One of my favorite RPG games is Space Station 13; in that part of the game is to ACTUALLY role play your job, instead of just being a wizard and having certain abilities and thats as far as you go. That's one of the best things about getting together with a bunch of friends in a D&D match; coming up with entertaining quests. But it's rare to find a game that actually encourages the role playing aspect, and a large part of SS13 is the stuff that other players / admins will do to spice up the gameplay for others.<p>For the unfamiliar, here's an example of some of the gameplay of a janitor: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpBxqZYgem8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpBxqZYgem8</a>
One of the first programs my father wrote in the 70s/80s was a DnD dice rolling simulator, I believe in assembly. I've heard similar stories from others who began programming in that era. It's interesting how many "nerds" got their start in development through RPGs.
One of my favorite hobby projects is a dice-rolling gaming aid that morphed to a place where people can play RPGs online together over the years:<p><a href="https://rolz.org/" rel="nofollow">https://rolz.org/</a><p>Due to time constraints I've been neglecting it during the last months, but I'm looking forward to jumping back into development at some point.<p>When it started out, it was barely more than a Google search-like input box that would parse and execute RPG-style dice codes that I needed for GMing my own games. Over time, users had a lot of feature requests and this is how it got to today's state...
One thing that frustrates me is my endless quest to find a decent electronic character sheet. They're like the to-do list app that's never quite what you want.
Funny that this should come up as I am currently building a game master assist for Cosmic Patrol (cosmic-patrol.com). I'm fairly new to rpgs and I didn't have the dice needed to play so I hacked out some python functions to roll the right dice and I've kept expanding it to handle more stuff.