After looking back at 2019, we now want to look towards the future. Just as we did in previous years, this year we dedicated a few days of time to determining where we are with RPGpad, and what the best use of our time is for you, the players on the platform!
At the start of this year we will be focussing on three aspects of the platform.
Chat Support — Currently, RPGpad supports table-top play and forum play. Another great mode of play is real-time chat. As some of you might have guessed after we dedicated a blog post to establishing why we wanted new communications methods, we are going to work on support for chat-based roleplay.
As with the forum, the chat roleplay will be integrated tightly with the other parts of your campaign: players and storytellers alike will be able to switch masks on the fly to their PCs and NPCs, players can add dice rolls to keep things going, and we have a few additional ideas on how to best support roleplay about which we will write a future blog post.
Usability and Discoverability — With the platform having a lot of features already, we want to take the time to make sure that everything works as you would expect (even the things you did not now about). This involves making sure that things are as easy as possible for all players, and finding ways to inform and explain how RPGpad can help you with your campaign.
This includes a more in-depth review of the current campaign site structure by investigating how people use the platform currently. It will also involve improving the discoverability of features like schema editing—features that can greatly improve your campaign but are difficult to discover and use right now.
Polish and Quality of Life — There’s a lot of little things can make using your campaign site better, and we aim to take note of those and work on them along the way. This means we want to start “polishing” all rough edges people encounter, to make using the platform as smooth as possible. As always are overarching goal is to make sure that RPGpad never gets in the way of you playing your campaign!
Have you encountered things that are not “smooth”, or things were you though “Hey, this would be better for me if it was like this”? If so, let us know in the community forum!
As I write this blog, Mercury is finishing up a great quality of life improvement: the viewing of differences between versions of Vampire character sheets. Go read this week’s changelog for more on that.