Greetings and Introduction

[Pete Doroshenko]

Greetings to Jay and the members of this Divine Right group !!  Thank you for allowing me entry !!  I have travelled far and long to get here.  It's a very long story that has taken me through endless forum threads, blog posts, and even some podcasts!   I truly feel like I've walked from the Altars of Grey Staff to the Temple of Kings to get here, and hope the journey was worth the effort !!!  

I am a long time fan of Divine Right, having purchased my own first copy in the Summer of 1980.  My friends and I have continued to play Divine Right from those long summer days until now !  We have all moved around the country a bit, but up until recently have always managed to get together in person once or twice a year for a reunion and marathon session of Divine Right.  Despite all it's faults and foibles, we have always been able to gain great enjoyment from these events!  

Through my travels over the great digital expanse of the internet I've pieced together the sad set of events related to the development of new and improved version, DRX. Ugh.

With the pandemic our group has not been able to have our usual get togethers, and recently one of my friends discovered Tabletop Simulator (TTS), and this led me to discover Vassal.  We are all excited about the prospects these tools provide and the opportunity to play our favorite board game virtually.  Our biggest concern is if these tools and the associated content for DR used with these platforms is legal and not breaking any copyright laws?  Does anyone have any guidance in this regard?  

I look forward to learn more of the community here and HOPE to someday be invited over to a pub or coffeehouse for a visit to Minaria... virtually or in person, matters not :)

[McCrackan]

Welcome, Pete. Glad to have you.

Before I go any further, let me just say that my legal qualifications are on par with those of Ogsbogg. My legal insights below are therefore unqualified speculation.

Glenn encouraged the use of online media of DR, including Vassal. His publisher subsequently acquired the rights to DR, but I doubt that online versions would be seen as competitive with the actual board game. If he does, the onus is on him to ask that the online platforms be shut down.

[Barry Beadman]

i studied Law in the Huts of the Scumm.....

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[Pete Doroshenko]

Thank you Jay!  I always thought Ogsbogg had it together.  :)

I agree with your assessment.  There is an implied permission to use the text and artwork until such time as the holder of the copyright for the material or their agent request it be removed.  Vassal has this clearly described in their FAQs actually.  I feel better that I also own the original material as well.

[Pete Doroshenko]

LOL, I thought this was true of all "good" lawyers Joust.

[Daniel U. Thibault]

On Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 1:07:41 PM UTC-5 pete...@gmail.com wrote:

With the pandemic our group has not been able to have our usual get togethers, and recently one of my friends discovered Tabletop Simulator (TTS), and this led me to discover Vassal.  We are all excited about the prospects these tools provide and the opportunity to play our favorite board game virtually.  Our biggest concern is if these tools and the associated content for DR used with these platforms is legal and not breaking any copyright laws?  Does anyone have any guidance in this regard?  

   I would like to point out that besides the Vassal implementation of DR, there is also a TTS mod of DR. The latter is rather bare-bones but has great potential if put in the hands of a TTS modder. I tinkered with it, adding army deployment buttons and other little things like that, but I can't spend the time required to fully script it out. Maybe once I'm retired...

       Daniel U. Thibault

a.k.a. Urhixidur

a.k.a. Seigneur Bohémond de Nicée

[Philip Kiff]

On 2021-04-01 07:59, Daniel U. Thibault wrote:

On Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 1:07:41 PM UTC-5 pete...@gmail.com wrote:

With the pandemic our group has not been able to have our usual get togethers, and recently one of my friends discovered Tabletop Simulator (TTS), and this led me to discover Vassal.  We are all excited about the prospects these tools provide and the opportunity to play our favorite board game virtually.

I would like to point out that besides the Vassal implementation of DR, there is also a TTS mod of DR. The latter is rather bare-bones but has great potential if put in the hands of a TTS modder.

And there is an old, stand-alone software version written in Python, called "pydr". It works as a play-by-email version where you share the game file after each player's turn. In fact, that's the only virtual version I personally have ever used, and I always thought that it was great. The code for it was under an open source license of some sort, and I always thought that it held a good promise for the future.

I'm not sure if anyone is still playing using pydr. Though come to think of it, I might be interested in starting up one of those again while we wait for this da*n pandemic to fade away.

Phil.

[Yosef Bender]

welcome fellow traveler , still waiting to get to play one line myself but hope you find a home here 

On Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 1:07:41 PM UTC-5 pete...@gmail.com wrote:

[Pete Doroshenko]

Hi Daniel,

Yes, thank you, I have found the TTS version as well and was playing around with the interface, a little squirrely for me, I keep "flipping the table" accidentally :)-    I can just see my friends using this feature a lot, and realize I can turn it off.   

