Ever since I first heard about Mac OS X Tiger's onboard "Widgets", I've been thinking of how useful they'd be in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

For those who don't know, Widgets are small mini programs that are used to perform a variety of specialized tasks. In Tiger (otherwise known as Mac OS 10.4), these Widgets live within an environment called "Dashboard". Clicking on the Dashboard icon, or hitting the appropriate hot key, brings up a transparent layer over the desktop, as well as all the Widgets riding there.

Widgets are used for a wide-variety of tasks. There are reference tools for Wikipedia and Britannica, as well as thesaurus and dictionary look-ups, RSS feed readers that can be used to pulldown all manner of news, and tools for converting numbers.

RPG Speculations

As a gamer and a Mac user, I can see lots of potential for tabletop gaming. Normally, my virtual desktop is cluttered by Word documents (adventure write-up, saga notes) a multi-spreadsheet Excel document (initiative tracking, damage tracking) and numerous Safari tabs (for the Hypertext d20 SRD). Shuffling some of these tasks off to the Dashboard would make the whole game run more smoothly:

• Initative Tracking: Moving to Dashboard makes the most sense; right now it's all done in Excel, and switching to that spreadsheet -- particularly during combat -- is annoying. Putting it into Dashboard would allow me to summon the Initiative Tracker with one click, then dismiss it with another. I'm not sure exactly how I'd display it -- probably as a table, with a highlighted row indicating what the current round is. The Widget should also track the number of rounds since the beginning of combat, and possibly the duration of spell/ability effects as well.
• d20 SRD Reference: I'd love a d20 SRD Reference Widget -- like the Wikipedia one -- that displays results within the Widget itself. Failing that, a link to an SRD search -- like Britannica -- would also be good.
• Random Generators: My urban "Dark City" D&D campaign uses a lot of random generators, particularly ones for names, NPCs and treasure. Having widgets for each of these tasks would be great.

The cool thing is that Widgets are basically just Web pages powered by JavaScript and prettied up with Cascading Style Sheets, which are all technologies that I'm familiar with. So I should -- in theory -- be able to knock out at least some of this widgets myself. And since I'm looking to polish up my JavaScript skills, I'm working on doing exactly that.

The Mad Dash

I started experimenting with some of these Widgets today, and based on my early experiments, I think its doable. The treasure and NPC generators should be easy -- that's just table work (though I do need to figure out exactly how to store the seed data -- maybe as XML data that the JavaScript will load?)

The initiative tracker is more complex. I was able to build a rudimentary JavaScript initiative tracker, which sorts both by what the character rolled, and what that character's init modifier is (so that I can resolve ties). Automating this -- so that the Widget would roll initiative -- is easy, but it's a little more challenging to allow the DM to enter numbers, then have it do the sort. Data management is also an issue -- there needs to be a way for DMs to set up character lists and add opponents as needed. I haven't seen any Widgets that do that yet, so I'm not sure if it can all be done through that sort of interface (but it should be).

I haven't actually tried to turn any of these into real widgets yet, but when I do I'll post them to Nuketown for folks to try out. If you know of any RPG Widgets, drop me an e-mail about them at knewquist@nuketown.com.