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The Trouble With Using D&D Rules In Videogames?
An anonymous reader writes "There's a new article on kuro5hin.org about the trouble with porting pencil and paper RPG games (such as d20 3.5) to RPG video games. One such rules-snatching video game is examined, The Temple of Elemental Evil. The article is also an introduction to a new RPG Standards Compliance system that is currently under development and will be online soon, in hopes of bridging the gap between computers and those lovable PnP evenings we all enjoy."
But I believe Knights of the Old Republic uses this sort of system internally. It's mostly hidden from the user (unless they choose to view it), and I had no problems playing the game. In fact, it was quite enjoyable. A good mix, I'd say.
Where are the cheetos?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The main problem encountered here is that a system designed primarily for abstraction, that relies on mental visualisation to compensate for the abstraction, is being ported to an environment where complexity can be handled and arbitrary visualisation is provided. Additionally, IMO hitpoints really don't work representationally after a set point.
BTW, I'd like to just point out that I haven't touched a P+P game since I was 12
Look at Knights of the Old Republic. Not even D&D even though it used the D20 system. I have rarely seen a game half as balanced as that one. The D20 system was invented just to make it easy to make video games.
He's making a remark to the excellent D&D parody by the Dead Alewives. If you search Google for it you can probably find it.
Problem is that D&D's number-crunching sucks and instead of focusing on giving the player a thousand numbers to concern himself with, it'd be better to make a fun game.
Since when was he the one that "invented" RPGs? Maybe the same way Al Gore "invented" the Internet... RPGs existed in several forms long before Gygax. Gygax just made one of the more popular such systems that took off. It is true that a number of videa games took ideas from D you see THAC0 and such a lot in older CRPGs.
(The Al Gore "quote" was from one of the actual ARPAnet implementers; rather sad he got so heavily critized for that given he didn't invent the quote and the person who did had a valid reason for saying it.)
... wrote a complete character sheet in VB6 (ick, I know) that was fully v3.5 compliant... All I heard about once he was knee-deep into it was how bad it sucked and how complicated it was... But it turned out pretty cool. Dice rollers and everything. Now to get him to port it to gtk or qt...
bash: rtfm: command not found
I've been playing P&P RPGs for a long time. I started in 1992, with my dad, when I was 7, playing AD&D Second Edition. Played that till Third Edition came out. I've been playing Shadowrun on and off for about 4 years. I've also played lots of CRPGs that used D&D Rules. NWN (The Version that used to be on AOL), NWN (by Bioware), Unlimited Adventures, All the Eyes of the Beholders and their many Kin (27 Beholder-Kin, if I remember) and what not. I've not played Temple of Elemental Evil, though I did see the Beta at GenCon. It seemed buggy then, too. But NWN has hit it dead on. It's an excellent game based off the rules (Based. Not entirely kosher. Think about some of the feats) and I like it alot. It's better than Unlimited Adventures. We've never had it so good.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
If you're mostly into Hack & Slash, then video game D&D is workable. In fact, it's been around a long time: Rogue was released in the mid-80's wasn't it? Man, I still love that game.
But if you're mostly into grand sweeping epic storylines, or intricate political manipulative shenannigans, or just the camaraderies of hanging out at the gaming table, eating pizza & diet coke (or cheetos & Mt. Dew) and rolling dice and making bad puns or acting out like your character, then the computer version is very, very tame.
I can handle both styles fine though. THey both have merits.
BTW (off-topic) how many people still play older editions? I'm very much into old-school Basic/Expert D&D (those old boxed sets from 1981). That's what I started out with back in the day, and it's what I keep going back to for some reason. I know the new editions are technically better, but I just don't like 'em that much. *shrug*
The most amazing thing to me is, the fact that this article posted at all over on K5. I can't believe it did, since it was on it's way down last I looked at it. Looks like K5 really has gone to pot. :-(
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
not because of the AD&D rules being ported to a CRPG, but because;
1. It is extremely bug-ridden. Really *really* badly bug ridden. And abandoned too. No more patches. The publishers just don't care; they have made their money back already. Atari *suck*.
2. The designers appeared to have taken the original p&p module and turned it into a game with very little 'fleshing out'. Normally, when a DM buys a module and runs it as a game, they treat it as a framework. In TOEE all we get is the framework.
As an example of just how bad it is, a single rogue character can finish the game in about 30 mins with very little levelling up; all sneaking outside of combat is 'take 20'.
Every action you need to perform, every item you need to find to complete the game can be done from stealth (except one and that only leads to a non-combat dialog). If you know where to go and what to pick up the entire game can be completed with no combat. Period. Normally that'd be a good thing (eg the original Fallout, which can be completed *almost* without combat, by a 'talker'). But here, in ToEE, its only because theres no real storyline.
However, the ToEE game engine is potentially *awesome*; it faithfuly implements the AD&D rules. There is very little problem in this regard.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I would say that it is a much better idea to use the tried-and-true D&D rulesets than to create your own on the fly. Heck, for starters, it saves you a huge amount of time.
For success they must roll at least an 18
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I played a good bit of pen-and-paper D&D back in the day. I remember ignoring most of the rules and dice rolls entirely. The biggest rule, was that all the rules were optional. D&D was about having a good time.
In computer games, the rules sometimes get in the way of the fun (see TOEE). Your character is more a collection of numbers than a person. Sure, you could play pen-and-paper like that too, but you would have to be pretty anal.
It still doesn't tell how Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is different from regular Dungeons and Dragons. I've asked around and no one knows. I'm starting to think nerds just made it up to sound smart.
"I'm playing Dungeons and Dragons."
"Oh yeah? I'm playing ADVANCED Dungeons and Dragons"
"Good old days." Yeah. The days of absurdist playstyle created by monster manuals chock full of monsters that had once/day attacks with no other purpose but to instakill your beloved character.
Not to mention the wretched class imbalances. I'm not fond of WoTC, but at least they fathomed that perhaps the mages should actually be able to reach 20th level, and not at that point die to a single flurry of +1 arrows shot by orcs...
You see the Baron, three bodyguards, and Goldie.
Goldie's the mage! Kill her!
(different game, same problem...)
Ask and thou shalt receive...
8bit D&D Flash Movie
Don't get me wrong, NWN is a great example of how to put D&D as a video game -- but pen-and-paper games is only best with pen-and-paper the majority of the time. Plus you just can't get a true experience of sitting down with your buddies and having a sadistic GM.
Karma whorin' since 1999
The whole idea of using tabletop RPG rules for video games is silly. Tabletop RPGS are designed in every way around the fact that the you can only generate random numbers by rolling dice, and human beings have to resolve everything: what made Rolemaster (or "Rollmaster" as we called it) intolerably slow in person would be completely invisible in a video game.
Tabletop RPGs today go out of their way to avoid rolling too many dice and looking up results on too many tables (things that are trivial for a computer). What makes games in person fun (aside from, you know, playing with other people) is the ability of the GM to improvise, which is essentially an AI-complete program. Thus, you end up with dungeon-crawls like "Temple of Elemental Evil," where the player's choices can be limited to the extent that it's possible to plan for most of them. (Or, you get a game like Neverwinter Nights, where - despite goods scripting - you bump against the artificiality of the world at every turn.)
Unfortunately, the article chooses to talk about AI bugs, scroll menu bugs, and other things that are entirely unrelated to the choice of the D&D ruleset.
An article where no one can say "this isn't news for nerds!"
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seriously, though. It's a great engine. I love how you can either roll characters or do the good old point buy. What I dont' like is that the story line is terrible.
On the other side of the coin in NWN. It's a dated game engine for sure, the mechanics are an edition ago, but on the other hand, the story line in the single player is absolutly awesome. The second expansion, Hordes of Underdark, is probally the best game experience that I've ever had in my life. The characters (Aribeth especially) were very well done. The main enemy, Mephostopheles, was actually scary. No angst-filled BS like a lot of other games. None of that 'he was a good person gone bad' crap. He was just plain evil.
Obviously, no one would want to handle the complexity of a swordfight in all it's glory, so RPGs simplify this-it is made clear that an attack roll represents an opportunity taken in a heated exchange of blows, that hitpoints represent luck and experience as much as the possible maximum damage taken etc. Players are then able to visualise the action
The first problem is the stupidity of the hitpoint system at high levels-D+D originally only went up to level 6, where the abstraction worked. At level 20 it becomes a hindrance, as players survive lethal situations with ease. In part due to the success of hack and slash games like Diablo and unoriginal Japanese RPGs, designers now feel compelled to allow the player to reach godlike levels The second problem is that computers don't need abstraction-they can deal with complexity, and provide a limited level of visualisation. As such players lose the level of abstraction. This encourages powergaming, which makes balancing near impossible
I=genius
Baldur's Gate? This article confuses me on several levels.. First, it's operating within a microcosm of video games that are based off of AD&D - in particular just one. This isn't really that great of a study if it's just using one source. I'm taking an introductory statistic's course right now at my college, and my professor would fail me if I used only one souce. (He also mentions something called d20 in passing a few times but makes no arguments over it.) Second, what about Baldur's Gate? There are very few more successful game series then the Baldur's Gate line. The game is able to be played as a traditional RPG with pause's after each move, the storyline is diverse, and with BG2 onward you have different plots devlop based on your char's alignment, class, race, etc.. it's quite a wonderful and diverse game. Neverwinter Nights continues to expand it allowing user/gameplayer customization of the settings and rules. This customization of the rules of the game is also my third point with what's wrong with this "article". The author says that Pen and Paper games are much more flexiable and adaptable based on their player's needs.. well, if I am playing a game of NWN or BG or Ice Wind Dale, all I have to do is change the settings in my preference box to change the level of hardness of the monsters or the speed of the game, etc. It's not difficult, and just requires a few clicks of a button. So in conclusion, what happened to the Baldur's Gate line of games? I mean, come one... the games span three platforms, are wellknown amongst gamers, and have won more awards then I can count. Why didn't the author include BG and Black Isle analysis in his article? All this means is that this article is a bit of FOO and should be sent to /dev/null, or rather /dev/menzoberranzan.
