Living in the Cloud

I'm a software engineer who tends to be on the early adopter side of things. I'm writing this on a Chromebook, I store most of my digital gaming products on Google Drive. I now purchase the bulk of my RPG products digitally. Most of my fiction is read on Kindle or Kindle App. My music library is in the cloud at Amazon Cloudplayer. (And also at Google Music).

Earlier this week Google announced the Chromebook Pixel. Unlike most Chromebooks which are very low cost, the Pixel is a premium machine with a clear inspiration from Apple's unibody products.

I began wondering how practical it would be to use a Chromebook exclusively. While I do a lot of work on my Chromebook I also have a MacBook Air (which also runs Windows 7 as a Virtual Desktop). The family also has a large screen iMac, used mainly by the kids.

For day to day stuff I do pretty well on my Chromebook. I use Google Drive for a lot of my word processing. I'm able to watch movies via Amazon and Netflix. I can listen to streaming music no problem.

For work and for hobbies i run into some issues. At work I have two computers. The first is a powerhouse Lenovo notebook computer, very useful for a lot of the intense number crunching I have to do at work. The other is a virtual PC - still pretty powerful, though short of the physical machine. When I don't want to lug the heavy notebook home from work but still need to work from home (a routine occurrence) I can use a VPN program and my RSA SecureID to connect to my virtual PC. However, the VPN client is not available on the Chromebook so I have to use either the MacBook or iMac. (I have learned a giant screen PC is an awesome thing for work.)


On the hobbies front... As far as playing video games, I'm a pretty casual player. My main vice is Civilziation which requires a PC or Mac. For tabletop RPGs... It's a bit of a mix. I can use my Chromebook to write adventures, store character sheets, etc. I can use Google Hangouts to game remotely, something I routinely do. I'm able to save files purchased from RPGNow directly to my Google Drive. But there are a number of things I cannot do.

First there aren't that many solutions to mapmaking online. I was only able to find one, Pyromancers.com. There are tools there for generating encounter-type maps online. However, I was unable to find any support for hex based overland maps nor for greater variety of tools such as cities, modern/science fiction maps, etc. For those you are looking at either ProFantasy's Campaign Cartographer or NBOS Software's Fractal Mapper. Both of these are Windows-only products. Another solution for any machine able to run a Java app is Inkewll Ideas's Dungeonographer and Hexographer products. These are great products but more suited for fantasy games.

As far as virtual tabletops go, if you are looking to go beyond the basic functionality of Google Hangouts, there are a number of options. There is the Roll20, a web-based VTT that plays nice with Google Hangouts. This is actually a viable web-only option, working on any computing platform. MapTools is a popular product - it is very barebones but is reasonably easy to customize. It can run on most platforms that can run a Java app (though not a Chromebook or other pure web-based solution). Fantasy Grounds is a popular option that I used for my Call of Cthulhu games but it is PC-only. It is a great tool in my opinion for games that it supports but I find it much more difficult than MapTools to customize.


So, what is the verdict then? Is it possible to be a purely cloud-based tabletop RPG-er. It could be, but I think you'd be missing out on a lot of tools that lots of gamers make use of. For me, it isn't yet possible. Quite possibly in a few years. One of the nice things about web-based solutions is that it removes questions of Mac support, Linux support, etc. But if I had to claim just one of the computing devices I have available to me to be my only option I'd almost certainly pick my MacBook Air (with its PC Virtual Desktop within for running Campaign Cartographer and Fantasy Grounds).

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My Ideal D&D Original Edition

Earlier this week Wizards of the Coast announced they would be reprinting the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the famed "white box".  This set will consist of the following:

• Volume 1: Men & Magic
• Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure
• Volume 3: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures
• Supplement I: Greyhawk
• Supplement II: Blackmoor
• Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry
• Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes

I first started playing with the "magenta box" version of the D&D Basic Game. Prior to this the Advanced D&D Game, the "blue box" Basic Game, and Original Edition were released. AD&D 1st edition was still very active and would be for years to come; it was the game we probably played most in the early 80s though by the late 80s I'd switched to science fiction games. It wasn't till years later that I managed to get copies of the Original Edition and blue box version of the Basic Game. I also have PDFs of all these versions. Thankfully Wizards of the Coast has again begun releasing their library in PDF format again. I've a hunch that anything they are releasing premium reprints of though won't be released in PDF for some time, though I could be wrong.

