Google Plus

I've wanted to run a Beacon game on Google+ since they announced the hangout feature* but it hasn't happened yet.  I am however going to be playing in my first Google+ game tonight using the lovely Labyrinth Lord rules. It's a Constantcon game and follows the Flailsnails conventions and all that so it will be a good introduction to that community for me. I have to say I enjoyed rolling up the character** and am excited to play, especially since I never ever actually played original D&D. I actually cut my teeth on AD&D even though my first adventure was Keep on the Borderlands.  I figured it would be a good thing to play a few games this way before running one, especially to see how things like character sheets were done.  I can handle having players roll their dice and have no issues about trust in that respect, however character sheets and item management seemed to me to be the really sticky point. 

The GM of the game I'm going to be playing in suggested a site called charactersheet.net along with Google Docs and some other thing I can't recall at the moment, and so I went to the site and was happy to use that service.  It works good, and if it's a bit spartan - well it's clean and free so no complaints from me.  It looks to support multiple games and even has a free form sheet.  It looks to be a suitable solution for G+ and maybe even for regular meat games.  I do worry that it's web only however since I would like the option of playing a game in a spooky shack in the Carpathian mountains, or when the power goes out.  I did want to know what other similar services were out there for managing character sheets, especially for the tablet platform.

I'm going to look into this more because I'd like to have character sheets on my iPad and preferably be able to store multiple characters from multiple games and port them between the Applesphere and desktops or even a hypothetical fancy Android tablet (the Toshiba Excite x10 one looks nice!).  My regular gaming group is starting an L5R campaign and the GM is a real Apple fellow so we have a website/app for the campaign and I really want to electrify my character sheet and do everything but dice rolling on the tablet.  There's no reason why this can't be done these days, even to the extent of having many fields on the sheet flowing back to the GM's dashboard.  I can dream of a day when I have Beacon character sheets, indexed rules and various quick roll tables all packed into one nice little tablet app.

Also speaking of Google+, I did make a Beacon page on there as a ambassador of this blog and a way to co-ordinate activities should I get a game going.  Don't bother checking it out now however since nothing is going on there yet.



* Actually I've wanted to try to run an online game since I found RogerWilco VoIP software back in 1998, but G+ multi-person video was the sauce on the goose.


**I made my daughter validate my rolls 3d6 in order.  I got a Fighter. He could have been a dwarf with his 14 STR but I wanted to go with a two handed sword though.  He has 4hp. I've certainly been thinking of the differences between this and my last post about starting HP.  She also suggested the name: Marlin Densburg - kids are fun.