- Simrook.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
It takes a lot of programming to make a game truly "open ended". Baulders Gate I and II did this quite well, although there is simply no match for the imagination of the human mind. There may be 'open ended quest' but today that only means that there are a few endings, that could perhaps change later events in your game. But for intigrating the rules, it seems simple, but when you add the rules to the open-endedness of pencil and paper games, it becomes that much harder.
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Knights of the Old Republic used essentially the same rules as D&D, the d20 game, Star Wars Roleplaying Game. I've played the RPG, it works well as a table top game.
I think that KotOR makes it pretty obvious that a great game *can* be based directly on a table-top RPG. But a crappy game is a crappy game, no matter what property they license to go under it.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
My biggest problem with porting pencil and paper games to video games was finding a pencil that would write on the screen. Then I realized that dry-erase markers worked really well, and as an added bonus it was much easier to change the stats on your character without leaving those nasty eraser smudges.
paintball
Neverwinter Night, and the two follow up expansion packs did a wonderful job recreating d20 RPG on PCs.
Is that someone who played AD&D managed to procreate.
paintball
d20's a pretty sucky system, rules wise. Shadowrun and Whitewolf games have a nicer system, overall (though I don't like either game genre, personally). The various games jumping on the d20 bandwagon are just making their games sucky. Sucky but sellable.
Give me a nice smooth, fast system that's as open ended in character design as Shadowrun any day over any d20 crap.
I'm told 3.5 is a massive improvement over v3.0, but it's still not for me.
As for RPGs in computer games, I've yet to see one. Arcanum was the closest to one I've seen. It was fun. It was also lightyears from being an RPG. We'll need truely imaginative AIs before we have that.
The article pretty much seems to ignore its premise.
The fact that TOEE is bug-ridden doesn't say *anything* about the suitability of adapting Pen N Paper RPGs to the computer. It just means there were sloppy programmers.
I went about trying to write an online character generator a couple years ago.
Character Generator
The new 3E rules are much much better at converting to a sane mathmatical formula. Instead of having lots and lots of charts with varying numbers, a lot of things have been reduced to a linear function. (an example would be the +1 bonus for every two points above 10 in ability scores) But it is still far from perfect, but perhaps that is part of the magic. Instead of reducing everything down to some simple formula, you have to correspond or heaven forbid, make something up.
According to this Link
There will be a new patch coming out in the next couple of weeks. Since Steve Moret is only the lead developer for ToEE I guess you would know better.
This article seems poorly thought out, fails to address the topic with many points, and is generally confused. Let's take a few examples...
Problems: Distributed Database vs. Brain
I'd be more impressed with this if I knew what the author thinks distributed databases have to do with computer games. And "systemic pliability for quick changes and alterations to code blocks"? What does that mean?
The Adventure
There's already nine starting stories, which is eight more than most games. How will you make the quest depend on class when the party can have up to five people of any combination of classes?
Solution: Standards Compliance
The problem with this list is, as far as I can tell, D20 already has all this. Though I may be wrong, since the article is hardly clear.
I could go on but I can feel my IQ decreasing with every paragraph I read, so I'll stop here...
Human/Ranger/Zangband
That, and he has an affinity for twenty-five cent words, when a nickle word will do.
I thought it was a perfectly cromulent article.
c-hack.com |
All I got from this article was that the guy wasn't happy about the d20 system, he really didn't seem to be all that coherent, which he warns us of this ("this is no review of TOEE, although it could be"), it apparently could also be a rambling condemnation of WotC, or a big circle jerk about how great J.R.R. Tolkien was.
/. aside from the usual comments about the editors?
As people pointed out in the thread below, a computer is more than capable of performing the functions that the d20 system has laid out. I for one have never found it difficult to comprehend, as everything is simply a plus or minus on a random interger 1-20. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it really isn't that tough (compared to say, creating some good content) to establish these scripts and commands?
I mean really, for now all we're going to get is a fairly modular design, but the rules are not the problem, shit games with tons of bugs are the problem. Who wrote this article, why are they qualified to make these statements, why is it on
From the comments: "I've seen d&d accused of being satanist for years, but I've never seen an actual personal perspective on d&d from the Devil." (link)
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
I think it's a shame that D&D became synonymous with rules instead of plot. To me, D&D is a generally a recipe for a cliched game. The alignment system sucks and the classes are just plain dull. AD&D became a big complicated bore. In fact, I think it became so complicated just so it could sell those dull overpriced manuals with their generic rock album artwork throught them. Instead of an interesting game it boils down to healing potions, XP and levels. The PC versions like Baldurs Gate have much of the game picking up gold and arranging inventory - a trite mundane for a child of Baal.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
I mean ya, a pen and paper game can actually be played without the pen or paper if you want. My friends and I did, for the most part. All we used was charater sheets. This was mainly a process for organizing your thoughts. The player had to put thought into what kind of character they wished to play, and the GM (we weren't playing D&D) got an idea of what that character was and could formulate a story around them. Then we basically told an interactive story. The sheets were also useful if you wanted to pick up later (it's hard to remember what the fuck you were doing a month ago).
Not the case with computers. They are as of yet not nearly advanced enough to engage in that sort of thing. So you need a set of rules for them to adhere to. For combat they can't deal with telling a story about it, they need to crunch numbers to determine a winner.
D&D is good for that. It provides a robust, and very tested system. It's not the easiest thing in the world to come up with a good system for a game. This provides a ready made (and good) one to use. Now some games expose perhaps too much of it to the gamers, but some of us find that fun. I really like BG2, despite it being really complecated.
D&D also has a very large and developed universe to draw on. Again, good stories aren't the easiest thing to come up with, espically from scratch. The D&D universe gives you a rich background with many story frameworks from which to start, and write your specific adventure.
Not saying that all games should be D&D or even D20, but I don't think it's bad that many are. I mean BG2 stands as my all time favourite computer role playing game. I'm not sure it would have been as good had they not used a rich preexisting universe like D&D.
If any of you are scratching your heads, trying to figure out where this text is from, it's from Summoner Geeks.
Figured I'd could save someone the trouble I just went through trying to figure it out...
The sketch in question was originally done by a comedy group called the Dead Alewives, an improv troup based out of Milwaukee whose webpage now seems to be defunct. The Summoner Geeks clip as linked above was actually a hidden feature in the computer/PS2 game Summoner, which could be accessed by pressing ESC (X) during the credits. The original Dead Alewives version had a very amusing intro, which was cut in the Summoner Geeks flick.
The audio is, however, preserved in its entirety in a flash animation called 8bitDandD.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
As per the D20 System Trademark Guide as provided by Wizards of the Coast, it states (page 11):
'No Covered Product may be an 'Interactive Game' as defined in this Guide.'
The d20 System Guide's prohibition against Interactive Games applies to any online games, including MUDs (provided the MUD meets the definition of an Interactive Game as defined by the License).
On a somewhat related note, I just read on EN World that Gary Gygax recently suffered a mild stroke. Man, hearing news like this makes me feel old.
Dark Dungeons!
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Of cource theres baulders gate Dark Alliance 2, which is based off dnd 3.0 and runs fine. Not to mention the majority of the problems mentioned in the article refer to AI problems, rather than problems porting d20 rules. In all reality, Diablo 2, which is arguably one of the more succesful rpgs of all time, uses a d20esk system in its calculations.
D20 was thought as simplification to limit amount of calculations performed by players at cost of adequacy of simulating the world. So, you lose part of the reality by using very simplified system, then lose a lot more by limiting the player to what the authors had thought of and disabling all what the player could think of, but authors didn't implement. (classic problem of "you can't do that!. Why? Because you can't." In paper RPG you can try to climb a wall, dig through it with a pickaxe, throw a rope over it, stack items to climb them etc. In computer RPG you can only curse because it's the wall of the map and there's nothing beyond.).
I'd take Morrowind as the best example of modern system for computers.
Take a fight. You press mouse button, by holding it longer you increase strength of hit a bit. But then there's calculation of fact of hit: Agility, speed, unarmoured, distance, fatigue, load and luck of the enemy vs your attack, weapon skill, agility, height comparing to enemy, fatigue, load, damage of weapon and luck.
Then point of hit: Where you aimed your aiming cross, your skill, fatigue, luck.
Then HP taken: Point of attack, armour on that point, corresponding armour skill of the enemy, damage of the armour, endurance, fatigue, HP, luck, your strength, weapon hit ratio, damage of weapon, your fatigue, your luck.
And possibly quite a few I forgot.
3 hits with a dagger in one second, not a problem for a computer to calculate that. Think of a player performing such calculation "manually" at each attack.
Porting paper systems straight to computers is plain dumb.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I have have a couple of thoughts on this:
1. First of all, there are a couple things about the D&D ruleset that trouble me - example: last time I played, there was nothing about size of an enemy effecting chance to hit. Throwing a knife at an enemy 12 feet side should be notably more likely to hit than an enemy 4 inches wide. Unfortunately, its not... according to D&D rules. I think games should concentrate more on Logical game rules incorporating whatever rulesets seem fit that also support a logical view of a gaming universe. There is no reason to religiously attach ourselves to a ruleset that may be imperfect, just as ancient astronomers tried to attach themselves to a view of the universe that rotated around the earth. Imperfect concepts Must be improved upon. Its evolution.
2.In D&D, a DungeonMaster had at least a little room to embellish. A newbie who isn't a jerk and isn't incredibly stupid probably won't be instantly killed if a good DM is hosting the game. Their gameplay will lead them further in to the game, teaching them and immersing them in the action, like how a teacher of Go will open a students eyes through a game on the board. Computers aren't there yet, even Neverwinter Nights, which was supposed to send pen&paper to obscelence, somehow missed. There is an empathetic human nature with proper D&D that hasn't been replicated with video games yet - and it may still take a while to happen.
The K5 article makes a good point about people being able to exploit a game, but can't exploit a DM for too long. I'm not sure if a game could ever become smart enough to sense when its rulesets are being tampered with and then adjust accordingly... but if it could, it would be a massive step forward out of the cookie-cutter solutions we find in so many games today.
