[UA] Unknown Armies Online

[Nicholas J Ingrassellino]

		Something I failed to mention before was the voice component. I would most likely add one of the voice applications to the mix.

Besides
that I like the idea of having everything in a single, integrated
place. Although I have little problem trusting the players in my
current group (as I am the GM) as a programmer you never trust the user
not to screw up and I think that is what is driving me to want the GM
to not have to rely on others for information.

We have seven PCs
and I can not remember all their stats. Hell, even sifting through
seven copies of character sheets while doing everything else is a
hassle. For the GM to not only have this information at his finger tips
without having to ask but to have a back-end system doing most of the
work for him would be of great help.

Text-based chat would most
likely be the easiest of the systems to implement so I am not too
worried about that. IRC did cross my mind but I feel it is too limited
so facilitate the ease-of-use I would be going for in designing such a
system.

Maps, I bet, will prove to be the most complicated
indeed. To create a large map you-- of course-- do not want to reveal
the whole thing at once. To break it down into smaller parts and only
show what you want to (or only what can a PC can "see" from where he is
standing) would be an awesome feature.

I could also add a plug-in API which could allow future GMs to easily add to my work.

----------------------------------------

						Nicholas J Ingrassellino
WebHouse, Inc.

Technical Support Manager/Senior Systems Engineer
nick at webhse.com || (516)764-6300
				"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."
- John Carmack on software patents

----------------------------------------

				From: Andreas Davour <ante at Update.UU.SE>
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 3:08 PM
To: nick at webhse.com,  The Unknown Armies RPG Mailing List <ua at lists.unknown-armies.com>
Subject: Re: [UA] Unknown Armies Online 

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007, Nicholas J Ingrassellino wrote:

>
> After some research I have discovered there is no good way to run an 
> Unknown Armies game online. This brings me to my next thought: What 
> would I include if I were to make my own "Unknown Armies Online" 
> system? I refuse to use OpenRPG because I am not installing Python. 
> Fantasy Grounds has a lot of nifty features but does not seem to do 
> much outside specific games. Both focus on the d20 system which 
> Unknown Armies is not. There was a third I had found (of which I 
> forget the name already) but it also focused on the d20 system.
>
> Obvious stuff to include are character sheets, dice rolling, a chat 
> system- both PC-to-PC/GM and public- and a map. I imagine it being a 
> web-based, AJAX application. This way the platform is already deployed 
> (virtually everyone already has it) and is low bandwidth.

Thought? Yes, I have some. I wonder, do you really need to have stuff 
like character sheets online? Couldn't the players have the old style 
ones in front of them?

Anyway. I can share my experiences of online play with some other kind 
of tools, that are fairly easy to use and install. I have used IRC for 
secret messages between GM-Player, and a dicebot on the IRC channel for 
rolling dice. Darkmyst is an IRC network for gamers with some support, 
like a pre-made dicebot, available. For the general communication we 
have used both Skype and TeamSpeak. The latter alternative is the 
low-fat alternative but the former sound better.

It is the closest I've come to face to face roleplaying. Maps is more 
complicated, but you can have a webpage with ready made maps which you 
can introduce to the players as the play progress.

That's what I've used, and I'm always on the look out for other 
alternative solutions, even though this one have served me well. It have 
the advantage of being available to Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and MacOS in 
the same player/GM group.

/andreas

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