Why develop the KOTLL service? (continued) | ||
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Although very popular, BBS posting is not the only method of remote game play that role-players have adopted. Other popular styles include play by email (PBEM) or play by chat. While both of these involve sending messages back and forth chatting is much more like live game play. The unfortunate fact is that the heart and soul of role-playing lies in dice rolling. Role players often find that chat rooms can provide them with the same opportunity to converse as a tabletop game, but they really lack the ability to provide true dice rolling. Some gamers have opted for web services that send emails as a means of rolling, but the process is complex and who really wants their name on another SPAM email list. Overall PBEM and online RPG chat sessions using some of the more common messaging programs have proven difficult and clumsy for role players. Those role players that do use them often suffer from a lack of game content not to mention a sense of dramatically restricted game play. KOTLL is aware of these issues. To aid DM’s and role players, KOTLL was designed with an interface to allow truly live rolling of game play results. The KOTLL interface has been designed with ease of use in mind. Players chat with each other and roll dice all from the same screen. Players who use the free Red Blade character generator can import the HTML character sheets into their game. This simplifies rolling even further. In these instances, the KOTLL interface is designed to calculate most of a players d20 rolls from the sheet. All a player needs to do is select the roll type and click a button. It is that simple. Rolls are calculated on KOTLL’s servers and a response is immediately posted into the players’ and DM’s chat window. The roll results are real! There is absolutely no player fudging here (sorry guys and gals). This high level of integration is key to KOTLL’s performance and ability to provide realistic game play.
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