I switched to K5 ages ago because I thought it was less geeky than /.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
...I've got something I've mentioned in feedback to the "big three" PC-game magazines (Computer Gaming World, PC Gamer, Computer Games) - there are others, but these three seem to be the only ones which focus solely on PC games. The question I've posed to them is essentially a "RPGs for Dummies". I never played D&D when I was younger, and I play a lot of games but most of them are FPS and strategy games. I do however, own a ton of other games, including a lot of RPGs, which I've never played (which I guess would classify me as a collector). I purchase the ones I keep as a collector based on reviews and feedback from people I know - so that puts me in the range of 700 games (according to my electric inventory). Anyway, the RPGs have never really made sense to me but I've never seen a good explanation regarding their actual, underlying philosophy and play.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=35eaccc3.6520 1896%40news.earthlink.net
-- Old Man Kensey
Then you've just been playing the wrong games.
Advanced D&D added melee rounds and even segments. None of this was in D&D. That and all the goofy multi-class characters were the big differences I could see.
Earlier D&D used the distance-weapon type rules for melee, which I guess didn't work as well.
The article states that the main base for D&D wasn't Tolkien, but actually was Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth.
If you read the novels it now looks like someone wrote that book with the D&D player's guide in front of him. All the funny magic items and weird magic system comes from there. While everyone agrees that Tolkien (and his Inklings group of which CS Lewis was also a member) had a great influence on fantasy, in this case it was Vance's fault
PS the article also fails to give credit to Dave Arneson (hope got the name right) as a co-creator.
be seeing you
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
you just got modded up Funny for re-posting someone else's funny comment that got modded up.
The problem with D&D rules is they're set up for long term (years and years) campaigns, not 30-40 hr games. So you're characters get just a few skill points and new abilities per level; so few in fact that it's a waste to spend them on anything other than what the game intended for that character. This makes leveling up a linear and dull event, better handled by just clicking 'automatic level up'.
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Standards compliance? What a bunch of rubbish! Besides the hubris of introducing a new system in the middle of a review on someone else's game, this he has the chutzpah to call this unwritten (let alone published) system a "standard".
If that's a standard, I've got several dozen more over here I could sell you really cheap...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Have you taken your happy pills today? All good citizens take their happy pills...
At the top of the article the author says "Computers are very rational, and people are abstract;"
Programmer joke: if people are "abstract" how come I keep seeing so many instances of them. Maybe they are subclasses?
Anyway it's completely trite. And untrue. Computers are algorithmic. Humans can be rational, which is usually defined as 'capable of exercising reason'.
Unless, of course the author means rational as in mathematics, as in a rational number (i.e. a number that can be represented as a fraction). But in this definition, the author is even more wrong; computers are of course binary machines.
This is just the sort of faulty reasoning that makes me stop reading articles. Quite aside from that first sentence !!! from this single example, perhaps we can conclude (erroneously) that people aren't abstract, they are illiterate. At least in this instance.
-A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed-
Mod me troll for saying this... but i'd actually like to see game designers move AWAY from D&D or other paper based rulesets. Don't get me wrong, P+P can be great fun... but when's someone going to make a ruleset that takes advantage of a computer? I've always felt that paper systems were simplified because rolling 20 dice just to see if your right-handed 32 degree slash hit, wasn't deflected, broke a link in their chainmail, and caused a wound... well its just not fun. So in paper, thats all done in what... 2 rolls? But hell, with a computer you could make 20 dice rolls in an instant and the user would never know the difference. Basically I just think the rules for computers need to be streamlined for FUN, not some non-existant physical limitations. And by the same token, much of the power and flexibility in having a real DM is lost with a computer... so compensation in that area is definitly needed. Its all about limitations and tradeoffs IMO, and paper's are definitly NOT the same as a computers.
The other thing is, and do excuse the tangent, i've always HATED D&Ds magic and ability system. Maybe i'm just a Diablo-noobie, but if I can do some kick ass backflip-powerstrike, or ultimate-spell-of-destruction... why the fuck can I only do it twice a day?! What, is there some internal clock on my character? Does he go "DING!" when 24 hours pass? Thats stupid. I've always preferred the mana/stamina "pool" method because its so much more flexible. Mana is raw ability... do anything with it, but your supply is limited. D&D you've got all that memorization and per/day limit stuff... its just stupid. Say your mage character unleashs some raging inferno and completely annihilates a whole clan of orcs in an instant. Once. Now imagine the conversation:
"That was badass! Do it again!"
"Sorry man, I can't".
"Why not?"
"Oh because I have to wait 19 hours to do that again."
"Oh, so like you're tired?"
"No, not tired... I just can't do that again."
"So you could cast another spell?"
"Yeah sure."
"So cast that spell again!"
"Can't dude, like I said. All i've got left is... light. Want me to make the room glow? Its really cool, watch!"
*Grumbles* "Stupid wizard."
And yeah, I know there are some ways to fudge that stuff... but the flexibility just isn't built into the game, and thats what I hate about it. Don't get me wrong, the D&D universe is a blast... I just wish there was some plausible explanation why, in NWN, my badass, "more pissy than a castrated dragon", lvl 22 human female Fighter/Thief/Weapon Master with dual flaming longswords can only perform 6 "Ki Powerstrikes" a day. Bah.
There's also a second part to it, another round after school at the Brown Deer High (where my mom used to work, dead alewives are local for me) D&D club, one of them brings his girlfriend, hilarity ensues. Its probably avalable on p2p, thats where i got it, the DAs advocated getting their stuff there on their site since most of their cds are out of print.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Eventually the player community solved its own problem by collectively deciding that legging (like camping in other games) was just Not Kosher and going after those suspected of it. (It's impressive to see a bunch of well-controlled mechs battling in an arena suddenly all turn in a coordinated attack on one unrepentant newbie who's running around taking leg shots.)
-- Old Man Kensey
those lovable PnP evenings we all enjoy
Plug n' Play evenings are my favorite!
In the article, the meld with stone which makes a cleric impervious to damage is used as an example of how the paper rpgs have rules that are more complex than computer based rpgs. Well the paper rules never cover anything about behaviour of the monsters in these situations unless it's something like fear/flee response, it's the GM that does so.
In computer games, it's the AI governing the monsters reaction that does this. The game obviously doesn't take into account situational knowledge. Advanced AI would have taken into account estimated enemy's damage, behaviour of monster ( rage, bezerker) and assesment of areas of danger. It might have been an oversight really, but i've never seen game AIs anymore intelligent than scripted behaviour. Probably the games also uses line of sight for attracting monsters, as opposed to noise based on encumbrance values.
Besides morrowind, nothing ever comes close to that sense of adventure.
The problems with using D&D rules in video games are as follows: 1 - the D20 system sucks. 2 - One person sitting at their computer playing a game is NOT role-playing. MMORPGs come closer than what the video game industry thinks of as RPGs, but it's still a far cry from the kind of experience I think of when I think of role-playing games.
I have to wonder if the writer of the article has ever really played D&D d20 (3.0 or 3.5) or AD&D/D&D from previous iterations. I suspect, given the tone early on in, that he was blinded by his personal gaming political prejudice.
The latest incarnation lends itself very easily to implementation on a computer. Heck, we've been toying with converting an old LPmud to d20 because for the first time the D&D has a standardized machanic that can be more consistently implemented.
The author even goes on to state that d20 fails to take a standard approach in monster/character creation. Clearly the autlor has no clue what he's on about. d20 applies the same ruleset to everything. You want to play a Minotaur sorceror. No problem. You want to play a goblin barbarian. No problem again. Heck, you want to play a half-dragon assassin, you can do that. Now try doing that with earlier versions of D&D. Good luck coming up with a standard approach.
If there is one complaint I do have about d20 D&D it is that it feels too much like a computer game. The rules are so clear on everything now, that it all feels too structured. I find that the game is geared more towards the video game generation and less to those of us who prefer role-playing.
Video game RPGs need to be *less* standardized if you ask me.
The rules aren't really that important in a video game, as opposed to a pen and paper RPG. It's mostly done behind the scenes.
What we need is games with more imagination than "kill rat 500 times, then kill spider 1000 times".
Because you know these rpg developers are too focused on "standards". How about a mafia rpg where you start with collecting money for loan sharks, then move up the ladder? Yeah, you never thought about that, assholes. Thanks for all the spiders and small poisoned rats. I want to kill you by drilling a hole in your eye.
Please. Change.
Will code a sig generator for food
I can tell you a true story, a sad story, about using all the rules.
When I was in high school, there was a game shop near my home, and one day they had a tournament. A bunch of guys volunteered to be Dungeon Masters. One of the DMs, a guy I knew, was familiar with all the rules of AD&D. This was around 1981 or 1982, so we're talking first edition AD&D.
The store said the tournament was to use the standard AD&D rules. This guy assumed that meant all of them.
The characters in the tournament were all around 4th to 6th level or so. So this guy's group got into some kind of fierce battle, won the victory, but were injured. Their cleric started casting lots of heal spells.
This guy knew that, according to the rules, if you used lots of psionic powers within a short period of time, you have to roll on the Psionic Encounters Table. And he also knew that, according to the rules, certain spells count as using psionic powers -- among them, heal spells.
So he rolled his dice. Oh, a psionic encounter. He rolled his dice again. Oh, it's Mind Flayers. He rolled for how many. Three.
So three Mind Flayers attacked a party of 4th to 6th level characters that was only partially healed after a major battle. Everyone died.
The players were not exactly happy at this turn of events. They were all immediately finished with the tournament, and all because this one DM knew all the rules and applied all the rules. The store wasn't exactly happy, either. And the DM didn't really feel happy about it either, I'm sure.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The single player missions that NWN came with was soooooo boring, I swear it made baldurs gate seem like it had a decent storyline (it didn't).
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
No, you are a little bit mixed up as to the history.
l
The Basic Set was around the same time as AD&D. I'm pretty sure it actually came out after AD&D, at least after the AD&D Player's Handbook.
The original was a set of very poorly edited, poorly organized books. You can see pictures and read about them here, if you like:
http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/d_and_d.htm
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
...saying what should have been obvious to everyone.
This guy has no clue about RPGs (computer or otherwise). He doesn't know the history of roleplaying games. He doesn't understand Gygax's contribution. He uses buzzwords to hint at computer knowledge, but uses them in such a nonsensical manner as to suggest he's trying to get revenge on geeks for the jokes they've played on social science journals.
