I've had a few people send me a link to a Kickstarter for Codename: Morningstar
At first glance this is a fantastic update to tabletop RPG; instead of lugging around a pile of hardcover books the DM and the Players can use their readers/pads/smart devices to get back to the game. Or is it just about locking you into some kind of subscription service to use those books you already own? I'm so torn on this I think i need the community to help.
The technology to build Morningstar didn't exist two years ago. Now, we can integrate all the components of a complex role-playing game into a single application that can be run on your tablet, laptop or phone.
Everything about the game is at your fingertips from rulebooks, adventures, characters, and maps to the most specific character customization - even a hard-earned badge from an epic homebrew campaign. Tracking campaigns and compiling logbooks are no longer chores, but an integrated, shareable experience. And game night is streamlined. Rules lookups are instantaneous - the right information is at your fingertips. Sharing of content, maps and secret notes is a single tap away. Spend more time role-playing and less time rules-playing.
We firmly believe that the best adventures are sitting on the shelves and in the minds of passionate players and game masters like you. We are publishers by trade. Morningstar is designed to allow writers to publish and get paid for their creativity and imagination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:25AM
Especially if the community jumps onboard sharing content
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Sunday December 21 2014, @12:55PM
Maybe I'm a technology hating old guy, but I'm not sure about this. I don't even think I hate technology. I keep my DM notes and story in Evernote, and usually keep my tablet with rulebook pdfs on it. It's a godsend for spell reference at Gencon or something like that, but some of their justifications are a little hokey. "An hour spent a game looking at rules", really? Send secret messages? Like a text message? How novel. Buy an adventure? Maybe. Depends on the game, but most of the ones I've played in that I enjoyed have continuous plots that try to end on cliffhangers when possible.
I know one guy who ran games like that. Not the kind of guy I frankly want to have in charge of a D&D game again. I've always lived by the notion that if you can't find the rule in a couple minutes, you ad hoc it. Hell, sometimes I'll ad hoc it even if someone had their book open to the page. I mean, no one wants to stop an exciting moment with pausing to find out what kind of roll you need to pull something off.
It just sounds like it's pulled together the functionality of multiple different existing applications and rolled them into one big application that's going to charge you a subscription for some ambiguous number of "premium" features. The publishing side of things sounds interesting, but I've never really had a hard time finding adventures that people have created as a means of inspiration for myself.
Another issue: With the aforementioned guy, more often than not, most people were using their tablets more for Angry Birds than for anything related to the game at hand. Good DMing would overcome that, but the distraction of your tablet going off with an email or (unrelated) message or whatever would constantly be in your face. I just think any interface, no matter how well designed, would provide more of a distraction than a benefit.
Finally, I spend 10-12 hours a day in front of a screen. The last thing I want to do is look at one when I'm having fun if I can avoid it. I think it removes the personal nature of what you're actually doing.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rts008 on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:11PM
No, I don't think that it's about the tech, but the social implications of the tech that we don't appreciate.(at least that is my POV)
I'm an old geezer, but I am interested in the tech(all kinds of tech), but at the same time have noticed a lot of behavior changes.
Some of my co-workers are real young (18-25), and I see them gathered in the break room texting each other in silence, with no I contact...all of them focused on their phones.
I don't want this to become the norm in my gaming circles. For me, the whole point of those games is the social aspect, otherwise I could just join some server online with just anyone playing.
I guess about every generation goes through something similar. :-)
Ah, 9:00!
Well, time to take my Geritol, and tell those punks to get off my lawn and to TURN THAT CRAP DOWN!
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:13PM
The technology to build Morningstar didn't exist two years ago.
Does this actually mean anything, or is it just fluffy ad copy.
Also the "Risks and challenges" section neatly avoids discussing competitors, especially "the entire internet", by which I mean there's nothing new in here for modern RPG players other than inner-platforming everything and charging for it. Or if there is something new, they haven't advertised it very well.
a social system for sharing and passing secret messages
Classic inner-platform, lets try to lock them in, this is a design anti-pattern. Two dudes at the table holding phones while gaming, and they want to communicate in secret, first choice would be role playing like whispering or passing notes on paper using ink or hand signals because its a role playing game not scrabble or spades or poker, second choice would be a zillion "real" social network / communication technologies that already exist and are already installed on their phones and already have each other as contacts and already use, and last possible option would be a paid chatting service just for RPG.
There will be some content problems in that the existing collection of RPG scenarios has developed around the idea of not being able to do secret chatting other than in-character role playing, if that, so its kinda rare. I suppose an adventure along the lines of the old Paranoia RPG could work, but its not very popular compared to hack and slash adventures... One big content problem is a "spinlock" like problem for the other players. So we'll sit here and watch two players trade free instant messages err, $25 paid messages, for five minutes on their phone while we sit here and wait. That doesn't exactly scream role playing...
Another example of cheesy inner platform is "online education" where for decades they're been trying to embed plain old wikis and plain ole email and now plain old youtube into an extremely expensive little walled garden for educational purposes. It always sucks compared to the "real thing" out on the internet. No thanks!