We are planning to try the Vassal version this Saturday and see how it goes.  The one thing I really appreciate with the online virtual world is the rules being resizable and searchable !!  At our last in person session we all were squinting to read the rule books with our aging eyes.

And yes... my own "retirement list" is growing quite quickly.... now if I could only win the lottery !

Cheers

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[Pete Doroshenko]

Thanks Phil !

I've never played any PBEM games.... no patience. But certainly an option that is better than nothing.  I will google this too, what the heck.

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[Pete Doroshenko]

Thanks Yosef !!

Having a dedicated group of gamers I've been involved with since High School, and not really ever playing DR with anyone else.... What is the demographic of players here in this group, and how are you all involved in playing DR if not online, especially over the last year during the pandemic?  I know a little about Jay's background from the information he has posted online.

Myself and my friends, like Jay, were D&D gamers who stumbled on DR one summer at our local gaming store and once we played it were quickly hooked.  Are most of you RPG gamers who came upon DR back in the day too?  

To me, the prospect of playing this game online really opens up some never thought about possibilities.

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[J. McCrackan]

FYI, you might want to start with the How To Get PYDR.pdf file in the DR Public Files directory.

J. McCrackan
Chiropractic Physician

McCrackan.wixsite.com/McCrackan

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[Pete Doroshenko]

Ohhhhh..... Thank you Jay.  I hadn't yet looked at the files available.....👀 Wow.... some interesting stuff in here....

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[Yosef Bender]

PETE 

i think were all from different backgrounds,  DR was the first boardgame I played as a 20 year old back in the late 70"s  in part I miss those late nights around the gaming table , I got the 20th year anniversary  addition but never got to play it.  Then two years ago I started to imagine a epic  3d version of the game so I started to add some of the things I liked in all the other board games and made a rule set and then started 3d Printing  castles, land hexes and armies you can find my progress on this facebook page and that is where i met most of the fine fellows  (4) Divine Right | Facebook  . some here are very involved with the game design and have had years of experience playing it . 

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[Pete Doroshenko]

Thank you Yosef !!

Interesting background.... Your 3d version sounds very cool !!  

Thank you all for such a warm reception.  I was so surprised to find so many folks still involved in Divine Right all these long years later.  I had discovered the DEVGAME project a few years ago and was hopeful their efforts would result in a PC based version of DR.  The project diary and screen shots were looking promising, and I had signed up to playtest the game, but nothing ever came of this project sadly.

Game on my friends....

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[Albert Vest]

I'd also like to see a PC version - having the game function on a computer screen, and consume as little table space or shelf space as possible.

The pydr framework looks promising to me, but I'm frustrated that it doesn't enforce movement limits. If a relatively simple open-source game like Crimson Fields can do it, for multiple unit types & terrain types (crimson.seul.org) it couldn't be too hard, could it?

Would anyone in this group appreciate seeing pydr enhanced to keep track of movement limits, and which units have/haven't moved?

Welcome, and thanks for reading.

Albert Vest

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[Philip Kiff]

I would support any initiative to pick up the pydr game and try to improve on it!

Having said that, however, I'm not sure that I would recommend starting with movement. Correctly programming movement restrictions could turn out to be quite challenging because there are so many variables: unit types, terrain, mixture of types in stack, leader(s), state of monarch, random events, effects of magic, and variations in rules used. In fact, when I have played pydr, one of the frequent hiccups would occur when someone disputed whether or not a unit could reach a particular hex. And even in a group of only 3 or 4 there would sometimes be disagreement over the interpretation of the rules in a particular case. Leaving the movement constraints open allows players to control such things directly and leaves the responsibility for resolving such issues with them.

There are a couple other things that I personally would prioritize, if *I* were to spend any time trying to improve pydr (which I don't plan to at the moment!):

- installation
Many, many people don't install and run pydr because it doesn't have a standard installer for Windows, and I'm not even sure if anyone has managed to get it running on a Mac. I actually started to look into this myself at one point, but didn't pursue it. But I think for someone who knew what they were doing, it would not be too hard to add a standard Windows installer that would install the required Python version and also install the game, and add a simple menu item to Windows. In practice, I don't actually install it anymore, I just copy the entire game folder over from one machine to another, and I install Python. But for new users, this is a HUGE barrier to entry.

- Mac version?
Make it compatible with Mac OS.

- Update Python
The version that pydr runs on is outdated. It's not clear to me what would be involved, but if you expect people to install it, then it should be updated to be compatible with a current, secure, supported version of Python.

- Right click or middle click to show units
This is one thing that I personally considered looking into learning a bit of python for. The usability of the game map would be *greatly* improved by adding a method to quickly check the contents of a stack. I haven't played it in so long that I forget exactly what the issue is. But I remember clearly thinking how nice it would be to be able to right click or middle click on a stack to show a pop-up display of the contents of a stack.

Phil.

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