I was in the office hours stream this morning and asked Mellie about improvements to Print Support. Her answer was disappointing and it left me wondering if I’ve pumped thousands of dollars into Demiplane only to learn that’s been a waste.
I want to start by saying I love the digital tool. It works great “when you play on a digital device”.
I/we have been waiting for so long for print support and you released it… but honestly It’s really not that useful and I really don’t understand the perspective that it’s in a usable state.
The things included on the print out currently could so easily be added manually to a sheet. Which makes me question why I would use Demiplane in the first place to do that. The point of using Demiplane is it streamlines the process of creating characters and managing/playing characters. In it’s current state the print outs require you to look up every spell and ability manually.
Please “Do the kid test”
Sit down with a bunch of kids who are frothing at the mouth excited to play a TTRPG for the firs time.
Here’s how it plays out. ’
1- Here’s a link to Demiplane so you can create your characters. It’s super easy to use, just like playing a video game. (feedback is that this is really easy for kids to pick up and complete their first character sheet)
2- Ok if you can bring a device so you can access your character sheet at the table… (kids generally dont own a device)
3- Ok no device, try print (feedback, oh it’s a form fillable pdf… with no spell or ability descriptions… well that’s not useful)
4- Ok I’ve reenabled my HLO account. Recreated your character for you. Printed your character sheet. Now we can play.
5- Yay
I don’t understand why a form fillable pdf that we can fill in ourselves is even the target for functional print support. Form fillable assumes I have a device to make changes. Which means I have a device. Which means I’m going to use Demiplane on the device natively and just not worry about the print out.
It’s really worth having a look at what the competition is doing. Because they absolutely blow Demiplane out of the water in terms of Print support. It doesn’t need to be perfectly pretty. It doesn’t need to fit in the pre-defined boxes. Just make a loop that prints the information out in a useful way.
The objective of Demiplane should be to enable players to sit at the table and use the character sheet to play the game. The sheet should contain basically everything you need to know about that chracter so that the game game be played almost exclusively with that character sheet. Be that with a device or a paper print out. The kid test really helps you see if that’s possible. Because kids, ask a million times more questions. They need help understanding and reading the sheets. They are still learning the game.
Demiplane could be the best tool on the market to achieve this. It just needs to prioritise making print outs useful. It should be high up your list of priorities as right now… I believe you are adding new games at lightening quick speed to a tool that you havn’t even finished for the first supported system yet.
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