Travis' Territory

All-right, I have a number of projects that I want to accomplish at some point, and this is a placeholder for one of them.

This project is to allow someone to do a full role playing game online, and thus not be hindered at all by distance between players in the game.

Since D&D is likely the most popular of these, I'll use it for my explanation of the concept, though for legal reasons I cannot do it with D&D.

First to explain what D&D, or Dungeons and Dragons, and similar games are for those of you who don't know - it is a game of story telling. Essentially, you have one person (the Dungeon Master, or DM in D&D, Game Master or GM in other games) create a universe to be playing in. The rules for D&D are set for a fantasy era similar to Lord of the Rings in many respects.

Each of the players make one character for this world, and they have full control over this character much as you have full control over yourself in the real world, though more since you could choose what race they are and what gender they are. The biggest difference is, this is a game where you don't have to be as concerned about things like, for instance, pain. You're character would be feeling it if the person was real, but he or she is not, seeing as they really are just a figment of your imagination.

So, in this universe, you get into fights more often than not. Essentially, to simulate a random number generator prior to everyone having the technology, people used dice. There would be many different types of dice, each with a different number of sides.

There are shorthands for things as well. For example, if you wanted to write down that someone should roll 4 dice with 6 sides, you would say roll 4d6. There are dice with 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and 20 sides, along with a 100 sided dice.

Now the thing about the dice and this type of gaming is that often times, you are in the same room so you don't need to have 100% faith in the person that they are rolling the numbers. In the situation where there could be any distance between the player and the DM, you need to make sure the rolls are actually what the person is saying they are.

Another thing is that players often times use maps when playing in person to help everyone be able to visualize the playing field accurately. So for that I would like a click and drag map of icons that are colored, and allow the GM to save the map as it is at any point and then allow anyone to move tokens around, but keep the GM with the ability to reset it to the last time he saved it.

Next most importantly is the character sheets, or the information about what the person is able to do and how well he or she is able to do it, in addition to their health and whatnot.