The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[GURPS 4e] Building some software and looking for experienced player input
Sawks
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Hey, there. I read through the rules about how it's not advisable to make your first post a new topic, but hopefully this won't be too frowned on. I've lurked the forums in the past, but never had a real reason to create an account until now. Notice: ended up being way more verbose with my introduction than I planned, so wrapped all the boring stuff up in a spoiler tag :P
That said I'll move on to why I'm here. GURPS has inspired me to completely start from scratch and build a new program from the ground up. This time several times more legitimate and powerful though, as I'm building it with the masses in mind and not just my small friend group. The problem I'm faced with though is that, because I'm a total scrub, I don't know how much of GURPS is vital to be built into the program itself rather than being handled by the DM. I figured this is the kind of stuff experienced players, and especially experienced GURPS DMs, would be able to help me with really easily. And because I'm a big PA fan, and know that quite a few are probably lurking on these forums (and I'd been meaning to create an account anyhow), maybe this would be a good place to start
So, to finish off I guess I'll just list where I'm currently at as far as what I think the program should have built in and any questions/decisions I'm toying with to give some context of the type of information I'm talking about and to make it easier for my undoubtedly flawed logic to be corrected faster haha. Let's see...
- Comprehensive character creation: Enforcing the point system, allowing disadvantage caps, and big lists of advantages, perks, disadvantages, quirks, and skills to choose from (and with descriptions built into tooltips once in-game).
- The ability for the DM to add custom entries in all of the above.
- A prebuilt list of equipment to choose from? I'm not sure just how many stats and properties items can have (it's not just $, weight, and quantity right?) and if any of them will need to be worked with at all by the program outside of just listing them basically
- Not sure if any of the attributes need to be messed with outside of just listing them and allowing the DM to change them on the fly (but then, that might mess with the enforced point system now that I think about it. Hmmm)
- I don't really understand all the damage types and what the program should display, and if it'll need to deal with any of that outside of just listing it and allowing the DM to change it
- I was thinking that for the rolls area, I could just have three d6 icons that can individually be enabled / disabled by clicking on them (to change what you're rolling against). Is three enough, or should I have more (disabled by default) for certain situations?
- Should I have support for people preferring the D20 over three D6?
- I know I should list character name, player name, age, height, weight, and probably spent/unspent points. What I'm not so sure about are Size Modifier, Profession, Appearance
- Some sort of map and token support for the DM, maybe with a visibility checkbox to allow showing it to the players if so desired.
That's probably most of it for now. Any suggestions for things you'd like to see in a program like this outside of just helping me work out the GURPS stuff would be more than welcome as well, by the way. After I have enough information to build the UI, I'll be sure to post some screenshots to make critiquing a lot easier. Thanks!
So here's the rundown. I was never all that into the tabletop / roleplaying scene, but a year ago or so I was spending the night with some friends and one of them, a veteran tabletopper, suggested we give it a shot and play some Call of Cthulhu. I'm a fan of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, so the game piqued my interest. We all just used premade characters from campaigns with his role-playing circle of friends, but despite not knowing much about how a pen and paper game worked we all ended up having a very surprisingly fun night (a lot of which I attribute to my friend's quality DMing and knowledge resulting in the game running so smoothly).
Afterwards, my friends and I were so inspired by that night that we decided to make our own game: a post apocalyptic horror world we named "Surviving Rebirth." We brainstormed some pretty unique game mechanics, like using coins rather than dice and our own custom combat system and etc. In the end we actually had more fun with it than expected (given our noobiness here), but only had time to play it a few times before we all split up and moved away to attend different colleges. I happened to be getting big into programming and so decided that for my first real (and sizable) project I'd port the game to the virtual world to unite us all again over the internet. I don't have any screenshots of it in actual use (didn't think to at the time) and can't take any now (it uses an early implementation of web sockets, so only works with an old version of google chrome), but I do have this mockup I found that pretty accurately portrays what a user would be looking at while playing the game.
The DM ran a portable desktop application that allowed them to manage everything while players just connected by loading up a webpage (that the DM's program could change in real time for them). The problem was that I went all overkill on the DM's program, and in an attempt to do things like allow the player to have multiple options to choose from in combat scenarios (and compare the odds for each in real time) it ended up requiring the DM fill out a ton of number boxes and dropdowns and made combat a pain for them. I.E. for a combat roll it needed to know the defender, what they would potentially be blocking with, the attacker, what the attacker was aiming at (so it could check if anything was equipped there and use its defense rating if needed), the attacker's potential ranged and melee weapons, ranged hit difficulty, distance, and dodge difficulty. Sooooo, despite all my hard work I kind of fell out of love with my project, and after chrome updated its websocket protocol to match the new spec, effectively breaking the DM's program's ability to maintain a connection with the players' webpages, I was too unmotivated to even bother fixing it so we pretty much stopped playing altogether and moved on to other things.
