D&D 5E D&DN And Digital: Modularity in DDI

[Dausuul]

A primary goal of D&DN is modularity; you can use the parts you want and discard the rest. Lately I've been wondering how this will be addressed, or not, in DDI.

While DDI was a very useful tool in 4E, there were a number of things that bothered me about it, and one of them was the difficulty of filtering content. For example, when selecting monsters for adventures, I typically wanted to limit my search to monsters published in or after Monster Manual 3 (when the math was adjusted to reduce grind and make higher-level monsters more competitive). The only way I could find to do this was to search, one by one, inside each post-MM3 source. Likewise, if I wanted to allow certain sourcebooks for PC material and disallow others, it would have been very useful if I could distribute some kind of "campaign settings file" to my players, so they could just switch their DDI to "Dausuul's Campaign" and see only the stuff that was present in my game. Given that D&D trends inevitably toward bloat over the course of each edition, the ability to limit what material is used in a campaign is very handy.

I presume that D&DN will have a DDI-equivalent. I would like to see this DDI-equivalent include the option to create and distribute customized campaign settings, which would include the following:

• Source filters. You can make a checklist of which books are allowed and which are not, as well as setting a default behavior for when new material is released (either "allow new material by default" or "forbid new material by default"). Material from disallowed books is not displayed while you've got those campaign settings active.
• You can also go item by item, marking specific classes, races, feats, spells, magic items, or whatever as unavailable.
• Rules module filters. If you're not using feats, for example, you can uncheck the "feats" box, and players creating characters in this campaign won't be asked to select feats. Likewise, if you uncheck "skills," then skills disappear--both from character creation and from monster/NPC statblocks.

What sort of filtering capabilities, if any, would you like to have in D&DN's digital offering?

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Lackhand]

In terms of the product I want for them to develop: I guess I want them to allow me to "write my own ruleset".
I want to be able to curate a ruleset which I can share with others in my game, which lets me select from among the Wizards-published rules or write my own house rules or share house rules with other DMs, write comments on things, disallow sources, create new sources, and merge it with my campaign notes and PC records.

So this would be a rules reference, which knows how to pull from various sources via filters.
And a campaign manager, which can be used to do rules lookups and augment the rules lookups with additional sources of input (my campaign!).
And a character generator, which creates characters which can be put into campaigns (or carried around, or whatever).
And monster/NPC/trap/campaign note generation facilities, with appropriate levels of sharing.
And a loot-and-xp-dividing application which we can use to hand out schwag.
And the whole thing should be webpage-y driven -- they can make apps or programs or whatever fool thing they want, so long as I can also get to it with my phone or tablet. Which isn't necessarily an apple device.


I'm a computer scientist.

I would dearly, dearly love it if the guts of the ddi for the next generation were just exposed to all comers; there's some markup language (which renders nicely in the browser) and a real service behind it.

For example, I would like to have some published, forever-true statement that if I hit
http://ddi.wizards.com/spells/color-spray
with a valid ddi cookie in my browser, I get some formatting returned that says something like

<title>Color Spray</title>
<div class='level'>1</div>
<div class='school'>Illusion</div>
<div class='text'>Lorem ipsum...</div>
<div class='source'><span class='book'>PHB</span><span class='page'>42</span></div>

with the CSS magic to make all this stuff display beautifully in a browser.

Then they can almost do whatever they want, as long as they let us geeks write tools -- on our own dime, in our own free time, requiring the use of their service so they can charge stuff -- that will inevitably be better than whatever they actually pay for* from the point of view of me, the consumer.

---
* Someone's going to yell at me about the poor writers and designers needing some sort of CMS. Yes, yes they do. But I want a DDI I can use. Them getting data into it is their problem

 

[iwarrior-poet]

Whatever they do, I pray they have iOS, Android versions accessible by phone or tablet. I would prefer to use a phone or tablet at a gaming table rather than lugging around a laptop plus printed hard copies or books. (Though I still love leafing through my 3.5 tomes, and occasionally my 1e tomes)

 

[Ferghis]

Then they can almost do whatever they want, as long as they let us geeks write tools -- on our own dime, in our own free time, requiring the use of their service so they can charge stuff -- that will inevitably be better than whatever they actually pay for* from the point of view of me, the consumer.

This, verily.