I mean, look at this quote:
What the heck does that MEAN? I mean, know a little about client-server architectures (having written an engine designed to power a server for a game which uses such an architecture) and I have no idea what he means by "server client." All clients have to have a server, but no client is a server. So "server client" is either redundant or contradictory. And in what sense is Temple of Elemental Evil a client? I thought it was a stand-alone CRPG which played on your home computer. And, even if it was a client in some sense, what would client-ness have to do with intepreting rules. Every time I have tried to port an RPG from paper to computer (quite a few times, both successfully and unsuccessfully since I first tried it with Traveller in 1979), "intepreting rules" was the job of the programmer. And how would that lead to "standards violations" from any standpoint, let alone a programming standpoint?
Please...
The subject of this article is of intense interest to me. As I said, I have been facing the issues of porting RPG rules to computers since 1979. My first RPG was published by a major publisher in 1982. I've been playing CRPGs since they first came out. I want an intelligent article to be written on the subject so we can all discuss something that is obviously of interest to many of us. But this is not that article.
The author makes some statements about Troika's development of ToEE. Maybe we could learn something from some of them. But how can we assume they have anything to do with the game's actual development, when they're surrounded by pure gibberish? What's his source for this inside information about the development? (Assuming we can figure out what is being said among all the buzzwords. I'm not even going to try to figure it out until I have some reason to believe it would be worth trying.)
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
AD&D covered everything, all the way. D&D handheld you into it- the first three levels, everything was indoors. The next set- the blue box Expert set- was I think for 4 through 8 and introduced wilderness adventures. Then the Companion Set- green box- dealt with owning castles and waging big battles and shit like that, went up to (again, I think) 12. Master Set was next, and finally, Immortal Rules, where you got to become a God. I think that's all of them. Honestly, I just wrote this post to see if I could remember them all. Christ, I'm a nerd.
My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.
Isn't that kind of the point of having a computer to do it for you?
...of D&D. Except that Basic D&D wasn't called "basic" until after AD&D came out (for the same reason 1st Edition AD&D wasn't called that until 2nd edition came out and for the same reason that people in 1920 didn't talk about "the First World War"). As I recall, the original was not boxed until later. But I could be wrong about that since it was boxed when I first bought it.
The guy who wrote the article acts like he knows all about how D&D developed, but makes several statements which make it clear he doesn't know this chronology.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
It is *COLLEGE* paintball. It's as close as engineers can get to actually shooting fratboys.
paintball
There are a few howlers in the D&D game mechanics. Note: I haven't seen Third Edition yet.
0) You are a 12th level Fighter being marched down a corridor, no armor, your arms bound behind your back, and four men with crossbows are guarding you. So you run for it. Why not? After all, you have almost 100 hit points, and a crossbow does something like 1d6+1 and is slow to reload besides. Sure, we don't want our game to be like the real world, but should there be no chance that they can kill you?
D&D should have critical hits, or "impale" rules like Runequest, or something.
1) A typical town person has 1 hit point. 1 hit point is the smallest amount of damage you can do. Any blow with a sword will kill a town person. Okay. But also, say, a house cat: three attacks, claw/claw/bite, any one can kill a town person.
2) A 1st level mage is incredibly easy to kill, and only has one spell per day, and that one spell might even be something lame like Burning Hands. A 20th level mage, on the other hand, has so much firepower as to render the rest of the party irrelevant. This is overall considered to be balanced?
It would be better if 1st level mage characters were a bit stronger, and 20th level mage characters were a lot weaker.
I could name other things, but that's plenty.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
That's so new school man. Even if we were lucky enough to have a ball to play with, everyone always rolled a 1!
paintball
Kuro5hin is a site very similar to ./ ,in the fact that a lot of the content is the discussion of an article. So a ./ discussion on a K5 article seem a bit like re-inventing the wheel.
es
with your imagination
which was teh entire point of the game, which was not to be told how it was but to make it up as you went along.
i personally wrote my own rpgs, i made hybrid games, i had Middle Earth Smaug style dragons in D&D environments as PCs, i made an airplane based rpg based on teh cartoon Tailspin etc etc etc
Use your imagination or don't *ROLE* play
i was always the gamemaster and the first rule of any good gamemaster in any game (and i've played nearly all of them) is flexibility, if the rule sucks DONT USE IT; did ANYONE use encumberance rules in D&D? hell no it's insane
but everyone and their mother wants a perfect 20, the dice rolls added the chance, our minds added the magic, the story unfolded and everyone had fun
i haven't played for 10 years myself but watching you bitch about a rule that is as easy to break as simply not following it and then saying that the game doesn't have flexibility built in shows to me that you have absolutely no concept of what the opint of the game was to begin with.
Around 1980 or so is when I got into D&D...but moved on from there to other game systems.
I just didn't like the rule set for D&D...not even the d20 system. I mean, d20 is certainly an improvement, but I just got into other game systems.
I remember me and my friends playing a LOT of the Hero game systems like "Danger International" and "Fantasy Hero". These were basically a skeletal system that could be adapted pretty easily.
But by far my favorite game and game system was "Call of Cthulhu". I liked that skills were based on percentages. I liked the way that your skill percentage went up on the skills you used etc. And of course not to mention the very well written modules for the game itself.
We played a lot of games, but not D&D (or more specifically AD&D...back when it was called that).
We played these the most:
1. Call of Cthulhu
2. Danger International
3. Fantasy Hero
4. Morrow Project
5. Paranoia
6. Starfleet Battles
Ah...but it's been like 14 years since I've played anything. But we had a blast...never really took anything seriously and just had a great time.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Totally agree with your point here, but raised one question for me..
Would these types of games be easier to prduce were gamers less demanding of sophisticated graphics and dialogue?.
Something that produces text based storylines and conversation with a modern grpahical front end for enrything else would surely be easier to customize. People can "say" things from a large base of phrases, and the elimination of a character actor for each NPC would make this much less work.
im sure this could be worded better, but you get what i mean
bah!*@%!
i bought this game and found it completely unplayable, from both a technical point of view, and an enjoyment point of view. Everything about this game is/was flawed.
even the mouse cursor was badly implemented. combat sucked, and monsters even spawned in inaccessible places, leaving combat-mode permanently on. Ths only way to get out of this was to reload a savegame.
i've played all the black isle and Bioware D&D games and they've all been excellent.
Most of the author's gripes were about storyline or AI. He was griping about PnP games on the computer when his points were really about a specific implementation.
I will retort by bringing up NWN. I DM a weekly group and many of these same people I have played PnP with over the decades.
AI- AI is a general computer game problem. What does the ogre do when you cast a certain spell? Generally this is always scripted and the AI is only as good as its code. The Meld into Stone exploit mentioned by the author is an AI exploit. An AI exploit is an AI exploit; it does not matter if it is on CivIII, a FPS or CRPG. The standard AI in nwn is not the smartest, but it IS replaceable. The individual scripts that fire on various events (when a NPC perceives another creature, when attacked, etc) can be tweaked or replaced. There are several user created AI systems available and some are quite good. If it bothers you that the ogre is still focused on the cleric, check at the end of a combat round to see if he is under the effect of Meld into Stone. If so, go after the fireballing mage instead. Oh and if a DM is possessing the ogre, he will probably flatten the mage first in any case.
Stroyline? Come on! Creating a quest is like writing dialog for a play, except that the story can branch because of whatever. If the creators of TOEE did not do this well, it is because they did not do this well. The BG series did this well. NWN's expansions did this well. There are numerous modules available for NWN that do this well. Then again, in any story without a GM, it is impossible to vary from the story in any meaningful way. I recall playing a neutral good ranger in BG2. On returning from the underdark with the Githyanki sword in my possession, I was confronted by the Githyanki seeking its return. The verbal exchange turned into a fight and fretty soon the area-of-effect spells were flying. Mind you this happened in the promenade district and several bystanders were killed by Githyanki AOE spells. This bothered my because my "good" character had chosen to fight to keep the nice sword despite the fact that innocents would die in the process. I was not penalized as the designers did not think of this situation beforehand. A good GM would have shifted me toward evil for putting personal gain before the lives of innocents. Any non-linear story will have such bugs because the designers will not be able to think of and script for every possible situation.
That is what a good GM is for.
Further, while it would be nice to think that the mechanics under the hood can make or break a game (because it would mean the work of game-system designers is really that damn important...), the reality is that it's the ability and work of the game designers. KotR demonstrates that a d20-controlled video game can be stellar. And there are other examples that prove that d20-controlled video game suck. It has next-to-nothing to do with the use of the d20 System as the engine for the game and everything to do with the skill of the game designers.
D&D was actually created by some guy named Dave Arneson apparently.
homepage: http://www.castleblackmoor.com/
The article states that the main base for D&D wasn't Tolkien, but actually was Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth.
And since Tolkien was the basis for Vance, that makes it doubly the basis for D&D. All swords & socercy scifi/fantasy is Tolkien-derived, to some extent.
D&D elements originated by Tolkien:
A party of multiple professions (like fighter, ranger, thief, and wizard) and mixed races (human, dwarf, elf) travels through wilderness and underground mazes fighting off hordes of minor monsters (and the occasional greater one which is only vulnerable to magic weapons). They solve word-puzzles to open locked doors, drink potions to restore their health, and occasionally find magical treasure that resizes itself to fit the wearer.
D&D elements originated by Vance:
Magic users forget spells upon casting and are helpless until "rememorization". (Coincidentally, one of the lamest parts of the original D&D system)
the problem is that I fucking hate goths. WW games (specifically Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension) are the archetypal goth-games.
:)
I want a game which doesn't come with a naff prefab theme and wack gothique iconography. Fuck all that. I want a game I can tune to my requirements. Another reason I write my own.
Yeah, go on, flame my goth-hatin' arse
L
Computer game companies have the same problems as large scale "living games" in that the DM no longer can police the players effectively. I've played a good deal of living arcanis and living grayhalk and the per-written modules suffer from all the same symptoms as computer games. Forced linearity, plot repetition, and a lack of personal involvement of the players in the plot. (The most notable exception is the Baulders Gate series.) The person running the pre-written module has about as much influence over the story line as the computer, none. Even being a hard core "role player" I found myself wishing for combat so I could do something to effect plot.
.. *sigh* no one is even going to pay me to run a good game.