Recently though, I stumped upon GURPS and was really blown away by it. It seems to be really well balanced, encourages fleshed out characters, and sounds like it adapts very well to custom-made worlds like the type I had thought up for my previous program. And to top it off, the in-game mechanics seem exceedingly simple. I find I'm way more interested in the actual story and character interaction than crunching numbers, so GURPS really strikes me as the perfect system for what I'm after in these kind of games.
Afterwards, my friends and I were so inspired by that night that we decided to make our own game: a post apocalyptic horror world we named "Surviving Rebirth." We brainstormed some pretty unique game mechanics, like using coins rather than dice and our own custom combat system and etc. In the end we actually had more fun with it than expected (given our noobiness here), but only had time to play it a few times before we all split up and moved away to attend different colleges. I happened to be getting big into programming and so decided that for my first real (and sizable) project I'd port the game to the virtual world to unite us all again over the internet. I don't have any screenshots of it in actual use (didn't think to at the time) and can't take any now (it uses an early implementation of web sockets, so only works with an old version of google chrome), but I do have this mockup I found that pretty accurately portrays what a user would be looking at while playing the game.
The DM ran a portable desktop application that allowed them to manage everything while players just connected by loading up a webpage (that the DM's program could change in real time for them). The problem was that I went all overkill on the DM's program, and in an attempt to do things like allow the player to have multiple options to choose from in combat scenarios (and compare the odds for each in real time) it ended up requiring the DM fill out a ton of number boxes and dropdowns and made combat a pain for them. I.E. for a combat roll it needed to know the defender, what they would potentially be blocking with, the attacker, what the attacker was aiming at (so it could check if anything was equipped there and use its defense rating if needed), the attacker's potential ranged and melee weapons, ranged hit difficulty, distance, and dodge difficulty. Sooooo, despite all my hard work I kind of fell out of love with my project, and after chrome updated its websocket protocol to match the new spec, effectively breaking the DM's program's ability to maintain a connection with the players' webpages, I was too unmotivated to even bother fixing it so we pretty much stopped playing altogether and moved on to other things.
Recently though, I stumped upon GURPS and was really blown away by it. It seems to be really well balanced, encourages fleshed out characters, and sounds like it adapts very well to custom-made worlds like the type I had thought up for my previous program. And to top it off, the in-game mechanics seem exceedingly simple. I find I'm way more interested in the actual story and character interaction than crunching numbers, so GURPS really strikes me as the perfect system for what I'm after in these kind of games.
That said I'll move on to why I'm here. GURPS has inspired me to completely start from scratch and build a new program from the ground up. This time several times more legitimate and powerful though, as I'm building it with the masses in mind and not just my small friend group. The problem I'm faced with though is that, because I'm a total scrub, I don't know how much of GURPS is vital to be built into the program itself rather than being handled by the DM. I figured this is the kind of stuff experienced players, and especially experienced GURPS DMs, would be able to help me with really easily. And because I'm a big PA fan, and know that quite a few are probably lurking on these forums (and I'd been meaning to create an account anyhow), maybe this would be a good place to start
So, to finish off I guess I'll just list where I'm currently at as far as what I think the program should have built in and any questions/decisions I'm toying with to give some context of the type of information I'm talking about and to make it easier for my undoubtedly flawed logic to be corrected faster haha. Let's see...
- Comprehensive character creation: Enforcing the point system, allowing disadvantage caps, and big lists of advantages, perks, disadvantages, quirks, and skills to choose from (and with descriptions built into tooltips once in-game).
- The ability for the DM to add custom entries in all of the above.
- A prebuilt list of equipment to choose from? I'm not sure just how many stats and properties items can have (it's not just $, weight, and quantity right?) and if any of them will need to be worked with at all by the program outside of just listing them basically
- Not sure if any of the attributes need to be messed with outside of just listing them and allowing the DM to change them on the fly (but then, that might mess with the enforced point system now that I think about it. Hmmm)
- I don't really understand all the damage types and what the program should display, and if it'll need to deal with any of that outside of just listing it and allowing the DM to change it
- I was thinking that for the rolls area, I could just have three d6 icons that can individually be enabled / disabled by clicking on them (to change what you're rolling against). Is three enough, or should I have more (disabled by default) for certain situations?
- Should I have support for people preferring the D20 over three D6?
- I know I should list character name, player name, age, height, weight, and probably spent/unspent points. What I'm not so sure about are Size Modifier, Profession, Appearance
- Some sort of map and token support for the DM, maybe with a visibility checkbox to allow showing it to the players if so desired.
That's probably most of it for now. Any suggestions for things you'd like to see in a program like this outside of just helping me work out the GURPS stuff would be more than welcome as well, by the way. After I have enough information to build the UI, I'll be sure to post some screenshots to make critiquing a lot easier. Thanks!
Life sucks. Music doesn't.
Sawks on
0