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Message: <blockquote data-quote="InvaderSquoosh" data-source="post: 491372" data-attributes="member: 4529">Every time my group gets together and plays, the pace and immersiveness of the game is hindered by mundane things related to communication. Here is a list of things that I've noticed:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> It takes lots of time to draw out and create situations on grid maps.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Way too much time is spent re-reading rules and preparing spell lists.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The DM has an ungodly amount of information to juggle.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Oftentimes, the DM's vision of a situation is not completely communicated to the players. Important pieces of info can be left out by accident or oversight. This causes what I call a question-and-answer session to take place where the PCs spend some time trying to iron out the details of a situation. What is more annoying is when the players forget crucial information like names of NPCs and the like.</li> </ul>As the years went by, we began to use an increasing amount of technology to solve these problems. One day, we began to brainstorm what the perfect set of equipment would be like for a technologically savvy group. This is ourwishlist of technological innovations to accelerate the role playing experience:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> A flexible, table-sized computer screen that we can place miniatures on and roll up at the end of the day. It will hook up to a portable computer and generate random environments, a fog-of-war effect, and so on.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> A scriptable campaign manager for the DM. This will allow a DM to hack together some code to glue together disparate information and tools. For instance, the DM can have his own home-brew initiative tracking program and tie it to the program that runs the above mentioned screen so that it displays in a floating, transparent window without having to leave the campaign manager. Pluggable is not enough, the DM needs to be able to write script in Perl, Ruby, Python and what have you.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> An online resource of 3ed information in XML format. Unfortunately, copyrights and license issues get in the way of this. However, if the DM *ahem* "supplies" the info by uh... typing it up himself from the book he owns, then it should be legit. Like emulators and ROMS.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">  A very flexible indexing and search tool to work with above mentioned XML. If there's a disagreement about any rule, just type in a search term or click on the handy bookmark to bring up the relevant section in seconds. Kinda how we use google and dictionary.com these days to do research.</li> </ul>I guess the most important innovation would be the roll-up computer screen. That would take care of a TON of things that slow down my group's game these days.So what's on your tech wishlist and what problems would they solve?</blockquote>

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