I knew too much about the game system to play NWN. I built a character that killed everything in about one hit. It wasn't much fun to play after that. The plot came down to "get this item and bring it back". I'm not purely an acquisition of power motivated gamer so I lost interest.
I'm waiting for a game that can bring me the "other half" of the RPG experience. A non-linear, character driven system that focuses on how well you play your character, as opposed to how many combats you survived. Powerful characters should only be played by people who can handle them. Unfortunately when time is the only factor to acquisition of power you find a group of very powerful characters played by people not equipped to handle the responsibility and the game breaks, horribly. This is true for any version of D&D, Everquest, "Living" games and even the Camarilla.
How about a MMORPG that employs people to be real dungeon masters? Yeah, thats going to happen
Advanced D&D -- more rules and more money to buy the rules (gawd help you if you were the DM -- ya needed to have ALL of this). Simple enough for ya?
Ugh. That is a simply fallacy that the publishers want people to think. I have DM'd since I was 14 (16 years) with very little money. Even today, now playing D&D 3rd Ed, I use the DM's Guide, Player's Guide, and MM I & II. That's it. The rest comes from my imagination and a little elbow work in creating my own content, monsters, and such. For me, at least, that is the fun of being a DM. I like to devise the settings and threats, and watch how the players handle it within their character's abilities. Sometimes, I am suprised by their own creativity in solving problems. We have a wonderful balance of actual role-playing (sometimes, whole sessions dealing with a major npc) and action.
All the books in the world is not going to help that.
/. linking to k5? ... worlds ... colliding...
D&D 3E (and 3.5E) have come a LONG way from their humble roots, and for the most part have fixed every stupid-ass idea to choke the genre except hit points.
This is an artificial mechanic that never worked well. Never. Green Ronin, for their Mutants and Masterminds game (a superhero d20 game) eliminated hit points in favor of a "Damage Save": if you make the save (like any other save) you take no damage, fail and take damage in various levels.
This totally fixed the HP problem, and works well for a superhero system--the problem lies in taking that idea (simple as it seems) and applying that mechanic to the fantasy element. The result is usually characters dying faster than before--which may even be more "real to life".
Levels, to an extent, are also broken; but they're such a mainstay of the genre that eliminating them from D&D altogether would be damn-near impossible--and unwarranted. Such a thing could kill the player-base. Players like levels, it's almost like dick size to them.
For a MMORPG how they handle these two things is key. The rules weren't written for computers at all--they were written for a GM and players. No matter how many CPU cycles you put into it, a computer will never "out imagine" a human. Thus you get canned effects and hard-coded plot points that need to be met.
I'm kind of amazed that it works at all, actually.
How are Werewolf and Mage archtypal goth games?
Wraith and Vampire, yes, very clearly. Werewolf is a game for eco-freaks and Mage is a game for pretentious pseudo-intellectual f***-heads who read the Philosophy of the Matrix and talk about the I Ching.
Hunter is for DnD players who want to kill White Wolf playing goths and spend half the game buying guns and explosives. Demon is for Kevin Smith fans. Changeling is for 40 year old overweight virginal women who cast love spells and wear gossimer wings.
If you're going to stereotype, get them right.
Is that D&D has many rules and abilities that are activated or deactivated on a very short time scale, ie seconds. Even in fast running PNP game, you have minutes to think about what you'll be doing in each 6 seconds.
In a computer game, 6 seconds is 6 seconds, and there's no way that a well designed character can make good use of his various abilities and feats.
This article was very poorly written and not very well thought out. If the author did have useful points to make, they were lost in their inability to utilize the written word to convey them.
> Most of the author's gripes were about storyline or AI.
I'm the author of the k5 article, and I will say that my problems with TOEE are rules based problems leading to systemic bugs. The d20 rules are too subjective, and as a result, an objective use of them failed the game. Without a DM to ref the gameplay, TOEE suffers from a lot of leftover problems from implementing the d20 system. Most of the bugs in the game are there as a result of the rules and the needed programming to sustain the rules.
Furthermore, I pointed out in the article that these problems come from a plethora of complications as a result of using d20; the publishers were expecting miracles, the designers were playing whack-the-mole with bugs, and the system was very difficult to get under control.
The story module that this game was built on was likely one of the better elements of the game, IMHO, because it was a classic module for Greyhawk, and it's indeed a very fun world to play in. The story of the game could have been better implemented, but I maintain, and I maintained in the article, that the designers were likely too busy working on problems with d20 to have time to work on the more abstract elements of the game. You don't have time to tell a great story if you are too busy doing other things.
The article is really just bashing the implementation of the D20 3.5 SRD in TOEE. It then tries to generalize to all CRPGs based on a review of one game. Sorry, but that doesn't cut it with me.
I really think that the best implementation of D20 on a computer is Bioware's Neverwinter Nights. It does a good enough job of implementing the rules and is still playable.
What makes NWN so great is the toolset that allows you to create your modules, set up servers, and play with other people. The also have a DM client that allows you to play online with a human DM. This is the closest you are going to get right now to a tabletop RPG on a computer.
NWN has become my RPG fix. Since I moved to MA from KY in 2002, I've not found anyone in my area that plays RPGs, so I started playing NWN online with other people. It's great fun.
I do think that for a single player computer gaming experience, the D20 SRD is a bad choice. Bioware's implementation is as good as it gets, but single player is just so boring. I much prefer playing with others online.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
was Shadowrun's style of "character has this, so lets see what they can do".
:), and Street Samurai (expensive thug), but I also played a physical adept (think warrior-monk but bigger and faster) and that troll was my longest played character, and thanks to a good GM he was well positioned to flow "naturally" in the story without disturbing the other players who liked to do their own thing.
.50 sniper rifle) on another troll phys adept, who just happened to have "missile grab" or whatever it was called.
I never got into that whole Levels thing from D&D and similar RPG's because it never felt "intuitive" to me.
For example, D&D's maximum number of spells cast per day per level thing. Why? If I'm just lighting a cigarette with a tiny fire spell, why should that mean I can't cast jack for the rest of the day?
I much prefered Shadowrun's method of differentiating between "Mental" and "Physical" spells, and then rolling twice. Once to see if the spell had the desired affect - light up a room, shield a companion, or incinerate an enemy - and then you'd roll again to see how much the spell affected the caster, with him using his mental prowess to avoid being fatigued or damaged by the after effects of his own magic.
This system worked out great for various adventures, and it meant that once in a while a newbie player character who just got caught in a bad situation could pull off one "do or die" attempt at casting a D&D style level 20 spell, and possibly get away with it, or if a really high level character was fatigued from a strenuous Run, it would show in his lack of ability to do stuff as the day progressed.
I think it made for a more realistic style of gameplay, and let the players feel that even if they were newbies, they could still participate in a session with more experienced players.
I especially liked Shadowrun's basic XP system. If you want to improve a skill, use it. No uping your firearms skills if all you did was whack people with your katana, or drive all day.
I also liked the relationship between character add-ons. The whole "Essence" deal was good if you wanted to create a character that used "cyberware" and still play with magic. Too much tech, and you suffer a reduced magic ability, but you could improve this over time as your character gained XP's for utilising their magical skills and building their mental abilities.
I only played one magic user while I played Shadowrun, opting for the more techy style Decker (like a hacker but wierder
We had some humurous, to us, situations thanks to the GM adjusting the game as our chars grew, like when my phys adept tried to use a box and arrow (bow's draw comparable to char's strength - I got more piercing damage than a
Fired the bow, GM says "With your heightened senses he seems to stand stock still, as though ready (roll dice) and suddenly catches the arrow."
I said "Motherfucker!?" and rolled to see if I can leap the barricade I was ducked behind, run over in about 5 turns, and thump the other phys adept.
Best of all with Shadowrun you only needed one book, the main rules, and a fairly imaginitive GM to play, and the few expansion books - for comp tech, body tech, magic, additional pc's and npc's - were pretty detailed and very well laid out - last time I looked anyway.
[Apologies to current SR players for any mistakes. I haven't picked up a char sheet in about 9 years.]
ADDRESSING THE PROBLEMS!
"The rule, it seems, is that when a monster identifies a target, the monster will stick with the target until death. Now if it were me, and some guy is standing there like a statue, I would ignore him."
[[[I am familiar of no rule in the D20 system that says a monster has to attack the same person repeatedly, nor that the monster has to only attack on individual. Hmm...in fact, I've fought creatures that have attacked myself and several companions in a single round. Dragons are a good example....
No...this is an attempt at an excuse for poor AI logic. A simple flag would have resolved this problem. "IsTargetCurrentlyAttackable". If equal "1" continue attack. If equal "0" select new target. Problem resolved. Has no relation to "D20" or "RPG"...was simply a programmer caught in a failure to cover all the scenarios. Yes, that is a challenge. With a PnP-RPG the GM can respond dynamically where as in a PC-RPG all such responses must be coded in the AI. But hey, that's why it's called "AI" or "Artificial Intelligence".
]]]
"This is the first chip against TOEE's use of d20; what would it take to have a mini-quest given to each class/alignment suited for both these vars?"
[[[Not too much...could simply be an option of "raiding the nearby village for $$$" or "defending nearby village from raiders". Do you lead the rampaging greedy hordes or do you lead the peasants defending the farm. Which ever side you choose (based on alignment...which adjusts based on actions) determines which side you lead. Now was that so hard?]]]
"Considering, there are nine (9) possible alignments and eleven (11) classes that you can start out with, you can now see ninety-nine possible story threads"
[[[I disagree....as it doesn't matter WHAT a character's chosen alignment is, rather, their actions should affect alignment (per D20 rules). There really are only a few distinctions to affect story plot. "Good, Evil, Neutral". Are you helping, destroying, or staying uninvolved unless it affects you directly. Someone passing up many quest opportunities would move to a neutral state. One doing evil or greedy tasks would move to evil alignment. And one being helpful = good. That's not a giant big deal. KOTOR does this easily with their Darkside/Lightside. I don't see this as an issue. The other end of the spectrum (Chaotic/Lawful). Simply goes to whether you are dependent of a code or not. Thief's honor (example: "Memba is a member of the thieves guild...picking her pocket would violate the thief's code of honor." Doing so would move you from a lawful to a chaotic state. The state really should have minimal affect on plot other than interaction and perhaps the benefits one might receive. If you pick pocket you find a "journeyman lockpick" if you had just talked to "Memba" she'd have given you the pick. I see this as more whining.]]]
