Hi, I am the lead developer for a project called Playsets, an innovative digital environment for tabletop role playing games to replace maps and miniatures with rich digital environments and animated effects while also allowing players to share a map even over distance. Our Kickstarter campaign recently launchedhttp://www.kickstarter.com/projects/985647565/playsets-the-f... and we would appreciate you taking a look and even providing your feedback.
Some more details about the project(and why we think you might like it):
No subscriptions and no cost to add adventurers:
Lets face it, the last thing you want to do is convince all your players to buy a subscription or pay a bunch up front to try a new experience, so why start the night with that? Our plan is to launch Playsets with 3 free core environments and corresponding tokens for all players to use. Then in the future offer additional expansion maps and more tokens and even prebuilt campaigns.
Immersive High Quality Customizable Environments:
We all love detailed environments that pull us into the stories we tell with our game nights but sometimes the realities on our tables don’t quite live up to their job of pulling us further into the story and thats a shame. Playsets fixes that not only with gorgeous art from a professional game artist but features that allow for more in depth play than a map drawn on graph paper. If you were really in that forest you could hide behind a tree, or even climb the branches. You don’t see what's inside the Inn till you walk in the door, and your gameplay map should allow all these things.
We also know that no two stories are the same and that while one town might need some docks and a graveyard, another might need a bridge into town and a garden. With that in mind our maps contain fast easy controls and additional props allow you to create an environment that fits the story you want to tell.
Multiple ways for players to interact:
The most important thing in a campaign is the interaction between players. The moment you leave the same table as your friends you lose a lot of the small subtle interactions with people that make it so great to play with them, so one of our primary goals with Playsets was to try and recapture that “in the room feeling”. Real time token movement across boards was a must, not only do we want to see where that mage is and will wind up, we like to see how he got there. Maybe that dragon is flying around the room or we simply want to really enforce the idea that we launched ourselves across the room at that goblin, either way nothing makes us feel more connected than watching our friends move as they do it.
Beyond that we’ve included emotes and actions to allow players to communicate without interrupting the GM’s narrative or add special emphasis to the behavior of their avatar.
Mechanics? what mechanics?
Our goal isn’t to run your game, (that task belongs to your game master, and cheers to them!) its to enhance your experience for players across the country or even in the same room and that means we don’t set the rules. We want is to support as many rpg systems as we can and allow players to tell their own stories so Playsets is designed to support, not enforce.
This is just a glimpse of what we’ve been working on and we would love your support and feedback on the project.
Thanks,
-Alex
