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| Episode 43 |Announcements
- A God Rebuilt, our Campaign of the Month – check it out!
- The d20Monkey caption contest for April – there’s still time!
- We’re sponsoring the One Page Dungeon Contest – check it out!
Paizo to Reddit: “Ask Us Anything!”
Recently, brave, brave Paizo put themselves out there on Reddit to answer questions about Pathfinder. This is nice and very transparent of them, we think everyone in the industry should do stuff like this. Micah and I discuss some of the questions, both the good one and the silly ones.
Roll20 Virtual Tabletop
A new virtual tabletop is making its way into our d20 shaped hearts with ambitions of focusing on the story and good times that go along with roleplaying, not the crunch. Roll20 is currently in kickstarter-phase and is worth checking out. Micah and I discuss the “industry” and some skepticism on these sorts of things, are we dead wrong? Tell us!
Building The Halls of Undermountain
Despite our previous mention of WotC not being very transparent, it does appear they are attempting to change that as of late. A good article on the WotC site explains how a product like The Halls of Undermountain went from a grab bag of minis, tokens, and other goodies – to a simple book and some poster maps. Everyone has to make money in this industry, looks like it’s even tough for WotC sometimes. Be sure to check this one out!
Tip Corner
Use our integration with Pen and Paper games to start recruiting your next player. Edit your campaign to set it toLFP and also give it a location. Then you can look for potential players from the Edit Members screen. Consider yourself to always be recruiting, even if you have no open slots. You never know when a player will suddenly stop coming to sessions, and it’s always good to know that there are other people out there.
Twitter Question
@d20monkey asks: “If you could choose only 1 secondary class (bard, ranger, etc) for dndnext, which would it be?”
Listen to find out!
Music Credits | Intro: “Prelude” | Outro: “Stande Alone” | by LukHash |
Obsidian Portal is the award winning Online Campaign Management System for tabletop role-playing games. It’s free to use, it can be accessed from any web browser and it's built from the ground up for gamers by gamers.
We host a huge community of tabletop RPG players who are all looking to get the most out of their tabletop gaming experience. You play your campaign and we help you manage it. It’s that simple.
“You don’t need to ask the creator if you can paint your shield red.” Amen!!
Going to try out roll 20 and let you know….
Thanks as always for a great podcast, guys! Roll20 looks pretty sweet, most especially because of a detail you guys forgot to mention: it’s being coded in HTML5, which means that it will be largely platform-agnostic. No install, just a web browser… in theory you could use it from your iPad (though I have no idea if Safari for the iPad is allowed to touch the camera, and my guess is that the interface would get quirky). Additionally, their freemium business model should sound familiar to you. So: available to everyone, no installs, for free? Yes, please! Thanks again for plugging them… they definitely earned a little cash outta me!
Speaking of plugs, after you talked a bit about designer openness on your show, I wanted to let you know about The Next Project. Inspired by WotC’s promise to consult the fans in the development of D&D Next, we’re designing a tabletop fantasy RPG… completely open source. *All* design and development is taking place in public, with both comments and content contributed by fans. We had a successful round of Kickstarter financing – nothing major, but enough to keep our servers running for quite a while – and are cruising along an aggressive development cycle, aiming at a September 2012 public playtest release.
Unlike a standard RPG, not only is this game designed by the fans, but it will *continue* to be designed by the fans: the actual, official rules are a public wiki, and can be updated by anybody who has a better idea. Got your own house rules? Throw them up on the site and make them official… if they’re better than what we’ve currently got, they’ll become the new law of the land! With a primarily electronic distribution chain, we can easily update an ebook and get the most current version of the rules out to fans on a regular basis.
We’re still small enough that I hesitate to even call us “indy”, but we’re getting some great responses from the community, and someday you guys are going to be hosting Next campaigns alongside all your other stuff. Get the inside scoop at http://thenexted.com, or @thenexted on the Twitter.