Alternatives
Products that do what Roll20, a new virtual tabletop for playing RPGs online does
This is a project that I have been working on in my spare time for a while now. It's a new virtual tabletop for playing pen and paper role playing games online, but it takes an entirely different approach than anything out there right now. Rather than trying to turn pen and paper games into video games, with features centered around one-click damage calculations and detailed stats tracking, Roll20 focuses on storytelling. It has completely new features like background music, player journals, and an expansive art library with a built-in web search. The entire system runs on NodeJS, Padrino,…
- 1IB
Diceright is a virtual tabletop for playing dungeons and dragons with friends on the web. You can watch a quick overview of how it works here: https://tinyurl.com/diceright. And there’s a list of the main features right on the homepage. It’s a Ruby on Rails site that makes heavy use of action cable for keeping the maps and tokens in sync for all players. On the front end, I’m using HTML canvas for the maps and a js library called fabric.js for interacting with the canvas. Otherwise, just jQuery on the front end. I optimized it all to work on mobile too. I built this as a side…
2023 · diceright.com
- 2VT
2012 · roll20.net
- 3MA
A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I've been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody's suggestions. So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn't have done without your input. Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won't go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the…
2017
- 4MA
hi all, I've always wanted to make my own game, but couldn't afford a thousand-dollar adobe (flash+photoshop) license. I'm not a talented programmer, have no degree in CS. But I understand some elements of design. So I got me a copy of ImpactJS, and after about 5 months of steep learning curve (at least for me), I managed to come up with a game. I also integrated it with a highscore and badge system, similar to what you get at Kongregate. You need to login with Google/OpenID to earn badges/scores. link is: http://www.hotbazooka.com/privatejoe hope to hear some feedback/questions from you guys!
2011 · hotbazooka.com
- 5FP
2021 · roleplayful.com
- 6DR
2015 · github.com
- 7OR
Hi I've created a text-based RPG game in which you can experience different adventures and play interesting characters while the AI acts as a real time DM/story teller. There are multiple ways to interact with AI: 1) Input free will move 2) Input default move (affects resources) 3) Post a question to DM Also one more cool feature is that you can create your own adventure via simple form. Add scenes, add characters and make it public so other players are able to test it. I also plan to have 'competetive' side where players will pay some small fee to creators in crypto depending on…
2023 · landing.v3rpg.com
- 8OW
2021 · play.google.com
- 9AS
I’m experimenting with modeling tabletop RPG adventures as explicit narrative state rather than linear scripts. Everdice is a small web app that tracks conditional scenes and choice-driven state transitions to preserve continuity across long or asynchronous campaigns. The core contribution is explicit narrative state and causality, not automation. The real heavy lifting is happening in the DM Toolkit/Run Sessions area, and integrates CAML (Canonical Adventure Modeling Language) that I developed to transport narratives among any number of platforms. I also built the npm CAML-lint to…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 10
- 11IM
Hey everyone, I built this project because I always wanted to try playing D&D but couldn’t find a group of friends or a DM to play with. It’s still early stages and not meant to be a complete replacement for real DMs or IRL sessions, but it’s a good way to dip your toes into DnD or to play on your phone between your IRL sessions. I tried playing D&D with ChatGPT but the overall experience was lacking, so I built this site & Discord bot that has a character sheet tool, better memory management, support for multiplayer, and automatic tracking for things like spells, HP, and encounters. Try it…
2023 · fables.gg
- 12PA
I've been working for a while on trying to curate a game that has the emergence of procedurally generated computer games but that can be played with only pen and paper. Here I present the best version I've been able to come up with that is simple and emergent. I've really enjoyed being able to engage with this sort of game while not feeling like my brain in rotting. I recon my numeracy improves while playing it.