"Scroll Bugs and a Solution"
[[[Not quite getting what he's trying to say? *shrug*]]]
"The first premise of this new system is that all things are created equal. Effects are equal to all other effects of the same level, and such effects are standardized to be simple to adapt to CRPG or PPRPG."
[[[Never going to happen....because a creative person will find an time to use said effect when it is most helpful. Example: freeze monster...nice effect. But in a canyon, freezing the monster in a narrow path is much more effective when it blocks the 5 other monsters behind it. Lob grenade...thunderstones.]]]
BENEFITS AND EXAMPLES:
First off, Morrorwind is an amazing example of a game based on what PnP-RPG'ers are used to. Stats, construction, growth, etc. Now for some the slowth growth at first (very MUD-like in that manner) was too much for the casual Comp-RPGer. But a lot of die-hards loved the depth of that game.
Star Wars: KOTOR uses the D20 system and seems to do so quite well. Furthermore, it was very easy for me to get used to as I was familiar with the D20 system (D&D, Wheel of Time...but not SW). It wor
Thereare a few problems with the article. First, the writing:
...The result is a good experience, with beautiful environs and general ease-of-use, and all types of cubism present in Arcanum are missing from TOEE; therefore, any problems are not graphical in TOEE, IMHO.
The problems experienced by TOEE users might be best described as systemic, rules based problems that were not developed by Troika, but by RPG rules publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC), a bastardized version of what TSR used to be in its hey-day, prior to the removal of a very important figure from the company: The Father of RPG, Gary Gygax, first created Dungeons & Dragons with a bunch of people who hung out with him regularly, and it was through this intensive and subjective process that the rules of all future video games were spawned.
Huh? Nice sentence.
Second, his comment about "Meld into Stone" isn't a fundamental flaw in crpg systems using d20, it's nothing more than a bug in prioritization during combat for the AI. BFD.
(And, his experience with P&P RPGs is pretty freakin' sad if the only way his DM would resolve such a use of the spell would be to whack them with a 50d6 lightning bolt; I'd say his P&P weren't all that bug free either...)
He's barely coherent in much of his commentary, such as this paragraph: Right away, TOEE is behind the eight ball in terms of fluidity; the publisher must be held accountable for this, as publishers set the cycles of development in terms of funding and maximum resource allocation into projects. While some would say that developers determine scheduling, I am a firm believer that the market and external factors truly determine development cycle. Atari is an arcade games manufacturer, and therefore they must have thought in terms of the arcade lifecycle, and not what Troika was going for, which was the conversion of PPRPG into CRPG (something that could have worked if enough time and money was devoted).
Again, HUH? WTF are you SAYING?
I gave up reading it about halfway through, frankly. The guy can barely put two words together to convey a thought.
The problems with d20 as a CRPG ruleset are many and varied. The problems with d20 rules THEMSELVES are many and varied.
This article really illuminates nothing, and isn't anything more than a rant about someone who was disappointed with their CRPG purchase. So?
-Styopa
When we started out, we would always screw up drawing our map. Out of frustration, our DM would pull the sheet of graph paper over to him and start correcting our mistakes. If we did this enough, inevitably it would go like this:
"...and this wall goes five blocks here to the secret door... shit!"
But the greatest was in a large castle where we got to the treasure room pretty quickly (this was intentional) and saw a pile of loot. It was at the end of a hallway. Problem was there was a large holes in the ceiling and floor of the hallway, with about a 250mph wind whipping through it. The story was some crap about the castle's ventilation system. He was trying to tease us with the view to get us to spend a month trekking through the castle. Well, after getting pissed off, someone in our group realized we had an enlarging potion (or spell or something), and got the bright idea to cast it on our paladin's shield as he threw it over the hole. The shield expanded, capped the hole, and proceeded to help ourselves. We eventually negotiated with the DM for half the loot, since he threatened to make us spend the next six months carrying it all the way back to town.
The difference between a true PnP game of AD&D and the computerized experience of a D&D themed game can be slight or immense depending on the skill of you RL GM compared to the auto-scripted content of a computerized world.
A bad/unimaginative GM is little better, or possibly WORSE than online or computerized gaming environments. In contrast a talented GM will bend the adventure to fit the individual characters involved.
A good GM is many things, including an Actor, Story teller, statistician, and above all else a quick-thinker. Players like to try and out-smart the GM and a good one will do their best to limit how successful their players will be, preferably in humorous ways.
The real trick is the Story-telling apect. A good DM makes you believe you're actually in another world. That suspension of disbelief is only maintainable if the number crunching is done quickly and with as little distraction to the players as possible.
Computational talk should be limited to "Roll for Perception", or "Roll to hit" and even then it helps to not get too into the numbers. A good GM hears your roll and paints a picture of the action it caused.
Third edition fixes pretty much all of that, along with about a million other rules complaints I could make about 2e.
I'm not going to claim 3e/3.5e is perfect, but it's pretty good. I'd eventually gotten tired of all of the fundamental flaws in 2e and given up on it, and it took friends of mine a while to coax me to give 3e a chance and play it. After that, I couldn't believe we had played 2e for so long -- there are just so many rules changes that not only make the rule much simpler and easier to understand, but also just plain better. I spent the first few times playing 3e saying "Why didn't we ever think of doing it that way?" about a million times.
Give it a try sometime, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Like anything else, I think it's easier to see its strengths and weaknesses in play rather than simply by reading the rulebooks.
One of the major issues that I have with CRPGs is that ultimately, regardless of how good the AI in a game is, you are still fundamentally limited in the possibilities for game play. It's like a big "Choose Your Own Adventure Book". Maybe every so often you flip a coin to choose the next page, or maybe there are so many paths that you can't enumerate them all before you just get bored, but your still limited.
I contrast this to pen and paper games like D&D or Palladium (my fav fantasy). You are limited by the creativity of the GM, and the limits of your belief in human free will (and how long the pizza lasts). It's always been the unexpected turns of other players that makes these games fun to play.
Is the author of that article trying to say that God only has 50 hit dice? That's not many for God.
First off "The Temple of Elemental Evil" is not a very good example of a CRPG. It's bug ridden and to put it simply it's "NO FUN". Their whole selling point was the use of the D&D rule set. If this is what a CRPG is like using the D&D rule set then I do not want to play. The author mentioned "standardization" of character classes which is a horrible idea. A game where every class of character levels up at exactly the same time with exactly the same benefits gained (same number of experience etc..) would become extremely boring quickly. A magician should be harder to level up because of the fact that at high levels they are far superior to other types of characters (ie. a rogue or ranger). Working hard to grow your character in a CRPG is one ot the things that makes it like PPRPGs. You learn to love your character from his traits to his personality. As far as getting the true "story telling" and "openness" of a PPRPG in a CRPG is impossible. The lack of being able to grow the world "around the characters" within that world make it impossible. However it is very possible within an MMORPG. For example I play The Eternal City (www.skotos.net). In this MUD as I'll call it, the GM's are constantly adding to the game world. They add new skills and new areas. They have added things such as "hunters that can fish and trap" to "Tailors that can create all kinds of custom clothing". These are things that your character can learn to do , or they can simply buy required furs or clothing from another character that is a hunter or tailor. They have added things such as the coliseum where they hold GM led events such as trials to determine the fate of criminals to the "Auction House" where you can take your rare and/or common goods and hold public auctions. You can even buy parchment, quill and ink and if you are "literate" you can write up and post your auction or other event in public places such as INNS. My point is that these things have "been built around" the players. The things that can be built within TEC are infinate and the same is true for other MMORPGs. However in a CRPG about the best you can hope for is an expansion that adds some more skill sets, character classes, mosters, dungeons etc... Bottom line is that to try to reproduce PPRPG options in a "boxed for the shelf" CRPG is like trying to squeeze an elephant into a sardine can. It's not going to happen.
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
A good roleplaying system has three fundamental things it wants to achieve.
1. Simplicity. Simple enough that users can anticipate the results of their choices. If I use the +2 sword of summoning vs. the 20% magic resistance fire sword, I as a user will know how this choice will effect my combat results.
2. Faithfulness to the genre (this is sometimes construed to mean "consistent with reality" or "known facts"). My large sword should hit less often but with more damage than my dagger.
3. Balanced (multiple different strategies to create a successful outcome). An elvish druid is a fun and successful character to play as a Ogre barbarian fighter.
These three things are often fiercely in contention.
As an example, D&D does one thing that gives it both a huge advantage and liability compared to most other gaming systems. All players in a party can simultaneously roll to hit. All defensive rules are precomputed to the point that the attackers can just roll to hit and roll their damage. This makes D&D game play lightning in speed compared to a lot of other systems. However, it seriously impairs believability of results. Parrying, dodging, tumbling, grabbing, and pinning all tend to be rare. It takes a lot of the dynamic out of the fight.
As another example, some gaming systems make you roll to determine which precise parts of the body you hit, what types of effects your defensive maneuver and armor had on the attack, make you track how much you are bleeding (and from what body location). They will also decide how much stamina you still have for the fight either in courage or physical awareness. In these gaming systems, there is usually a clear best weapon, best armor, best attack and defense strategy, and best type of racial or profession choice for characters. Also, it can be very difficult for players to figure out what is happening during a fight and how their choices impact the results of the fight. These systems are faithful to reality at the expense of other game play.
One more example is how experience is earned and used. Do characters only get experience when they do the big thing (kill a monster, cast a spell in combat), or can they get experience just "practicing"? Do they get better incrementally or are there "level" jumps? If you try to do the realistic thing here, you are usually choosing the more dull and messily complicated solution.
My favorite pet peeve of all roleplaying systems I have ever played is the lack of balance. In D&D, mages start out weak and puny and then are like gods compared to other characters at higher levels (as long as they have a good set of high level warriors to act as bodyguards, thieves to do the dangerous bits of exploration, and clerics to act as hit point regeneration reservoirs).
