After a period of tweaks and changes to almost every facet of RPGpad we have taken a step back, and explored different options for improving and enhancing how we can support your campaigns. So, this week — instead of presenting a new feature, or showing some of the details on what we are working on, or even discussing some (theoretical) aspect of roleplaying itself — we want to discuss our roadmap for RPGpad for the coming months.
We highlight the five most relevant topics on our roadmap. Note that these are topics, so some of the changes you’ll see in the upcoming changelogs might alternate between them as we organize our work.
Chat tooling We want to add several technical capabilities to the chat that allow us (and possibly you, in some cases) to add smaller “tools” to the chat. An example of such a tool would be an Pathfinder Initiative Tracker. Of course we want technical support for more than just that example, so we will be working on improving the chat component to a point where it supports chat tooling in a generic way.
Performance charsheet/game system As it is, the character sheet performance when editing a Pathfinder sheet leaves something to be desired. Especially on older tablets — which are often used in tabletop games to take notes and look things up on the campaign wiki — the slowdown is noticable to the point that it gets in between you and your campaign, and we do not want RPGpad to ever be a barrier to playing. We are thinking of several ways to improve this situation, with some of them fundamentally changing how we approach character sheet code.
Implement D&D 5th edition We are looking to add Dungeons & Dragons’ 5th Edition support. This will be a large project, but it will be worth the effort! There is a lot to be said on designing the game system configuration and character sheet for 5th edition, especially in the way it relates to or differs from Pathfinder support. However, we want to keep this roadmap short, so we will postpone that to a future blog post.
Internal technical improvements Due to RPGpad being used by more and more players, we have gained new insights on several of the more complex technical aspects of the system. We want to take some time to review certain technical design decisions, and see if we can improve upon them with new ideas and a fresh look at the choices we have made. Not everything we do for this topic will result in a clear item on the changelog. Though there are some interesting things we will talk about in future blog posts to give you an idea of what’s going on.
Improved Campaign Creation Right now campaign creation is a bit underwhelming. We would like to provide better support to people creating new campaigns, especially because RPGpad has several very powerful features such as the customizable Schema’s and the reworked character categories. We are looking into ways to assist campaign creators with customizing schemas for the theme and setting archetype they want to run in their campaign.
As always, we have this week’s changelog ready for you to read about the detailed changes to RPGpad.
Of course, we also love to get feedback and bug reports — well, we love that you all report them quickly, we do not love the bugs — so do not hesitate to start a new thread in the General Discussion community forum.
Finally, we would also like to remind the Chat campaigns that we have an ongoing experiment, and that we welcome any ideas and feedback you have on that in the Chat Room Scrolling Experiment thread.