Jun 2026 · jameshylands.co.uk
- 13IM
Hey there HN, I took a page from Wordle's mechanisms and made this game for fun for some friends and I. Check out Wheredle and let me know what you think of it! ↙ ↗ ↘ https://wheredle.xyz
2022 · wheredle.xyz
- 14ED
This has been my secret pleasure for the past four years. Ever since I started playing D&D during the pandemic, I discovered my love for role playing and storytelling, but Beyond just wasn't cutting it for me. I wanted to make my own personal character creator and tracker that I could use for my games, so I set out to build Dwarven Academy (https://dwarven.academy/) and after two years of learning I decided to rebuild it all from the ground up, so The Elder Dragon's Tavern was born. Try it out at https://elderdragonstavern.com/ This is an app to build and track…
2024 · elderdragonstavern.com
- 15SG
Hi everyone! Want to share something I'm working on. Here is the brief description: From a single text prompt, craft dynamic worlds (both fictional and real-life, of any kind) filled with interacting NPCs pursuing goals, and control (human-in-the-loop) their behaviour and world state in real-time. Text-to-image to visualise every single step of change in the world's and NPC's state. My main goal was to check if it's possible to use LLMs (GPT-4 currently) to make characters interact with each other but in the end, it ended up with a neat little app where users can interfere with NPC's (and…
2024 · github.com
- 16AQ
Hello everyone! I've finally finished my latest side project - a RPG game made in Blazor. It started as a small project to learn some Blazor (I'm .NET dev but kept mainly to backend and ASP.NET). I had such a good time coding it that at some point I decided to make a full featured game out of it. I might've have bitten off more that I could chew as RPGs have so many systems and elements but overall I think it worked out well, especially for a single person project. I want to hop on the next project soon so any comments/questions/tips than can make me better really appreciated!
2024 · whimsicalwyrm.itch.io
- 17AB
We are working on this side side project since few weeks. Our goal is to design a fully email based game, with graphics and everything. The main concept is a battle between two sorcerers. It’s turn-based, and you send commands by replying to emails you receive. At the moment, you can move your sorcerer, and attack your opponent. New and exciting things are coming soon! To launch a game, you only need to send an email to [email protected] and a friend of yours. The game is fully open-source, including artworks. What are your thoughts? Game: http://cursend.us/ GitHub:…
2012
- 181M
Howdy, long time HN'er. Spent ~20 years in FAANG and startups, got the pink slip during a big layoff wave in spring 2023. That's ok, I was about to quit anyway :) Finally got back to a lifelong goal of mine, making an "indie" game. (Indie is subjective, but you get the drift.) So, here it is: Ballionaire, a "fast-paced pachinko roguelike where strategy meets physics to create outrageous wealth!" My influences were: Plinko(TM), Luck Be A Landlord, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. I was really fortunate because localthunk, the dev behind Balatro, noticed my game during its first month of…
2024 · store.steampowered.com
- 19IB
I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games. It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot. I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!…
May 2026
- 20TR
2019 · therandominion.com
- 21RR
About a month ago, I shared the Day 1 prototype of this project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46448670). It has since evolved into a somewhat more polished "Slot-Machine Deckbuilder." I also recently moved the project from qq-pwn.com to alt-qq.com. I did this mid-development specifically to see if I could migrate a live player base and session states without losing people. The Design Challenge: The core of the game is a "One-Armed Bandit" dungeon crawler. The challenge is balancing the "house always wins" nature of slots with the player agency required for a good…
Jan 2026 · alt-qq.com
- 22AR
A minimal "@ moving around a hardcoded map" implemented in a bunch of languages, some by me and some contributed by others. A slightly more interesting riff on the Hello World or 99 Bottles of Beer theme. More languages or improvements on existing ones would be nice :) There's a github repo at: https://github.com/nrkn/SimpleRL
2011
- 23AP
2019 · astraltabletop.com
- 24AM
Hi, I’ve been working on Artifacts for the past 2 years, and it’s now ready to try. It’s a sandbox MMORPG where every action is done through a REST API. Instead of clicking to move, fight, gather, craft, or trade, you write code to control your characters. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, I’d be happy to hear them.
Jun 2026 · artifactsmmo.com
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