Thursday, January 08, 2009

IRIS player display

First, what's IRIS? Originally, it was a standalone initiative system for virtually any roleplaying game which I got published in a fanzine back in 1988, which eliminated the artificial granularity of rounds. Later, it was the initiative system in Prism. Finally, it's a piece of software I wrote which helps automate the initiative system, particularly as it's used in Prism, and which grew into helping the GM automate a lot of other fiddly details of running a game of Prism.

Recently I hooked my HDTV to my computer as a second monitor with plans to use this for GMing support by using it to display things like visual aids and combat maps. I have finished the programming changes in IRIS I intended to take advantage of that with a player display:

Click the image for the full sized version. It looks so huge with giant fonts here because that's what it takes to make it readable in the incredibly high resolution of the HDTV, seen from across the room. It will show the next actions and current status of only the player characters, but not NPCs; when an NPC's action comes up, it will only show it as the action of "An NPC". PCs are sorted by next action so you can see whose actions are coming up. A brief summary of their status is shown, along with full details when their action comes up (or if I click on them in the list). The window is even resizable.

Put this next to a combat map, all where everyone can see it, and I hope that'll mean combat goes faster, is more engaging, and is easier for the players to keep track of.

2 comments:

litlfrog said...

That looks mighty shiny! But why is Lynn stunned?! See my concern for my wife? I think this'll be a cool feature, I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

Someone had to be to test that! (You're not even concerned about Rejoice being dead in three actions?)