"Frustrated but not bored" certainly matches how I was feeling during the exploration phase of that session. But I think it's reasonable for D&D rules, and on-the-fly DM decisions, to sometimes produce those emotions in the players. We committed ourselves, at least temporarily, to doggedly attempting something that we knew would be difficult given our characters' current capabilities. Alexis can't make us tramp up and down Hungarian hillsides all day in real life, but the game has been tuned so that attempting that action during play will make us feel a lot like how we'd feel in real life after a day of hard tramping with nothing (yet) gained. I appreciate that.
The Ability Scores section of the character sheet now contains an attack roll calculator. If you enter an adjusted attack roll, the calculator displays what AC you hit given your current THAC0. (#195)
In the Identity section of the character sheet, next to your current XP and the XP required for your next level, you now also see the difference of those values, i.e. remaining XP to the next level. (#199)
User Interface
Tables and other wide UI elements no longer run off-screen at narrow screen widths. (#34, #201)
Text labels in the Identity section of the site are shorter to better suit narrow screens.
You can now create and manage real estate: parcels of land and buildings alike. Most importantly, you can move items to parcels/buildings.
Zingor now has an importer for Alexis Smolensk's trade table spreadsheets, which contain weights, prices, sale units, descriptions, and other aspects of player-purchasable tradegoods.
User Interface
The navbar now sticks to the top of the page as you scroll down, allowing access to it without having to go scroll all the way up.
Various links and buttons have had their heights and shapes standardized.
For small screen widths, including mobile devices, the navbar now condenses down to a fold-out menu.
You (and long-time readers) know that I've long been questing for the staggering potential we can unlock by committing to fully computer-based gameplay. But I've tended to overlook the immersive potential of full real-time visual feedback. I gestured at that in my master's thesis but didn't fully pursue that particular thread.
Your recent experiment with Keep on the Borderlands image generation, and some work I've done on interactive battlemaps, have got me thinking again about how to more thoroughly integrate visuals into computerized play. Thanks for stirring the pot further here. Maybe you were the only one in five decades until yesterday, but make space on the bandwagon for Joey and me!
I've imported my old blog, 21st Century D&D, into this website, tagging the posts with "21stcenturydnd".
I wrote that blog during the second half of undergrad, give or take. While doing QA on the import program, I reread all the posts to gauge how I've changed since 2016-2018.
I've improved as a programmer and game designer, and there are ideas in those posts that turned out to be dead ends, or which are chiefly of historical interest as signposts for how far I've come. Yet there's a reassuring and comforting continuity between what I was thinking then, and what I've accomplished since.
You can now upload a portrait for each of your characters. A character's portrait is displayed above the character sheet's table of contents. (#56)
Sage Knowledge
Version 0.6.0 brings multiple enhancements to sage knowledge support. First off, Zingor now supports multiple chosen sage fields/studies, since we have characters hitting levels where they get more! (#163)
Zingor now also supports sage study concentrations, the app's term for subareas to which certain sage studies' knowledge points may or must be assigned (#171). The rules for concentrations differ from study to study, and Zingor implements all of them:
On his blog, Alexis Smolensk takes down the argument that using AI ruins your writing, by detailing just how magically useful it is for assisting with your writing -- so long as you bother to use it intelligently.
Present-day D&D practice may not admit of a procedural manual, but ours might, no?
An initial chapter might explain the importance of having a place that you control as the game venue (generally your own house), explaining why playing in a public place is liable to have too many distractions, as well as giving advice for keeping the fridge stocked, ordering food ahead of time and all that jazz. Simple stuff, yes, but things that a noob might not think to do for an art form with a strong component of people management.
That last needs a whole chapter too: Paying attention to players' emotions. Stepping in to resolve conflicts that are getting out of hand w/ techniques like making everyone go for a walk to cool down tempers. Praising players for good planning, good cooperation, clever use of abilities.
Major: I added a party inventory search/filter interface on the homepage (#27). Use this to quickly hunt through all of the items the entire party is carrying.
Minor:
New button to mark all of a character's spells as memorized
In the form for adding items to inventory, I split the "weight" input box into two boxes, one for the number and one for the unit.
Containers can now use "items" as their capacity unit, instead of a unit of weight or volume.
Bugfixes
Deleting a container no longer deletes its contents; instead they go back into your normal inventory (#153)
Gave my players more treasure than I normally would after a wight/skeleton fight yesterday and it felt good. But I couldn’t figure out whether your spreadsheet has an input for treasure type so I did the quantity ad hoc.
If Zoltan gets powerful enough to Plane Shift to Nirvana, or uncovers a different way there, and we all head on over, and discover it's full of blissfully working Alexises... well, you can't get mad if our characters sit down and roll characters. It's only fair.
Joking aside, I do like how you've poked logic holes in popular conceptions of heaven/perfection.
You've mentioned that one of the beautiful things about D&D is that unlike in real life, if players work hard towards something *and succeed*, the success will be meaningful and worthwhile. There will be a reward, or the DM isn't doing his job. That doesn't mean success itself is guaranteed, far from it. But succeeding at something does mean achieving a reward. Whereas in real life you can put in the effort and get somewhere, only to discover "somewhere" was never worthwhile to begin with.
Also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a DM from playing with you as, it’s that I need to give my party more combats and increase the size of treasure hauls. My current party has played ~45 sessions (!) and they’re all about 4th level. That’s ~3x slower advancement than in your game.
It was an excellent combat. We certainly *earned* that big treasure, it felt like, and earned it by the skin of our teeth. Pandred and I (Zoltan) were down to 1 or 2 HP each at one point. A couple different rolls could have totally changed things.
Conditions can now be edited inline so you don't have to delete and recreate them when they change (#113)
When adding or editing a Condition that targets an ability score, you now pick that score from a dropdown instead of having to enter it as freetext (#118)
Conditions that don't target ability scores now hide the ability-score input, and only Conditions that target Strength show the scope input (#118, #119)
Improvements to the code for inline editing UIs, including but not limited to items, sage abilities, and conditions. These should be invisible to end users, but may help address the focus jump issue documented in #47.
You can now delete sage studies. When you delete one, its points are still saved in the database; if you accidentally blow away one you meant to keep, just re-add it and the points will come back. (#51)
You can now add sage abilities separately from sage studies, for those one-off abilities from sources such as your progenitor, or the handful of abilities that hirelings and men-at-arms tend to have. As with studies, sage ability points are retained for easy recovery when an ability is deleted. (#107)