"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)
For my benefit: during development (i.e. when DEBUG is on), the page background now shows a color that grossly clashes with the rest of the theme, so I don't mix up the dev and prod sites (issue #101, PR https://github.com/maxwelljoslyn/zingor/pull/102)
Added a new "Docs" button in the navbar (next to the dark/light theme toggle) which links to the Zingor documentation at https://zingor.readthedocs.io/
The external sync feature (#65) is now fully documented, with instructions for turning the feature on/off, and an explanation of how to mark up your Adventure wiki page (or any webpage!) so Zingor knows what to extract.
I follow and appreciate the jewelry types and distribution. But I am wondering how you arrived at the ratios & calculations for the coins to be fit into the XP total.
I want to call “rebuilding the game as much as necessary” a good place to take them… for the few obsessives like us. :) But that’s just underscoring your point that the game as written, any edition, doesn’t work well out of the box. No argument there.
Party and character inventory tables now use abbreviated units ("lb" instead of "pounds") for weights and measures, removing some visual clutter. (#72)
Pandred filed an issue about the browser "Don't allow Zingor to prompt you again?" dialog; if you accept the prompt, you are then prevented from triggering the confirmation again, meaning you can't take certain actions e.g. deleting items. I've replaced that browser-default dialog with a custom one which doesn't let you get yourself into that trap. (#49)
Infra: cache-busting on static assets, saving you a little bit of bandwidth. (#95)
A DM has to be able to tap into two distinct ways of creating. During design (and play) the DM must be decisive and committed to what he has already made: "My rules for such-and-such work as follows"; "The game's design, its ethos, contains this, and does not contain that"; "Your character cannot do that because..."
But as you describe in this post, he must also continually reappraise his design and play techniques, and sweep them away if better ideas have come, without worrying about how long the previous techniques were in use.
If all you do is decide, but you can't reappraise, you won't be able to expand the game to offer more types of gameplay or more nuance for existing game elements. Your game will become repetitive.
Ahhh, it's a good night to do some coding. I improved the performance of the market page in my D&D application, reducing overall page load time from 2 seconds to 0.8 seconds.
Players purchase items using a "Buy" form. The DM has additional controls in that form to "Give" a player character tradegoods directly. One of those <form> elements exists for each player-purchasable tradegood, and there are about 1,200 of those now. While profiling, I discovered that the 100ish <option> tags on each "Buy/Give" form (one for each potential buyer or recipient of the purchase) were bloating the page to a horrific 25 MB.
I'm sad I missed it! I'm ~900 shy of 4th level so yes, probably would have gone up. It's a-coming, though...
I can't believe the carrion crawler blew all eight attacks. The players must have been hooting something fierce. A lesser DM would have fudged and destroyed the sweetness of that moment entirely...
The hard part for me has always been to connect what I've read in fiction and history books with what's going on in the game, and pull out details that will make the environment believable, in real-time.
In reply to my own comment on “Session 8: "I Love More"”
By "setting all avoidance aside" I only meant to imply that I couldn't care less that you ran away at first :) You killed the damn thing. Who cares what happened otherwise!
James, setting all avoidance aside, I want to thoroughly congratulate you on making the correct tactical decision with Melf's Arrow over, say, Magic Missile. Sure, the latter would have hit automatically, but it wasn't capable of doing enough damage to finish the fight. Though Arrow, with its roll to hit, can be seen as a higher-risk/higher-reward alternative to Missile, we were already in a dreadfully high-risk situation -- it was smart play to cast the spell that had a good chance of totally wiping out the dragon. (Especially since we knew 3 damage or more would stun!)
I've definitely noticed this characteristic of our fights in your game. This must be part of the reason the leveling up in your game is at least twice as fast as in my game. Under your *perfect* combat XP system, the larger the percent of full HP that a PC loses in a fight, the more XP he "extracts" from the fight. (Or in other terms, if sake of argument we say your fight-tuning skill exceeds mine such that PCs come 50% closer to death on average, then PCs in your game will gain 50% more XP for a given fight than if I'd run the same fight in my campaign.)
I read the title of your post and said "YES!" out loud.
I got to the all-important limitation of never repeating a wish and said "Oh, yeah!"
Fantastic stuff, Alexis! I think you've really done it with this one. Though I'll be sure to give you an actual play report if I ever have a PC get high enough to cast the spell :)
This fight was awesome and it was really down to the skin of our teeth! It felt SO tense. If Mikael hadn't made that 10% chance roll to stay conscious he would have been sprawled on the floor and probably much easier to hit; I bet an enemy would have finished him off. Even luckier was the caveweight missing by a single point when its minimum damage on a successful hit would have killed Mikael as well.
What makes it really impressive, Joey -- and must have made the moment tremendously satisfying for you -- is that you made that apothecary purchase ~5 real-world years ago!
"I'd say the party's engagement throughout was very strong. They were acting together, solving puzzles, standing up to me, acting perfectly like four gentlemen with plenty of experience in the game."
Thanks for the compliment :) I think we are gelling well as a party, and the game is a delight!
In reply to my own comment on “Session One, Sprites and All”
You say: "Personally, I'd prefer to be inside a strong, ordered structure that I can contribute to or feast from..."
This occurred to me as well. Believe me, I see the benefits of picking a popular local religion. I tried my best to weigh pros and cons, before the game and in the moment. I even considered, as a pro for Islam or various flavors of Christianity, that researching those religions would let me "double dip" to improve my own game world. I think maybe in the end my own familiarity with China won out...
Echoing Sterling: I shared this post with my players. At yesterday night's game session, one of the druids showed up with pages of notes he took while reading this post, fitting together different elements of our campaign into the three game-metaphors that you used here. For instance, on his "Chess" response page, he wrote down every NPC or faction he could think of that they've encountered, and started thinking about how the party might be able to aid/oppose each one. Now he's transcribing them into a shared Google Doc, hoping the whole party will take it as a leaping-off point to do more planning in between sessions.
Thanks for your "Submarine" post the other day responding to my comment. I continue to enjoy Introducing Gameplay's triple whammy of (1) techniques from technical writing applied to clearly explaining what the game rules are (2) criticism interspersed throughout to show how, even though you're the guy explaining the game's "product specs," there are obvious flaws in the product (3) jumping off from that criticism to show places where a DM could or must expand on the written game rules if he is going to provide the players a good game. The second paragraph you quoted from the paladin section today is a perfect example of what makes this compelling reading.
I caught up on Introducing Gameplay itself as of a day or two ago, but haven't been able to read all of your new posts about this project yet. I've been wondering why you are devoting this project to explaining AD&D by the book, when you could be explaining your own game version instead. The approach would transfer over, no? You'd still be explaining what D&D is and how it works for a complete novice, without being beholden to some of the dumber stuff in strict AD&D.
Maybe 'cause AD&D, not being your creation, is an external yardstick against which you and others can measure your work?