This week I am coming off of a short little vacation, mostly of the mind. In essence, I needed to take a few steps back and look at some issues from a mind that was not dragged down with progress. I escaped from the constant grinding away at the code and design elements and did next to nothing for several days in regards to working on DPnP, or E-RPG as a whole. It paid off.

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There is on element of DPnP’s success that is somewhat out of my control. That element is community involvement. Ironwood has a community forum that receives some lurker traffic but not much discussion. That forum is really just a placeholder. While all of the forum is a valid community forum, there are large sections that will be or is dedicated to growth through DPnP. The idea is simple, you create content, then you share it with the community. This is an important feature as it makes a potentially limitless library of content available for free. (more…)

As promised in last week’s post I will be expanding on what you will be able to accomplish with DPnP. Today we start with the most obvious: Campaign Building. (more…)

There still seems to be some confusion about the exact roll DPnP will play in your gaming. I am going to try to lay that out quickly here. I will also be compiling a PDF on all of the features concerning the release products and the potential of the system.

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Regions!

Honestly, what is so great about that? Well, to be frank, it is the keystone of a campaign world. It is such a huge part of building and organizing a game world I am thinking of releasing it as a separate program. Read more to find out why.

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I know I have been a poor blogger. I have not kept up these past weeks as I should. There are some good reasons for it, but the main reason is not important at all. You see, I found twitter not long ago, and I have been updating very frequently through there. This leaves me with very little to actually blog about. Not much of an excuse, but there it is. Anyways, onto thing you really want to know.

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I know, I have been quiet. I have been sick with migraines and back problems (one compounds the other which compounds the former). Anyways, I am back, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot of catching up this week. It is a busy week for myself and my daughters. So, with having almost two weeks of very little progress, it is time to catch up, right? Well, with limited time, I think I can take what little time I have and apply some little bells and whistles. I am also looking at reintroducing some features. They key feature, XML files, will allow for third party application development that I think may a good topic for discussion. Primarily because it has been on my mind for some time.

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The DPNP Campaign Resource Manager is a Windows Application designed to enable you to quickly, easily, and thoroughly create an entire E-RPG rulebook for your campaigns. You define every element of your E-RPG campaign from skills and items, to whether or not magic, firearms, or other campaign elements are included. You determine the rules for character creation, player character races, starting money, and more.

CRM: Developer Tool

The CRM is slated to become the developer’s tool for all future E-RPG products. The CRM’s versatility and ease of use promises to expand development initiatives by reducing creation time and by utilizing the CRM’s ballancing tools and automatic calculation features to allow our developers to focus on their creativity instead of rule mechanics.

All future E-RPG content will be developed using the CRM and other DPnP products such as the Character Creator and Manager and future products that depend on these two products. When you use the DPnP CRM you will be using the same tools that we at Ironwood will use to create our official content. You can feel sure that your own creations will fit smoothly into E-RPG games knowing that the automation and ballancing tools that are equiped in the program are guiding us in our efforts as well.

Features:

This list includes all features available in the DPnP Campaign Resource Manager.

• Full content creation of all available E-RPG elements including Fantasy Sagas features such as magic and psychic powers, and Modern Sagas elements such as firearms, explosives, and computer software.
• Create new skills, spells, items, magic items, races, psychic powers, environments, elements, toxins, traps, and more. Any feature of the E-RPG system is at your disposal to manipulate, create, and explore.
• Simple and easy to use wizards are the tools for creating each element. Furthermore, where ballancing is required a simple numerical gauge is used. You are not inhibited by this, allowing you to break the rules for your own creations.
• A simple user interface shows you all of your created content listed with information panels to dipslay the information as you created it.
• Reports allow you to customize the look of your content and print out the various elements or an entire campaign rule book!
• The program identifies your creations, and the creations of others, giving full credit for your creations, and your modifications. You can be proud to share your content with the SagasRPG.com community knowing that your work is recognized as your own.
• Import official elements into your campaign. These elements come free with E-RPG expansions and rulebooks sold in PDF formats. You can also purchase elements seperately.
• Import and Export just your content or entire campaigns to share with the online community.
• Import player created elements directly into your current campaign.
• Fully compatable with the DPnP program suite.

Proposed Features

Screenshots:

Setting Campaign Options

Showing Reports Selection

Formatting your report headings and fonts.

An example of a content manager tab showing skills. Skills and skill groups appear on the left panel with the informtation on the selected element displayed on the right.

Shows the skills manager tab with two associated wizards. The wizard on the left is for creating organizational skill groups, and on the right is the skill creation wizard.

This displays the wizard for exporting content. The elements you can select appear in the bottom left panel. Selecting an item will dipslay its informtation on the bottom right panel. The import wizard shares these same features allowing you to check exactly which content elements to import or export.

Digital Pen n Paper is a software suite designed to enhance your gaming experience. The suite includes products to create and managing content as well as products to enable online play of your E-RPG games. The full scope of DPnP is unlimited. We plan to expand products into all facets of Pen n Paper gaming from simple content creation utilities, management software, all leading up to a virtual tabletop gaming tool.

The suite is of programs will constantly grow with the needs and request of the sagasrpg.com community. Currently we are developing 5 programs with many more proposed programs to be developed in the near future. Currently we are in testing stages of the backbone of the suite called the Campaign Resource Manager.

A list of products will be updated on our products page and through this page as well during certain development milestones.

Released Products:

No DPnP programs have been officially released yet. We are still testing them and finalizing some of their features.

Under Development:

Products that are announced and under development are:

Campaign Resource Manager

The CRM is a tool for creating DPnP content much like you find in the Fantasy Sagas or Modern Sagas Player’s Guidebook. It is proposed to be released with the Game Master Lodestar PDF’s and available separately. The CRM creates content used by all other DPnP software.

Character Management System

The CMS allows players to create and manage characters from campaign resources created using the Campaign Resource Manager. It will be released as a free download with a demo campaign. Also it will be released with all Player’s Guidebooks with their associated campaign resources.

So I’ve been quiet. As some may know, I was laid off of work about two months ago. Ironwood and E-RPG have never been on a scale large enough to provide me with enough income to not work full time. Furthermore, my full time job paid very well. It had to. I am, or was, the primary income for my family. In fact, my wife working part time is only to bring down some debt we accumulated largely through the medical hardships placed on us by my youngest daughter’s spina bifida. So it is safe to say my income provided solely for the entirety of our 4 person household, not to mention a sizable child support payment for my son. Getting laid off hit us hard. However, it did open our eyes. The my success in my industry was largely dependant on the housing market. I didn’t realize until the current market how badly that could shape things. Personally, I didn’t like my work enough to continue on for much longer, and definitely not another 15 years starting at about 2/3 the pay I had worked so hard to get to. Truth is, I want something different. And with no jobs available for any more pay than 2/3 of what I was making, I think it is a good time for a change. However, change isn’t easy, and some sacrifices must be made to do it.

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