As I said in my last blog, I'm focusing on software now. For the month leading up to and after gencon, I spent a lot of my time thinking about what I was going to work on. One thing on my short list was an new version of OpenRPG. It wasn't what I picked to do first, but it's still on my radar.

I have long said that if I did work on a new OpenRPG, it would be web based. In the day of web 2.0 (I hate that term), nothing in OpenRPG couldn't be done in a web browser using AJAX technologies. Not to mention It would have the additional benefit of being 100% cross platform and not require any software installation.

On top of that, by just utilizing many of the web services and tools form google (http://code.google.com), you could quickly do many of the things we had to do in OpenRPG from scratch. So it would just be a matter of linking and organizing the proper google services along with some custom stuff just developed specifically for tabletop RPGs (miniature map, character sheets, etc..).

Enter Google Wave. If you don't know what Google Wave is, well, it's not something that is easily explained. But in short, it's a web-based tool that ties many of google's services together into one collaboration real time application. In addition, it's high extendable with a comprehensive API. Hmm... sounds exactly what I was talking about above, right?

I haven't played with Wave a ton. So I don't fully know all it's capable of, but if I were to embark on a new OpenRPG, I would probably start here. And I'm not the only person who thinks mixing Wave and tabletop RPGing together has a lot of potential: see Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D on Ars Technica.

Google Wave is invite only right now, but they are letting new users on the service all the time. It's not fully ready for prime time yet, but stable enough to use. If you want to know more about Wave, I highly recommend this website from Gina Trapani http://completewaveguide.com.