Some ideas

I have run my group a few times now. So here are a list of just random things that I believe would be great improvements to the game. Most of them are just RP enhancement, and thus not of super high priority, but I think they would enhance d20pro overall.

First off, the chat system.

I am not sure if its been mentioned, but it probably has. Is there a way for the game to show when someone is typing? This is very useful. If a little icon showed up next to their name on the chat list or something like that, it would be fantastic. People kept sitting around thinking, surely someone else must be typing right now, but no one really had any way to know lol.

Also, if players names could be colored. Would make it easier to distinguish who is talking at a glance.

A way to pull certain players in to a seperate chat room. If this is in I have no idea how to do it. But we had a situation where the party, in roll play, split up. So I wanted to have 3 of them in one room and 4 in another. Ended up having to use an outside chat program.

Fog of war and range of vision.

I like that the fog of war is manual and there is no automatic revealing. It saves on accidents. But one thing D&D has in the rules that I find very useful is a range of vision. Especially for characters with dark vision and the like. After brain storming with a friend we came up with the idea of being able to specify a character or monsters range of vision in the character sheet, and then have it display that characters range of vision when selected. So, for example, a character moves his piece to a spot. I highlight their game piece. A faint white outline shows its field of vision. Now I can reveal map based on that. It's like a template, but just showing the edges. If that makes sense... It's just a guideline for the DM to use.

Emotes and speech

Again, I am huge on Role Play and immersing the players in a story and setting. One way of doing this is preparing text. I will prepare any lengthy speeches I know will come up, and also descriptions of areas I know they will visit. This way they can be lengthy and highly descriptive without me making everyone wait while I type it up.

following with this concept, can I preset speech for an ability or an attack? For example

My players may fight a group of trained elven soldiers. I have designed the commander as a bard of sorts who uses effects that boost his allies through commands. So he calls out for an offensive strategy and all the soldiers gain in strength and hit but loose AC. I would love it if I could specify him to shout "CHARGE!! Cut down the traitorous filth!" when I activate the ability. This way I don't have to take the time manually doing this after setting the effect off. It just happens, enhancing the role play experience without adding another chunk to my plate as the DM.

Along the same idea, what if I could prepare a list of emotes with attacks. Describing attacks is another form of extra immersion. Rather than just rolling the die and letting damage go off, I prefer to describe it "The commander takes a vicious swing at your midsection." Would it be possible for me to set up some pre-scripted possibilities with an attack, and it choose one of them at random whenever the attacks is made? So its not too repetitive, using the same description over and over.

Size with ability

Can I change a creatures size with an ability? That would be awesome. I get creative with NPC's and enemies =P


Just some ideas for enhancing the game overall.

 

Yes, one can do much of this stuff manually. The point is, I already have enough to worry about when DMing. I'd like to be able to pre-setup as much as I possibly can. If I can have the ability set up to chance his size, that's one less thing I have to do manually during the session itself.

Again, a lot of this is not urgent. They are just tweaks that would be nice to see at some point in the future.

 

thanks for the reply =) and sorry I haven't checked in here in a while.

Being able to see who is typing as they type. Here is an example of what I'm getting at.

The leader of the guild asks a question to the entire group in general. "So, what will you do?"

Now, on AIM or MSN, if someone starts typing a response, we see that. It says "so and so is typing" or something to that idea at the bottom of the box. I'm not talking about who is saying what. That should be obvious already lol. I'm saying before they've hit the enter button and sent the message out through the chat system. As they are in the process of typing, everyone sees a message saying that they are doing so. This helps in two ways.
1) If everyone starts typing a response at once, they notice that, and most will decide not to. Because otherwise you get a bunch of responses at once that end up conflicting or not making sense. Then you go through all the out of character chatter to try and decide which was meant to be said first, and if someone would have said what they did AFTER the other person said what they did... People taking back what they said... so on and so forth... hopefully you understand what I mean.
2) If NO ONE is typing, everyone can see that, because no message pops up alerting us that someone is typing. Maybe the question that was asked is a hard one to answer. Without knowing if someone is typing or not, we could be waiting around quite a while simply assuming that SOMEONE must be typing a response when in fact no one is. So if we can see that no one is currently typing, someone can get on it so we don't waste time sitting around.

So my suggestion was to add some sort of indicator that lets everyone in the chat room know when someone is typing. I thought some sort of icon next to their name in the chat room list would be nice. Maybe an hourglass or something. *shrug*

I hope this clarifies things enough...