Hoping to find testers for a shelter-in-place-friendly D&D app

hunterloftis · May 2, 2020

Hi! I've been playing for a few years (mostly 5e, a little 3.5), but I've never DMed and I'm making a tool for DMs, so... I need to get feedback from folks who know more than I do.

Here's a bit of background about the project, in case you might be interested:

How Dungeons & Dragons Brought Us New Friends in a New City (Table of Sending)

Cheers,
Hunter

thom_likes_gaming · May 3, 2020

Hmm. Reading through your blog post, I'm still unclear as to how your table of sending intends to differ from, say, roll20. Would you care to elaborate some?

hunterloftis · May 4, 2020

Thanks, that's useful feedback! I'll probably need to address it on the site.

Roll20, in some way, inspired the project. It's the first thing we tried after we couldn't meet in person, and we spent the first hour trying to get audio/video issues worked out (never did), and then spent half of the rest of the session trying to figure out why we weren't all seeing the same thing (lots of page refreshes) or why someone couldn't move something (lots of configuration).

Especially after working in the space and seeing how hard it is, I respect Roll20 for making what they have into a success, but I would like something simple, minimal, and reliable. Additionally:

I want this to be a tool. Closer to a document editor than a game. So no rules, no character sheets, etc. Just a shared space that syncs the party remotely.
I want to encourage and enable improvisational gameplay through very fast, intuitive, world sculpting. A sketch that looks nice and is instantly readable by players.
I'd like to simplify some of the manual tasks our DM was frustrated by in Roll20 (like manually updating visibility) by using the semantic data of the world (this is a wall, this isn't a wall) to do things like field-of-view calculations.

thom_likes_gaming · May 5, 2020

So, kind of a r20 lite, more of a virtual table with a few bells and whistles than a full on VTT. Sounds neat.

What's your intended target system? A website / service, a dedicated software on a pc or some mobile app? I'd be OK testing some, if it's something I can run.

hunterloftis · May 7, 2020

more of a virtual table with a few bells and whistles than a full on VTT.

Exactly! Except, I hope very few bells and whistles. I'm going for (0) see/talk to your friends reliably, (1) intuitive map sketching, (2) miniatures, (3) dice rolling, in that order, and absolutely nothing more. Here's the current state of painting a map: