I started making yet-another D&D software tool

Since the overlap of people who can code and people who like D&D is nearly 100%, there are an endless stream of hobby software projects which want to automate some part of playing D&D. Naturally these people start with the Character Creator tool, since that's typically where people start to play this game. The problem is that creating a character is both 1) fun and 2) pretty straightforward. AD&D can be a little tricky but still, it's completely manageable, and absolutely not the part of D&D that needs automating.

But thanks to Winning Secrets, and the extensive research of the larger BrOSR community, we actually do have some idea now of what parts of D&D matter, and which parts would be valuable to automate.

So, I'm making a tool with the goal of makin it easier to play AD&D correctly.

This is accomplished by:

  1. providing opinionated defaults that guide you through starting the "right" way (town+dungeon or Braunstein)
  2. Auto-track the boring, complicated, and fiddly "details" in an ongoing game which nevertheless are fundamental to the campaign feeling "alive" (most importantly, TIME RECORDS)
  3. Miscellaneous tools that help you quickly "parse" the relevant rules to a given situation

The highest priority feature I have in mind is "automatic time tracking." The idea is that the DM can start a "session" and include some set of "characters" in it. He can move those characters from place to place, and say how long they spend at each place. Then at the end of the session, the time each character used and where they were at that time is "locked" into the future, and those characters proceed to "act out" the script which the session produced. Thus, next week, when the clubhouse meets to play, knowing which characters are available, and what locations are "locked" is trivial--the software is automatically moving everyone through time.

But doing any of this presumes a stable campaign map.

Published