In practically every roleplaying system certain characters, certain spells, certain skills, certain weapons, certain stragegies are clearly superior to most other choices. It is a rare game that is truly balanced. Most games cheat by making certain skills only available to certain characters and then making those skills required for success of the party. In those games, some people always have to "sacrifice" and choose to be the non combat oriented healing cleric.
What I got out of the article is, "No fair, they don't design pen and paper RPG rules with computer play in mind!"
To my thinking, it's a pen and paper RPG game... why does it have to work exactly the same on a computer at all? I mean it's not like the rules are actually hard and fast "you MUST do EXACTLY as the DM/Players guides say."
Right in the book, it says they are only suggestions, guidelines. Really, what (to me) makes a great roleplaying session is the departure from those rules in subtle ways that makes the game more personalized and just a better story. After all, that is what Role Playing is about, making a story about "what if". It's really hard to make departures like that on a computer that's only programmed with two or three responses to any given choice in an RPG.
I do agree with the author's cynicism of WotC though, I haven't liked that company since they screwed up Magic: The Gathering by releasing version after version after version, without thought to gameplay, or at least not much.
Overall, though, I don't think that you can truly make a "proper" RPG on a computer, because of that lack of human element. It's fun to play computer games, and it's fun to roleplay, but I think that the pen and paper RPG's are better, because in the end you make a better story, and you actually have interaction with People, in Real Life, not with someone on the other end of a keyboard...
but what do I know, I only play the games, I don't make them.
If you can read this, you are most likely close enough.
You want to watch that, there are certain exclusions with d20 regarding "Interactive Games"
/ 20 040123i
The way I read it is you can use the rules, but you cant call it d20 or reference d20 - but i'm not a lawyer.
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/oglfaq
Without needing to register with ifilms and dealing with all that crap, go here instead and just download the .avi, or if you're really lazy then just direct download SummonerGeeks.avi this way.
It's taking on a role enacting things you don't normally do
That definition applies to, like, 90% of all games. It would apply to all FP games (from DOOM, to Halo, to Spliter Cell); it would apply to all sports games (if you don't play those games in RL); basically it applies to pretty much everything, except puzzle games and such. And, yes, technically all these games (e.g. Halo, etc..) are "role-playing", but they aren't RPGs. And the parent poster's defition: 'Roleplaying is taking all the good and the bad of a character and making due with it' is extremely narrow. That's a part of role-playing, but it's not the defintion.
A distinction needs to be made between 'role-playing' and the RPG genre. People can have differing opinions about what constitutes 'role'playing', but the defintion of the RPG genre is a lot more well established. In the RPG genre there are two extremes. On one side are the adventure games (e.g. Sierra King's Quest), and on the other side are the hack-and-slash games (e.g. Diablo). What do these games have in common? Uh.. nothing. Currently the RPG label is applied to everything that falls somewhere between those two. Personally, I think there should be three separate genres here, one for each of the extremes and one for the middle (when a game contains both elements). Those divisions sortof exist today ('Adventure RPG', 'Hack-and-Slash RPG), but everybody always uses the term RPG to refer to one or all of them.
People shouldn't get all riled up if a game labeled an 'RPG' doesn't have enough role-playing elements for thier taste. The RPG genre and the defintion of 'role-playing' diverged a long time ago.
Aw crap, ninjas!
While Tolkien contributed a lot of the mythos, I've seen arguments which make sense to me that a lot of the style of the world was drawn from Fritz Leiber's Nehwon tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. *shrug* I guess part of it depends on whether you play the "epic heroes" or the "people surviving and living their lives" type of campaign.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
While the k5 article was almost incoherent. I've often felt that game designers were making mistakes in trying to adapt PnP rules to CRPGs. But more for the simple reason that different game mediums have different design requirements, strengths and limitations. And a set of rules designed for one medium will obviously struggle in another. For example, try to make a card game out of the Monopoly rules.
The game-rule parts of CRPGs generally work much better if the designers create a whole new system which plays to the strengths of CRPGs. (That's not to say that the game will necessarily be better, there are more factors to a game than just the rule systems.)
I'm the author of the article at k5, and I just wanted to ask you a few questions and respond to your comment:
> Once anyone focuses more on making the RPG compliant so that the numbers balance out, they've lost the point of the game altogether.
The compliance that I'm talking about has nothing to do with stats; it's compliance of concepts to enable better programming. This compliance is stats-based, but it's also hearted in the role playing experience.
The best games I've played were from first to third level, when the whole backstory is focused on, and the character is being melded into being. The story is what I focus on when I DM, and I often simplify results and stats in order to achieve a faster pace of decision making. Role playing is about the player's decisions and how they change the story.
It's not that P&P RPG-rules are not suited to CRPGs, its D20 specifically.
A system which consists of more exceptions than rules is just not suited for that (and IMHO also not suited for Pen & Paper).
Take RuneQuest for example: Clear, elegant rules. Everything adheres to the standard, a dragon is described by the same physics as a human. This is the kind of rules you want. No levels even, you get better in what you do by doing it, so some artificial caps aren't needed, since the best fighter can still fall.
FallOut is very near RuneQuest, in terms of game-mechanics, btw.
--
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
This article really illuminates nothing, and isn't anything more than a rant about someone who was disappointed with their CRPG purchase. So?
Actually, this article seems to be a push for his RPG Standards Compliance system.
This article is a bait-like makteting device masquarading as an analysis.
It's a good move to get the visibility needed.
I could be wrong, but it smells like it.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
ED: You see a well-groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo.
ERIC: A gazebo? What color is it?
ED: (Pause) It's white, Eric.
ERIC: How far away is it?
ED: About 50 yards.
ERIC: How big is it?
ED: (Pause) It's about 30 feet across, 15 feet high, with a pointed top.
ERIC: I use my sword to detect whether it's good.
ED: It's not good, Eric. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Pause) I call out to it.
ED: It won't answer. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Pause) I sheathe my sword and draw my bow and arrows. Does it respond in any way?
ED: No, Eric. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: I shoot it with my bow (rolls to hit). What happened?
ED: There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it.
ERIC: (Pause) Wasn't it wounded?
ED: Of course not, Eric! It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Whimper) But that was a plus-three arrow!
ED: It's a gazebo, Eric, a gazebo! If you really want to try to destroy it, you could try to chop it with an axe, I suppose, or you could try to burn it, but I don't know why anybody would even try. It's a @#%$*& gazebo!
ERIC: (Long pause - he has no axe or fire spells) I run away.
ED: (Thoroughly frustrated) It's too late. You've awakened the gazebo, and it catches you and eats you.
ERIC: (Reaching for his dice) Maybe I'll roll up a fire-using mage so I can avenge my paladin...
Full story here
If you play a simple fighter char with 3 weapons the most charts you will most likely ever see is 3 one for each of your weapons. Mage/cleric types need one or 2 charts for each of their spell lists and 1 for each different weapon / element thats it. we joke about it but there really are not that many charts or rules.
...
Funny, when I play a character in BESM, FUDGE, or any of the diceless games that my group enjoys, we don't need ANY charts. It seems that we get about role-playing just fine without them. As a bonus, WE get to describe what we happens in combat rather than let some crit table determine how our attacks played out for us.
Then again, we don't play games where fighting on stairs requires a move & maneuver check with reference to a difficulty table followed by a falling damage table check if you fail, nor games that have hygene checks to see if you've gotten sick from not bathing on a journey, nor games that come with 20+ pages of critical damage tables and seperate full-page tables for half your skills. "Rollmaster" is an abomination that plays more like a flowchart than an RPG if actually played by the rules, and if you're not playing by the rules, then why not get something that plays faster and cleaner?
Want charts and rules
Who does? I'll never understand people who revel in this sort of mathematical minutae and call it a game.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
...I was probably confused about it at the time. Now I've remembered my confusion instead of the accurate version. Ah, the travails of being an old man.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
...for guessing who I am.
I'm nobody particularly famous. (So, it's probably not worth trying to figure out.)
It was a pen-and-paper RPG, all too many of which were published about that time. (Although we didn't call them that back then.)
An equally-unknown-at-the-time artist named Warren Specter once illustrated a magazine article I wrote.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
> It was a LOT more black and white -- Lawful Neutral and Evil. Not to note
> that this makes no sense from a legitimate scale.
Of course it makes no sense - you've remembered it incorrectly.
The alignments in D&D were Lawful, Neutral, and CHAOTIC (not Evil), and the primary struggle was order/chaos.
> Classes were limited...and levels were limited to a ceiling of around 20.
This is not true for D&D. For the red boxed set you mention, there were no rules above level THREE. (Further boxed sets expanded that to 14, then 25, then 36, then various levels of immortality, but that goes rather beyond the basic set you're talking about.)
This is also not true for AD&D - there were no explicit level limits (beyond racial ones), and there was even an adventure published for 100th-level characters.
> Fuck, the last time I looked at AD&D, the books had gotten so out of hand...
That you had exactly the same PHB, DMG, and MM that you'd always used, ignoring the new books unless you felt they'd add something to your experience?
Nobody ever held a gun to my head and forced me to use any books outside the core ones. Perhaps your experience differed.
Your rant is purely subjective, with very little objective merit (and I say this as a solid fan of original D&D - vive le boxed sets! vive le Gazetteers!!). By the time you add in the Expert, Companion, and Masters sets to get high-level rules, you've got just about as much complexity as the core AD&D books.
AD&D had somewhat more OPTIONAL extra books (Complete X books, equipment guides, monster lists, different settings, etc. as compared to Gazetteers, boxed sets, Creature Crucibles, and so on), but that was largely due to its greater popularity as a system.
And, bloody hell, man, if you don't want all the extra books, don't use them! (Geez, you'd think that was a hard concept...)
Both parent and grandparent posters are dead-on that the article is nonsense, something that's sadly clear from the very first paragraph:
...with other people, most notably Dave Arneson.
...by reading what wargamers had been doing for decades...
...for making everything as close to Jack Vance's books as possible.
> "rules publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC), a bastardized version of what TSR used to be"
Translation: "I frothingly hate WotC, and will take it as given that anything they have created is tainted and evil. I will proceed to rant now as if my OPINION were somehow fact."
> "The Father of RPG, Gary Gygax, first created Dungeons & Dragons"
> "the rules of all future video games were spawned"
Like BFGs, Sonic's prediliction for picking up shiny rings, and Mario's mushroom habit?
