Dr. Magnethands

Play Dr. Magnethands
Source Code Original (GAE) Source Code

Dr. Magnethands is a tabletop RPG “for three or more drunk people”, created by Grant Howitt. My friends and I enjoyed playing, but we frequently forgot to bring pencils and paper, so with his permission, I ported Grant's original tabletop rules to a mobile web app.

Dr. Magnethands provides the essence of a tabletop RPG in a quick, simple, and silly format perfect for people new to the genre, not looking for something too serious, or too impaired for math and dice-rolling.

The title screen shows a silhouette of Dr. Magnethands and button, About, New, and Join. The G M waits for players to join game Z D W T. 5 players have joined. A player enters Things for game Q 6 T 6, including three cats in a trenchcoat, a rusty spork, an extraordinarily popular burrito, harder than steel, Danny DeVito, and a banana suit. A player has the aspects, a rusty spork, an extraordinarily popular burrito, three cats in a trenchcoat, and the Flash's speed. An extraordinarily popular burrito has been used. A G M has the instructions and list of Things, including 4 D glasses and a banana suit.

The original app was built with Google App Engine and its Channel API, but stopped working when Google shut down the Channel API in 2017. I rewrote the backend with Node.js/Express/MongoDB and Socket.IO in 2020. I kept most of the original AngularJS frontend for the sake of time, but I did take the opportunity to make some slight improvements.