So... I've already got almost my entire set of pathfinder books in ebook form. Because "grep" sucks in ebook readers and the direct copy of paper tends not to be well linked (because paper is expensive so we can't afford a decent index / TOC and the paper and ebook are the same) there are a bazillion old, free, apps that contain the free rulesets. So now I could pay a lot of money for an app to do the same thing. No thanks.
From a style perspective there's a lot of differing opinions about "chronological re-engineering" where "of course how we handle it is the only right way" so implementing it correctly for everyone is going to be challenging. What I'm talking about is the accountant work for characters and encounters where I admit I'm a bad GM but when I GM I'll kind of adjust things on the fly to maximize fun for all, and of course some people hate that and want to either be stricter (The book says 4 dire wolves not 3 damnit you're cheating the players if one of the wolves runs away!) or looser (Lets face facts, we just want to get drunk and roll dice so don't bug us about that whole "character death" thing because we'll just get pissed and quit and who wants to do the paperwork to roll up a new char anyway) Making everyone happy will be challenging. Maybe they'll pull it off, which would be cool. I'm just saying there's more to replacing a GM with automation than just copying "the platonic form of an ideal theoretical GM" or even copying "one individual really good GM (aka not me)". Yeah yeah I know people about to be replaced with automation have been saying that since the first machine was built, but it might really be true with respect to recreation. Like you could replace that cute bartender with a drink mixing robot, but nobody actually wants to remove that experience when you're talking about recreation.
There is also a minor resolution problem. I have enough tablets and phones to display maybe a sq foot of "graphical stuff" but the games I actually play seem to require much more surface area. So either it'll be unreadable and low res, or chop down the content and simplify it until its unappealing. So (yeah, I know this isn't RPG, but) imagine Agricola on your phone. That would totally suck because you need a big dining room table (or two) to play agricola, to see it all. Given a "retina display LCD" the size of a giant dinner table with some kind of hyper multi-touch technology, I could kinda see that. But that doesn't exist, maybe never will, and a box of cardboard and meeples is going to be so much cheaper and longer lasting and less technology headaches...
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Sunday December 21 2014, @01:42PM
High-five!
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:48PM
It doesn't mean anything. I had everything Morningstar is advertising long, long ago, from ``secret notes'' to dice rolls and map sharing, courtesy of technology from [ietf.org] last millennium [wikipedia.org] and the ``search'' function of my editor/document viewer of choice.
Actually, the tactical map thing might be more recent, but I've never used those, anyway. I do remember online tac-maps being around at least five years ago, though. I think WotC themselves tried to sell something like it.
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Sunday December 21 2014, @02:37PM
Doesn't allow the user to add rulesets.
Since I don't use Pathfinder, that severely restricts its utility.
And I don't think I'd have a use for this anyway. If I wanted to 'hide away the rules', I'd play a rules-light system. Or a diceless one. Heck, sometimes I do.
Anyone up for some Amber Diceless? Remember: When bidding, Strength is the most important attribute.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:08PM
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:20PM
Do they really want to use the term "morningstar"?
It's a slang term for the moist patch of seminal fluids, vaginal fluids, lubricants, anal discharge, STD pus, urine and possibly vomit that one finds on their bed upon waking up the morning after a lengthy night of frisky sexual play.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:57PM
I doubt there's a single noun in the English language without sexual connotations.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday December 21 2014, @03:38PM
It’s still going to take time. There are lots of issues to solve. But they care, and that’s what matters. They want to make a good application that does everything that everyone wants and needs, and I have confidence that in a couple of months Dungeonscape will be exactly the electronic tool that we want for D&D 5E.
Apparently diceofdoom's opinion changed later. In a followup article [diceofdoom.com], diceofdoom said:
Whilst I was optimistic at the beginning, little had been changed in the last month, and there were deep usability problems that seemed unlikely to change. I can support a lot of their efforts, and their Customer Service team was great, but in all seriousness they need to fire their UX designer. Sure, they had bugs, performance issues, and other problems, but in my opinion the user interface and experience design was practically unforgivable. I was seriously losing hope, and apparently, so was WotC.
The announcement of the parting of ways with WOTC did hint at a possible future for Dungeonscape.
Although we can’t reveal all of the details regarding the future of DungeonScape, we are happy to say that there is indeed a future—so fear not!
This project, 100% internally funded, conceptualized, and built by our talented team at Trapdoor, has been a labor of love from the very beginning. We set out to change the way RPGs are played at the table—making our game night more about enjoying the adventure than searching for rules. We still hold true to that quest. We believe that our Story Machine™ is a powerful tool for converting information into something more useful and rich.
We’re working hard to solidify the details of what’s next for DungeonScape, and we’ll share that information with you when it’s appropriate.
It looks like that future is Morningstar.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:06PM
Before automating a role playing system, it is essential to play TWERPS [The World's Easiest Role Playing System] [wikipedia.org]. It is specifically designed to reduce dice rolling and language lawyering. And I had great fun playing a simpleton warrior [wikipedia.org]. I never played any of the expansion packs because the basic system was sufficiently comprehensive but the expansion packs covered superheros, space marines, cyberpunks and other scenarios.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Monday December 22 2014, @03:00PM
... and the comment thread was less than giddy:
http://www.erfworld.com/blog/view/45376/appeal-for-codename-morningstar#blog-comments [erfworld.com]