Okay, I'm a skeptic about Pathfinder fixing what I perceive as flaws in 3e, but let that slide. But I do have a way to make adventure preparation easier, and some other ideas for how to generate "goodwill."
Totally embrace the computer.
Everyone has probably seen Jamis Buck's NPC generator. I think he has a town generator too. And a treasure generator. Other people have worked on things like random dungeon generators.
Basically I think you guys need to put a slew of generators up on your site. A slew. And I think you need to have more generators than is typically the case.
Take an NPC villain generator.
There should be multiple selections, like BBEG, or henchman. Race, CR desired. Background that is randomly generated for me, or that I can ignore and make myself. Magic items, that sort of thing.
Let's say I need an encounter. The party is going to New Freetown, a coastal city. I want an encounter appropriate for them, one not too hard.
I pick a challenge rating, and one is generated for me. I have other options for treasure, or I can ignore them, whatever works.
Say I want to have a sea hag. Maybe the sea hag needs some compatriots to make the encounter a reasonable effort for my party. I manually select a sea hag, and the program takes care of adding some henchmen.
There need to be a bunch of options on the thing. I have in mind a page or so of toggle boxes and drop down menus. Something like a dropdown that says "Give me," a selection of 1 to whatever, then another box where I could input (via completion) "sea hag," or select it via dropdown.
I want treasure generators. I want something that will generate me a two or three chamber secret complex for my not so innocent temple of a thief god. I want random city generators. Random country generators, that randomly generate everything, or let me pick size, and or population, high magic or no, theocracy or magocracy or aristocracy.
You can go far, far beyond what I wrote and you should. You guys are game designers. You live for making random tables.
Mine the 1e dmg. And I mean mine it. If you can have inbred ogre hillbillies, the wandering strumpet table is no reach.
Now the output should be something like a pdf I could print up. Or save on a computer. Or export into OpenRPG or Maptool. A little more on that in a bit.
Okay, I've put this out there. Now let's talk about what you need to make it happen.
First, you have an uncommon resource available to you because of the nature of your clientele. An uncommon amount of computer knowledge. And that is shared by your staff. I suspect some of you have worked as programmers or system admins or the like.
Also the people that post on this board, some of them are invariably going to be very capable at this sort of thing.
You or your clients, or someone you know can advise you as to the feasibility of what I propose. I'd be kind of surprised in a way if you didn't already employ someone who knew this stuff already.
It's been a while, but I bet I could whip up a darn good generator in a couple of months. And that is with finding tables, and re-familiarizing myself with an appropriate language for coding this.
Now this may seem like a daunting challenge. Or not. I think it is eminently doable.
For instance:
1) You guys are in Seattle right? Lots of programmers there. Lots of unemployed programmers everywhere actually, including some that post here I'm sure. You don't even need to hire them permanently, just employ a couple on a project. Programmers do project work all the time. You will have no trouble finding programmers who are knowledgeable about d&d, trust me.
2) I actually think I would put a 6-month period on this project. Probably use 3 or 4 guys (or gals). Might have one stick around afterwards on the basis of general usefulness. Though with all the unemployed coders out there, they would be happy to just do occasional maintenance work later. And you are monitoring things as they go along, to make sure the code is well documented and understandable right?
Some general things:
1) I suggest you use Python.
2) Go with the Penguin, go with freedom and open source.
3) You can find people out there, who have already come a long way to what I describe if you go that way.
4) Output should be something that someone could print up, or even write some details down on a piece of paper. Don't require them to have a computer or have dm genie or anything. Unless they want to, then you should make it easy for them to use.
5) As for your bandwidth costs, ehhh I don't know. You will have rubberneckers (like me) that use it for fun. Better find someone who has a better idea of how to project this cost.
Now in closing:
1) Your web site isn't the best I've ever seen. You guys need to go through it and make it easier to use. At least it is not totally borked like WOTC's is. And if you don't believe me, conduct a poll as to how good your customers think this site is as far as being able to find something intuitively and quickly.
2) In addition, totally embrace OpenRPG and Maptool. Make it possible for your output to easily be used with these tools. Have some "pogs" or whatever maptool calls them made up so people can easily use them with these apps, as a freeby because you care, and want to create goodwill.
3) You can pretty much duplicate what I can gather of the DDI, you just won't be making money off of it, other than creating loyal customers and being useful.
4) Put up a forum with a searchable scheduler for online, PBEM, and real life games. You want people to play your games, so you want to make it as easy as you can for them.
Okay, that is all I have to say. Other people can add to these ideas, or modify them as appropriate. I think if you look around though, most of these ideas have already been implemented, and you can probably find a free version of them somewhere.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 4, RPG Superstar 2011 Top 16
