Where would I like to see innovation in RPG gaming?
Well, now Innovation. Man in the last few years there has ben a tremendous amount of innovation in RPGs. Roll 20 and Fantasy grounds have revolutionised gaming away from the table and it’s about as good as I think we will see for some time.
There are several applications for tracking your games and your characters out there that do this masterfully but these have been established for some time and I don’t think we will see any innovation coming from these programs anytime soon.
Much like Character sheet programs, I think we have seen Dice Roller come as far as we are able to take them as well and this leaves us with another area I can not see improving as of now.
One thing I have longed to begin adding to my games is more Virtual handouts. I am not talking about a sheet of paper so much as Custom News Feeds. Mock Videos. A wide collection of some excellent forms fillable documents. I know with the right editing equipment and programs this is already possible. I would like to see a set of tools to make this more user-friendly.
I have seen some of the things that Invisible sun has dabbled in and I love the outer ideals of having clues in the real world and embedded online and such for players to seek out as well. But at a cost, that is not prohibitive.
If any of you use anything like this or have suggestions I am more than willing to seek out and give these things a try !
Am I crazy for reaching so high? Or am I blind and it already exists?
Until next time.
Runkle Plays Games 
Your idea of the news feed could be done right now with enough brute force applied to it. Create a twitter feed for yoru campaign or a private facebook group and your means of distribution is sorted. There is at least one freeware PDF forms application out there that I have used so you can create, share and gather the results of forms easily enough. You could in theory skip the PDF forms and use Facebook Polls as your forms.
I don’t know what a mock video is so I have no suggestions there.
I am sure that if you reallty wanted your virtual handouts feed then you could probably get one going and learn and refine the process with tools we have available now and for free.
For your idea of virtual handouts they would certainly be prettier with matching art created on the fly.
What I would like to see is automated text to graphics conversion. We already have automated data visualisation but it would be great if you could upload a character sheet into a form and it turned an image of what the character probably looked like, or a description of a landscape and it produced a matching graphic.
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What I meant by mock video was video mock ups for things like News Footage and such. Where I could link to News reports being played back Via Video or Audio playback.
Again it is something that already exists, There is just a lot of heavy lifting on the DM part at the moment to make that kind of a vision come to life.
Technically If I were to hunt through enough YouTube Nightly news clips I could find the topics or clips I might be in search of but it takes man hours ATM to do it.
I ran a game about 12 years back where my handouts were actual snippets from radio shows they heard as they were walking by or video clips from News crews.
It’s all very awesome if it works. And like you said most of it exists already. I would like to see an innovation that would make all of that a lot easier and less time consuming!
Thanks for your reply Loved this question!
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Also I love the idea of a Twitter feed you suggested. I use private groups for my games all the time. It is funny that I never thought why not make a Page for IN game as well as out of game content. That will be done for my games from now on.
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