscription model to pay for costs. What I am wondering is if there is are player and GM levels? If I am running the game and putting everything in, I would expect to pay more than the guy who logs on to see his sheet and handouts once a week or whenever we run the game. Will there be different subscription tiers for players and GMs?

 

[LucasC]

From that video it seems that the modifier for each stat is added manually each time? Is that so, or is there a way to automatize this process?

That's correct, modifiers are added manually. That's because not all games handle modifiers the same, and we're not programming for a specific game system. It is likely that we'll look at automating the modifiers for some popular games at some point, but for now our focus continues to be ensuring as broad support as possible for games.

How flexible is the system? For example, in AD&D, each stat has several different modifiers. Is it possible to implement this?

You can enter anything in the free-text form (in the video you see it as Description). Data entered here is not dice-enabled on the sheet, but it is captured, stored, and can be viewed. When we build a character sheet template for 1e/2e games, we'll look for a better way to accommodate ability scores for those editions. That won't likely be until sometime after Beta begins, however.

 

[LucasC]

I understand that there is a subscription model to pay for costs. What I am wondering is if there is are player and GM levels?

Our pricing model is the same regardless of how you use the system. Your subscription gets you access to all the tools in The City of Brass and our stock art library.

 

[Ferghis]

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

This would work fine for me.

Here's the tough part to implement: turning links to assigned pages into plain text for those who do not have access. And viceversa to those who do have access. I'm not trying to be unreasonable: if that isn't done, the system wouldn't be useless to me, and I would not dismiss it. But showing that there is a secret, and providing context for that secret (via the positioning of the link) would give away half of the secret.

 

[Ferghis]

From the video, it seems that feats are only selectable from a pre-populated list. That makes me guess that you have to implement feats when you implement a template, or at least that's the way you built that template. Can you elaborate at all on that? I'm asking the question because it would be easier, I think, for most DMs, to set up a template and then let the players type in or copy and paste their feats and other details.

Also, a very minor feature request: it would be nice to click once to edit all the ability scores, and then tab through them all and their modifiers. Users will often want to modify most ability scores during character creation, and modifying just one score is a relatively less common event (in fact, D&D often lets you modify two of them). This is one of those trivial requests, and I'd be happy to see it low on your to-do list.

 

[LucasC]

From the video, it seems that feats are only selectable from a pre-populated list.

Feats, Spells, Items, and (soon) Characteristics are all data elements that you are likely to re-use on different characters and/or creatures. Rather than having to enter them every time, you need enter them only once, then after you've done that, you can add them to any character. One cool thing about this approach is, the longer you use The City of Brass, the easier it gets, as you build your own personal database of information.

When I recorded the prior video, I did it on a new account so there wasn't any data in my Feat database.

Easier to show you... here's another quick video. http://youtu.be/XB3ZzLPqlcY

And here's a screenshot taken from another account of my items. You can see I have entered stuff for three different games. Those items are now all associated with my account and can be re-used with future characters.

View attachment 65897

 

[LucasC]

I have also recorded a few videos showing World Builder. If your interested, you can find them here:

1- Creating your world
2- Adding an Atlas Entry and modifying the menu
3- Adding child records (and some stock art)

 

[Ferghis]

Thanks, this info is all valuable.

Feats, Spells, Items, and (soon) Characteristics are all data elements that you are likely to re-use on different characters and/or creatures. Rather than having to enter them every time, you need enter them only once, then after you've done that, you can add them to any character.

Can anyone create such data elements and use them on different templates? Or is it the case that, if one party creates a template, they have to create all the elements as well?

 

[LucasC]

Can anyone create such data elements and use them on different templates? Or is it the case that, if one party creates a template, they have to create all the elements as well?

The Character Sheet templates are created by us. As of this post, we have a template in place for 5e, Pathfinder, W.O.I.N., and a Generic ruleset for everything else. Next up is a Fate Core template and then probably a 1e/2e sheet, but I'm not certain yet.

Some of the advantage of a specific template are verbiage can be tailored to the game, default options are pre-generated (like skill lists and ability scores), and we often build minor functionality (like BAB for Pathfinder or Proficiency for 5e). The Generic ruleset would work for these games but it's a little cleaner and easier after we've setup a specific template.

The data elements (Feats, Characteristics, etc.) are created by you and resident on your account. They are private to your account, and cannot be shared. If, for example, I want to share a new W.O.I.N. exploit (read: feat) with my players, I do so by posting a House Rule in Campaign Manager. They each then copy that exploit into their account as a Feat where it becomes available to them.

A planned future enhancement will allow you to share data elements with others, who will then be able to clone them and add them to their account.