Quote Originally Posted by damned View Post
Hey DMFirmy - what are you working on? Can you tell us some more about your project?
Well... It has been almost 10 years since I last sat down at the game table with my group of players. Over time they (like many adventuring parties) have scattered across the country, and we no longer have the ability to get together and game in person. The last campaign that I worked on was originally known amongst my group as my "End of the World Campaign", but unfortunately it flopped pretty early on as people began moving and drifting apart.

One aspect of gaming with my own group is that between us all, there are very few official Wizards of the Coast supplement books that were released for 3.5E D&D that at least one of doesn't own. Over the years I have combed through these books, selecting which options I felt were a good fit for the campaign world that I am designing, and as it stands now there are over 30 available class options and 80 race options for my players to choose from.

So, a large part of my customized version of the 3.5E Ruleset is devoted to the addition of many of the various "house rules" that I am including in my own campaign world that are not part of the basic 3.5E rules. For example, in the World of Warcraft: The Role Playing Game supplement we are given the rules for the Tinker class, some variations on the standard Player's Handbook races, and an entirely new game mechanic that deals with the inclusion of technological devices in a D&D campaign. I also have some completely custom rules in place that are specific to my own campaign. For instance, there are places in my campaign world where time itself acts peculiar, and magic has something of an unpredictable nature. I decided that it would be my best option to simply design my own ruleset based on the 3.5E ruleset rather than trying to figure out how to handle all these customizations in game.

So, that is where I started, but quickly the project has grown into something a bit more for me. You see, what the discovery of Fantasy Grounds really means for me and for my players is that after all these years we will finally have the chance to gather around the gaming table again (albeit a virtual table) to share our adventures. Even after all these years, we still discuss some of the events and characters from my previous campaigns as though they were real and that they really occurred. When the Half-Orc Barbarian Krunk physically wrestled a flying dracholich out of flight in one of the games I ran many years ago, it became the stuff of legend amongst my players. I have grown to miss those times.

Of course, the virtual table top is not quite the same as sitting together in person, and the more time I have invested in working on customizations to my ruleset the more I have realized that one of the most important things that being physically separated while we play will be that unlike when we gather in person, we will not be able to pass around our rule books to reference this-or-that while we play. If I turn my head right now and glance at my book shelf, I can literally count hundreds of D&D books. Now, anyone who has spent any time working on D&D source material knows that when it comes to what you are allowed to include and share in your own creations, you are rather limited. Even though there is a great deal of "Open Content" available for the 3.5E D&D game, compared to the wealth of what is available as "Closed Content" this is actually a very limited subset of what is really out there and available.

This is why I began working on the second part of my project, which is a set of custom reference modules that my players can use to look up rules, or stats they will need for their characters. With the 3.5E ruleset, I was very greatful to find that Fantasy Grounds included a set of modules that basically gives us a copy of the 3.5E SRD that we can access within our games for reference, which I think is extremely amazing and useful. At first I figured I would just add some of my custom data to the existing modules, but it didn't take me long to come up with what I think is an even better idea. The more familiar I become with the inner workings of Fantasy Grounds, the more opportunities I am finding to improve (or at least to tweak) it.

For instance, in my first test with setting up my firewall to allow my players to connect to the copy of Fantasy Grounds on my machine, the player who was testing with me was working on character creation when we realized that we simply couldn't find any references to the rules for carrying capacity or encumbrance within the modules provided by Fantasy Grounds nor in the ruleset code itself. So, first thing I did was I added a page to the basic rules module for Carrying Capacity, but now every time I create a character I will need to open up the module to look up this information. But what really goes into figuring this out? What size category is the character? What is their strength? Are they a quadrupedal race, such as a Centaur? Most of this information is available either directly from the character sheet, or else it is determined by the character's race, and as I was adding the many, MANY player character race options into my module from my various source books it hit me that if I did a bit of custom formatting for my module's xml files I could expose this information in such a way that it can be consumed by my ruleset code to automate the calculations for carrying capacity. While this is just one example, and it is something of a trivial one as well, it didn't take me very long to write the necessary code so that now whenever you set your Strength score on your character sheet or when you type in the name of your race, the ruleset scans the modules that are available to find the information for your race so it can perform the calculations internally. Now my ruleset is smart enough to know that a Human with a strength score of 12 has a heavy load of 130lbs., and it simply fills in the appropriate values on the Inventory tab on the character sheet.

I have automated many parts of the character sheet in this way, and I am also expanding it some to allow the addition of some information that is not really included on the original 3.5E sheet. There is no place to put the creature's type and subtypes on the standard 3.5E sheet, so I am adding one of my own. This may not seem like a big deal since all the standard races are Humanoid races, but this is far from true in my campaign. In fact, I could go on and on and ON about how MY campaign is different from any other as I am sure any passionate DM could, but since I am also a passionate computer programmer I enjoy being able to add my own touches to the software that is enabling me and my players to resume our gaming after such a long time.

Tomorrow, November 13, will be our first game. My players and I are still learning to use Fantasy Grounds in game, and for the first couple games I am planning on just running a standard 3.5E campaign to get my players used to using the software. After a couple of levels though I am going to begin my custom campaign in full, and with almost 10 years of design work on the world in which this campaign is set, it promises to be my most memorable campaign yet.