I've been wanting an on-line campaign manager for my games for a long time, both as a player and as a GM. It's possible that the 4th ed. tools that are coming out will cover this for D&D, but I consider it unlikely that they'll do all I want them to.
Griffon has been (hesitantly) espousing PCGen for this purpose for some time, and the tool has many excellent features, including a fairly comprehensive Arcana Evolved data set. However, it is not web enabled, and thus cannot be run from a web server on laptops and smart phones. In addition, it handles custom data quite poorly. Also, the design team is quite flaky and unwilling to consider user input.
Examing PCGen got me to thinking about what I really want in such a tool and whether I need to program it myself, or if there is a ready made tool out there that meets my needs. I started this thread both to solicit feedback on what tools you folks have used or heard of, as well as to discuss desired and must have features. My initial list:
Needs to be:
- Web based (likely Javascript-AJAX front end over MySQL.) Password protected data available to any player/GM over any browser.
- Simple to Use
- Fast
- Adaptable to small or large screen sizes (i.e. iPhones and other smart phones to big screen monitors)
- Include rules lookup by Hyperlink and/or Book Reference
- d20 first pass, but should be extensible to other games.
- Fast, Inuitive Die Roller w/GM only results option. Sound and 3d Animation. 3rd Party.
- Make Initiative/action rolling and administration painless!
- Combat status tracker w/interaction available to any or all players. Visibility of foes/rolls GM selectable to any/all players.
- Possible to have multiple client windows/pages open on a single machine, one per player.
- Full featured, HTML based, text editor w/decent printing format control. Must include image insertion and scaling. 3rd Party.
Tracks:
- Multiple Campaigns
- Multiple Rules Sets
- Campaign (VS, Games, Character Records, Rules, Rulings)
- Games (GM Player, Game Date, Script, Players, Characters, NPCs, Treasure, Player Notes, GM Notes, Events, Encounters, Combats, Advancement Events)
- Notes (any notes taken, allows search by date, game, author, and content. GM not visible to players by default. Player visible to all, by default.)
- Characters (Character Sheet, current and by Advancement Events, Player(s))
- Advancement Events (Game, In-Game Date/Time, Character (i.e. Leveling or skill ups)
- Players (Name, VS, Characters, Game History, et. al.)
- Information (A GM administered library, with tracking of which pieces have been revealed to which players, by whom/what and when. GM selectable visibility to any or all players.)
- Mosters (stripped down versions of NPCs that may have no names and for whom stats can be generated automaticaly on the fly.)
- Combat rewards calculation (Xp, skill ups, et. al.)
- Items (Customizable and ready made, sould track appraisals by character)
- Currency
So, what have folks seen along these lines. What else should the tool do? Which items above are a waste of time?

Ariande Bard 20 • Nightfall Ranger 19
The Avatars, Argonessen Server
- szaijan's blog
- Login to post comments

The primary reason I want it
The primary reason I want it web based is that I want the player and DM content to all reside in a central location and be accessible by anyone in the game with any device that can browse. No way to do that with a fat client, unless it stores it's data in the same way, in which case I see no need for a fat client. I want to be able to look things up on my iPhone when I don't have a PC handy.
Couple things
There is actually some kind of web component to PC Gen, I haven't looked at it hard though.
The PC Gen folks are very friendly and cool, I think you are commenting at the monkey coders folk that work with wizards of the coast on the data sets and I think they are doing the 4th gen tools as well. They are um, not so cool or responsive.
PGGen custom data is complex and the documentation is kind of obtuse but it's open source so anybody can fix that it just needs the loving.
PG Gen can get the data for things like Arcana Evolved from the monkey guys, it otherwise only supports open systems (D20 and others).
I think under the hood there is lots their but my hesitancy is often with the UI, it is simple kludgy but it is all java...
I have looked at some othe products (Red Blade etc) but they can't get/use the custom data sets which means you will only get base rule set implementation. Everything that is detailed is IPed and folks not wanting to get nuked by wizard of the coast have to be very caefull even about what kind of reference they include.
I'm not sure why you have so much web centric emphasis, there are a lot advantages to a fat client even a java one. Now pulling the data from and writing to a server (again something I see in PC Gen but don't know how to use) would be very handy. I guess I just remember all the problems that web base RPG site we used had, data loss, down when I wanted it etc :p, left me dry.