New Publishing & Revenue Model

>>Ryan - I think he was saying something to the effect of allowing GMs to update & maintain character sheets online. So, we just had an awesome crawl, everyone goes home, GM logs in and gives everyone 1000 exp. Bob logs in little bit later and HEY! Cool, his character's been updated to show the new EQ and experiance.<<

Hi Nate,

I get that. But what then happens with that character when the player takes it to go play in their other gaming group which is not played online and for which the Realm Master isn't participating in our online community? I think by giving players and RMs a variety of communication tools such as VOIP chat, regular text chat rooms/IRC, their own e-mail accounts through our on site e-mail system, private discussion lists, etc, the Realm Master can just as easily jot the player e-mails to tell them how many Experience Points were earned. And this doesn't tie the character or player into the online system in any sort of burdensome way. I want to offer content for the RPG online and I want to offer the ability for players to be able to play online with other players, but in no way do I want to restrict the ability to play the good old traditional way.

In fact, after reading some commentary about how recently there have been incidents of World of Warcraft MMO RPG players have been successfully introduced to traditional Role Playing, as we build this out I think I am very pointedly going to build game play examples, videos, etc, to show our role playing to these online MMO role players and bring the into the fold. WOW now has something like 8 million users. A successful campaign of reaching out to those players and introducing table top role playing games to them could easily be considered very successful if just a hundred thousand or two of them can be reached and converted.

I think it will be enough that if we can build a really great interactive character sheet that can export to PDF so as to be easily printed, I don't need to tie game play, items, experience or anything else into a limited computerized system. Players can input entries onto their character sheets the same way as they can use a pencil or pen to update their paper character sheets. The thing to remember about our old WHAT RPG system is spell creation and skill creation is something players do themselves and is somewhat free form, limited to a game mechanic for assigning "difficulties" to the spell or skill and, of course, approval by the player's Realm Master. So trying to tie experience to a computerized system that has lists of spells, skills, etc, for players to pick from a list and gain, upgrade, etc, would be quite impossible. The old practice of manual updating of character sheets has worked for more than 3 decades for table top RPGs...I see no reason to mess with what works. Just trying to bring the edge of technology to it. So a character sheet, instead of just being a single or double sided piece of paper, may now include space for unlimited pages for lists of items, spells, skills, riches. They could include campaign notes, player notes on NPCs and/or businesses encountered, notes on story elements and tid bits of information the player might want to follow up on later, pages dedicated to such information as the PC's relatives or leading henchmen and so on and so forth. We don't want to do anything to "force" players and Realm Masters to play online, but rather to keep all their data online and to make that easy. While there we'll make all the game rules, world setting content, etc, available to them as well and make money on advertising being on all of it.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com