OK, this is just for the sake of discussion, but then again maybe I will consider putting something together in the future.

There are lots and lots of pen and paper RPGs and lots of people apparently still play them. There are things about classic RPGs that make them very different from so-called computer RPGs, for example they require the players to perform real role playing, and they require a real Game Master to manage the scenario. Further, they usually are more flexible and interactive, because the GM can invent stuff on the fly.

There are lots of support programs for dumb little things like random map, name, and character generation, and die rolling programs, and the like. I would like to consider the issues involved in building a Cocoa application to enable 'Net play of an RPG. Could be specifically AD&D or something else, or maybe it could be very configurable, either using some kind of data-driven table-based layout, or plug-ins.

The major choice comes in where you draw the line for features that are built in to the software.

At the very least, you need chat capability. You can already do that with a dozen clients or even irc, so that would not be worth the effort. So you would probably want some kind of support for some essentials.

Handling turn-based play. Players would enter their action decisions, which would enter some kind of queue visible to everyone, unless it was, say, a thief who wanted to inform only the GM what s/he was up to. Meanwhile GM would need a means to enter NPC actions into the queue as well.

Managing character information. At the least you would want a table of stats and their values, visible to the player controlling that character and the GM, and synchronize them. Also, some fields would be player editable, and others GM editable.

Mostly, the idea would be to give the GM client a lot of features that would make it easy for him or her to push game updates at the players. The GM would use some kind of pop-up menu to cycle between the characters actively in the current campaign.

Other GM interface possibilities:
Browser to move through the nodes of the game world. Ideally would distinguish between various types of information: general description to push to players, detailed description for behind the scenes, and GM notes. Heck, even editable HTML would suffice.

Of course, integrated die rolling. This is the one thing which would maybe cause problems unless players were confident that it was "fair".

Random encounter generation. Labour-intensive, because it would require a database of NPC/monsters to work from. If the GM enters the information on the monsters, so much the better.

Attack management. Instead of just queueing turns to attack, adding a weapon tracking feature would mean that players and GM could just click "attack" and proper attack and damage rolls would be handled automatically and results pushed to the chat channel.

Anyway, there are lots of other improvements one could make to the interface. Essentially what this would be is a tool for managing a campaign being run over the internet, so you would have all the screens familiar from Baldur's Gate except no game play screen. You would have player inventory, progress/chat window, and maybe a map window, but probably not like in a commercial game.

The mapping feature might provide a scanned image of the real map for the GM, with links to each area's description/treasure/notes/encounter info, and a manual map drawing region for the players. It would be nice to have a simple grid-based mapping tool. One player at a time is designated mapper (or the GM could be the mapper), and all participants would see the map updates. (Maybe this would go in version 2. )

Comments welcome.