I'm glad Wizards of the Coast is releasing this, albeit at a pretty steep price ($150 US). It's probably only a dream, but some day I'd love to see a "cleaned up" version of the Original Edition. By careful use of the Open Gaming License and System Reference Document for D&D 3.0/3.5 people have been able to produce "retro-clones"of the Original Edition - Swords & Wizardry being the best known with Delving Deeper having been recently released. These games are far, far better organized than the Original Edition. I love the Original Edition but, organizationally, it is an absolute mess. In some ways that's part of its charm, with its very vagueness encouraging the Dungeon Master to make his or her own rulings. However, even with this charm it's often difficult to find what it does spell out. For example, penalties giants have to hit dwarfs are listed in the monster book instead of the player section. 

While the retro-clones are far better organized they are limited by just how close they can copy the original rules. A lot of the terminology can be found in the System Reference Document but some of the terminology from older versions do not appear in it. Similarly while you cannot copyright a formula not all of the tables in the Original Edition follow formulae. So there is a limit in how "true" these retro-clones can be. 

Basically, I'd love to see a 0.5 edition of the D&D game be released - keep the same rules (including where they are vague) but give it far greater organization. With digital publishing one could have different variants of the game, allowing a group to decide which supplements they want to use - indeed which rules from which supplements they want. The result could then be organized in an order that makes sense - keep all the class information together, the spells together, etc. In some ways this is what Advanced D&D was meant to do, but I'm looking more for a consolidation and organization vs. all the new stuff and changes that AD&D added.

Failing that another interesting product could be an annotated version of the rules. Ron Edwards is in the process of producing an annotated version of his Sorcerer RPG and, having access to the draft material (due to funding the Kickstarter campaign) I have to say the result is very interesting. The product is still a usable game but the author is also able to indicate what he was thinking with certain rules, what he would change, etc.

 

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A New Campaign - New York by Gaslight

Broadway, 1890s

Having gotten together a small group for a Fantasy Grounds Call of Cthulhu game we settled on a Gaslight-era game set in London of the 1890s. Being a history buff I did all sorts of research, read my Sherlock Holmes and H.G. Wells.

The research proved useful and the first adventure, though hindered by busy schedules and Murphy's Law, went pretty well over three sessions. In the last session our heroes survived, albiet a bit less sane, and had angered an apparently pretty powerful cult. With that in mind they decided the best course of action was to cross the Atlantic Ocean and set up shop in New York City.


Alrighty then. So glad I did my homework. Actually, in all honesty, I was thrilled. To let you in on a not-so-dirty little secret, I love it when what I planned goes up in smoke - at least if it does so as a result of players going off the beaten path (vs. an adventure just going lousy). To the way I figure it, I'm not a writer of fiction. I'm constructing and/or running a scenario for my players with a goal of us all having a good time. Why should the players be the only ones who have to think on their feet and adapt to changing circumstances?

So, off it was to New York. Ironically, though we had lots of delays in our first adventure I had two weeks to get ready for the move from London to New York City. That said, it is not as if I was going into the scenario blindly. I was born in New York City and though I did not live there long, growing up I had family there and often spent school vacations and summers in Brooklyn. I absolutely adored my grandfather who imparted his love of New York City to me. Born in 1907, he was able to give me glimpses of a city that no longer existed. He showed me the remains of trolley tracks in Brooklyn. Seeing what a rail-fan I was, he told me about the earlier subway system, the elevated lines in Manhattan, etc. He took me to the museums, told me of the construction of the skyscrapers. He took me to the World Trade Center and Empire State Building but I'm pretty certain his favorite building was the Chrysler Building. My brother and I both found the only time we didn't regret his passing in 1999 was after the September 11 terrorist attacks - I think it would have broken his heart to see the whole in the skyline.

With that background I've been doing some homework on the New York of some two decades before his birth. It's a New York that, at the time, did not include the East New York neighborhood where he grew up. It does include the Brooklyn Bridge, though that name had not yet become official - a bridge which as a little kid I referred to as "the cage bridge" - it was, and remains, my favorite path into Manhattan. And the most beautiful bridge I can imagine, with apologies to those of you in London or San Francisco.

I'll be posting details on some of my research and inspirational readings. But one thing that has become clear to me is that this is definitely an underused setting in role-playing games. You've got a corrupt political machine with Tammany Hall. You have members of the police force who supplement their income by payoffs. There are well-intentioned reformers who seem to have the habit of taking things to extremes - Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt's crusade to enforce the prohibition of alcohol on Sundays being a fine example of this. There are people of all races and nationalities in New York City. The wealthiest and the poorest are within walking distance of one another. There is constant construction going on, good excuses for people to build hidden lairs or hide bodies.

I'm hoping the game goes on for some time. We had our first New York by Gaslight session last night. It went reasonably well, though was plagued by many real world distractions - we're recovering from a blizzard here in New England and my kids who normally leave Daddy alone during his "playgroups" were a bit on the wild side with cabin fever. Even with that, we were able to make some good progress of our fist investigation in Gilded Age New York, the murder of a rabbi on the Lower East Side.

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