Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="lkj" data-source="post: 7655762" data-attributes="member: 18646">Everything else aside, I agree with them that pdf's are a limited 'technology' when it comes to gaming material -- a activity where you are regularly accessing reference material in the course of playing the game. Whether you are creating a character, making an adventure, running an adventure, etc., you are regularly flipping through material in a book, or more often several books, to get all the information you need for a given task. That's because the pieces you need for a given activity are never all together. And there's no way to avoid that in a paper book. If you are building an elf fighter with a charlatan background you have three different places to look. And you can't change that without severely limiting options or creating an absurd tome with incredible duplication. Pdf's don't much improve that situation. They offer increased portability and a search function. But you're still 'flipping' around various parts of your tome trying to get all the information you need.What you really want-- in this age of digital information-- is a content management system in which all the pieces of information you need are always one touch away. Essentially you want all the information you need in one place all the time, no matter what you are doing. And, finally, we have sufficient technology to make that possible. Of course you need a  well designed interface and a well designed database structure to back it up. No easy task to be sure. But heck, I was helping my kids design characters today, flipping back and forth through my beautiful player's handbook while also trying to clean the house, and I would have loved (killed for the opportunity?) to hand them an app where they could just click on various parts of a screen to get the info they need rather than what I did have to do. Don't get me wrong-- I love the physical books and it's the way I want to learn the game. But once I'm using it, the tool would be great to have. The same is true when I'm running an adventure. Need the map? Don't flip a page, just press here. Need the monster stats? Press here. Running a combat and want info on that spell the evil dude is casting? Click here.  It's all about the design and usability. And pdf's just don't offer anything like that. Not even close.And I think--  however well or poorly they've articulated it-- that is what Trapdoor is trying to achieve. It's not just a character builder or a campaign management tool. It's a system which serves you the information you need for any given gaming task easily and intuitively. And as soon as you buy content, it immediately gets integrated into this system and is suddenly at your fingertips. Then they layer on things like game table aids-- dice roller, messaging, etc.  Do other tools get at some of this? Maybe. But I haven't seen anything I could easily hand to the least intense of gamer friends and see them just use it. The snippets I've seen of the Morningstar app seem to indicate this is what they are putting together.But here's the rub for Trapdoor, and it's been articulated in this thread a lot. The value of the tool is intimately tied to the availability of the information. If you can't plug the info into the tool (5e in my case) then the tool loses most of its value. Sure, you can still use some of the features for a 5e game. You might be able to design your own adventures with it and have sweet maps and such. But that's not what is going to sell me on it. What sells me on it is that the content management works with the system I'm using. Ultimately I can't blame them for not having access to 5e (you can try but it's all pretty much extrapolated speculation with likely little bearing on the reality).  But it is what it is. In order to sell this thing, they have to have content a lot of people want. They might be able to do that for PF and create a tool that rocks enough to convert people from various other less slick apps. But to do that will require a demonstration, and again-- it is what it is-- they just aren't in the position to do that. I really do want this app, as I believe it's envisioned, for 5e. I'm just skeptical that there's a path to get there. The OGL (if there is one) should help clarify that. Unfortunately, the timing is awful for Trapdoor. My two cents (bloated to about the size of a buck).AD</blockquote>

Verification