> "Hit points, stats, skills and all were first developed by Gary"
> "using Tolkien's work as a solid base"
FIVE major flaws in the article, and that's just the _first paragraph_! The original article is nothing more than an opinionated, unresearched diatribe. If there's anything of substance in there, it's pretty well hidden by the layers of ignorance, error, unreasoning hostility, and naked opinion.
Who thought this was worth anyone's time again?
Neverwinter Nights has done this.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
All weapons do 1D6.
The article seems to imply that because ToEE was buggy and had some implementation problems, that the entire concept of using d20 as a basis for a CRPG is flawed. I can't disagree more with this. Anyone who has played Knights of the Old Republic knows that as long as you realize you're making a CRPG and don't try to perfectly emulate a PPRPG the d20 system can work quite well. I only lament the lack of multiclassing in KotOR...
White Wolf - been there done that (ex-DST) TSR - got the RPGA membership card for a 'real' gaming experience try D20 Macho Women with Guns! cheers
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
My fave minimalist system is Over The Edge. It's got just enough dice in it to introduce the "shit happens" factor while still keeping the diceless feel. I also love the character design. I think a bit of chance is good for games, otherwise your character is not taking risks, but acting to the whim of the GM. For example, how does a GM decide that this is the time that a character screws up a slightly risky task they have done many times before?
For systemless convention games, I go with whatever feels right. Mostly I just use narrative, other times I'll toss a coin (random factors) or play paper-scissor-stone with them (challenges).
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Some people think the d20 rule-set is the problem.
...lacks the >dynamic "Rules >Bender" called the Game Master
However, the problem is the game engine's treatment of the rules.
As a programmer, I know it's easy to get caught up in one's own rules, for sanity and stability.
However, RPG programmers always forget ---
1. The DM is always right.
2. The DM has control over every outcome, etc.
3. The story-line will unfold spontaneously.
4. The world is dynamic and subject to DM whim.
5. Chat should affects outcomes and conditions.
6. Evil Actions attract Evil, and repel good
7. All actions result in risk of detectability.
8. NPC's remember you, if the DM allows this.
All of the game engines have hard-fast rules for outcomes. Secondly, they imply they run the show.
Thirdly, building the next level/room/terrain on the fly by the DM is non-existent.
Someone said this with:
>Personally, the hypothetical "best" CRPG would >allow GM interaction at whatever level was >required. A fast and clean implementation.
I also agree with:
>Considering that any CRPG
The game mechanic, should always treat rules as suggestions, or building blocks for the DM's screen. Just because it is most appropriate for a given set of conditions to affect the outcome of a given action, doesn't mean that is what the DM meant to say. Any RPG that assumes this sucks.
I also agree with:
>A good GM makes the STORY run the game, not the >DICE.
The first step to a story-led approach is to force the issue.
This implies, the story better explain the outcome by labelling the causes as a set of conditions of the actor, environment or the acted upon, which affect the outcome; Although the DM is God, she should be forced to show how a specific condition caused a specific outcome to occur.
>CRPG's don't know when to fudge a roll so the >hero can survive, or kill a monster, or whatever
I agree; The Dice Roll must be fully controllable by the DM. To take this control away from the DM doesn't resolve DM honesty; It just forces the DM to ignore that functionality.
>Any game that tries to port the inherently >unbalanced AD&D rules over is going to have holes.
I don't think any rule-based system will cover everything; However, to NOT assume this, makes the existing software out there bad for P2P playing.
I need to create creatures/rules/environments on the fly, I need to change an action's outcome by adding/subtracting/changing conditions that affect the outcome. I need both of these, while I play. If I can't, the software failed.
We'll never get there, unless the only hard-fast rule is, "The DM is always right".
or a question on a geek test.
Have you ever implemented the dice roll tables from AD&D in a program?
(ie. typed the chart in so the computer could understand it!)
#0: a 12th-level fighter is far from being a normal human, so your intuitions about normal humans and crossbow bolts don't apply well. The fighter makes innate use of magic as powerful as that of the wizard, dodging and blocking blows that no normal human could hope to counter, and surviving wounds that would kill a normal man instantly.
...except in the new edition, where it just gets worse and worse to have a spell cast on you. Breaks the game, really.
You're under the mistaken impression that a 12th-level fighter is just a normal person who's really good with a sword. If you want a more accurate idea, think of the characters in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"; they ain't normal, and neither is the 12th-level fighter.
#1: normal men never had 1hp on average; typically, they had 2-4. You are correct that small animals sometimes did too much damage, though.
#2: a 1st-level mage can usually kill a powerful group of opponents with ease (Sleep) or enslave powerful allies (Charm Person); by high levels, his targets will almost always save against those effects, forcing him to be less direct...
Holy crap. I have never read a more idiotic set of posts in my life. Debating the relative merit of fantasy based games, and their effectiveness on letting total social retards to live out their imposible dreams through die rolls? I now remember why the football team took such great pleasures in beating up on you D&D nerds... Christ, you deserved it. With luck, resident Shrub will declare D&D to be part of the Axis of Evil, and you losers will all end up in Gitmo Bay getting fisted by a marine. Of course, I'm sure one of you wankers has some kind of a "repels anal invasion" spell that you can conjure up.
Now, go look in the mirror, and repeat after me "I accept the fact that I am butt ugly, terribly over weight, and socialy retarded to the point that human interaction is physicaly painful for all parties involved. Accepting these truths is the first step in re-integrating myself to society. Should society not deem me fit to exist, I will graciously take my own life for the overall betterment of the species".
Stupid fuckin nerds...
That was the most claring thing about the article. Tolkiens influence is mostly limited
to abilities of the elves, dwarves, and the subtypes of the halfings/hobbits.
Anyway,in Tolkien's world it seems like you have to really be some kind of demi-god or subangel/demon type do use any magic. Quick, name a magic user in LOTR, or
isn't an elf w/ a ring, or some kind of mi-ar (sp?). Gygax lists a large bilbilography
in AD&D DMG 1st ed., many books and series are listed. and I think maybe, you're overstepping if you imply Jack Vance, exclusively -- But closer than the article at any rate. TO Me i don't care about d20. D&D went down hill about the time of 3rd ED rules,
maybe the descent is now steeper.
I see they now own STARWARS , too BAD. One of the cleverest RPGS was the original STARWARS RPG by West end games. You just used d6 and lots of them. Minimal Charts. The more d6's you had in in skill/ability the more normal the bell-curve, less erratic, and some point, and around midlevel, easy task are automatic As opposed to, the D&D rule, were no matter that your character is now 20th level Fighter-Lord with 10 retainers and a castle of men,there's still a 1-in-20 chances that you'll slip, trip, fall on your ass, do 1-4 points of damage to yourself, and chip (-1) your vorpal sword.
First of all, let me just say that you do raise some valid points, yet you appear to think you know me, when you could not possibly know anything about me.
:-)
To suggest that I know nothing about RPGs, is equivalent to saying that you are capable of knowing someone, and evaluating someone, after reading 2500 words they scrawled out for a discussion website. That demonstrates some negativity from you that is unwaranted, and offensive.
> He uses buzzwords to hint at computer knowledge, but uses them in such a nonsensical manner as to suggest he's trying to get revenge on geeks for the jokes they've played on social science journals.
In regards to the use of the phrase "server client", I believe I was missing a / character there. That was a typo. And actually it should have read "client/server".
> And in what sense is Temple of Elemental Evil a client?
The way I see it, TOEE is a client. Permissions must be met for it to run, and it must execute code under an OS in order to function. I guess I'm suggesting that the TOEE is linked into the operating system it's running under, and therefore it typically is a client. There's no multiplayer, but I believe there is cause to define programming video game engines, that the engine itself is the server and the client consists of the loaded modules/levels and media. That's the basic schema of video game design, so it does surprise me you did not pick up on this.
> "intepreting rules" was the job of the programmer
I strongly disagree. This is the reason that so many CRPGs out there have difficulty when they have been ported from PnP; the creators of the PnP are the rules interpreters, and they delegate that power by creating rules to the DM. Programmers need to get their grimy hands off of the rules, because the rules belong to the game designers!
How it leads to standards violations is because the programmers are often overstepping boundaries by coding quirky routines in order to get necessary effects out of the game and squash bugs along the way. Often, programmers misinterpret the rules written by PnP designers, for what ever reason. When I create a set of rules for PnP, and someone takes them and interprets them, they may or may not understand my meaning; if I did my job, even, they still may misinterpret me. There are countless examples of this in TOEE.
> The author makes some statements about Troika's development of ToEE. Maybe we could learn something from some of them. But how can we assume they have anything to do with the game's actual development, when they're surrounded by pure gibberish?
This was kind of a troll statement, imho, yet I will answer it as if it was not. The gibberish you speak of, is perhaps your own inability to comprehend what I'm saying in the article. Perhaps you could provide some more examples of gibberish that I could answer to, and help you to understand better what I'm saying. You see, you are essentially proving, by misinterpreting my article, that programmers do in fact have a tendency to read things a certain way, and to some extent, form their own opinions on the material. My thoughts are that you perhaps failed to do your homework, or you were somehow incapable of reading the article the way it was intended to be read, and the blame, if any, would fit squarely on my shoulders, because I'm the author and it's my duty to explain myself coherently enough for others to understand immediately what I'm saying. Ahh, but of course; that is the way we all go through life, stumbling at times before some solid progress is made. Cast the first stone...
If I knew it was that important for me to spell out the differences between the interface problems and the AI problem, it would have been an article about video game design, and not an article about standards. Just because your focus was not met in the article, is no reason for you to slight it, and without any supporting evidence, to boot.
From dictionary.com: bastardized
...by reading what wargamers had been doing for decades...
adj : (fine arts) deriving from more than one source or style
> Like BFGs, Sonic's prediliction for picking up shiny rings, and Mario's mushroom habit?
I said rules, not design; you appear to be confusing the two.
> > "Hit points, stats, skills and all were first developed by Gary"
This appears to be out of the scope of the article; the article was not about wargaming.
> If there's anything of substance in there, it's pretty well hidden by the layers of ignorance, error, unreasoning hostility, and naked opinion.
You can discourage me if you like, but why? Why would you discourage someone for trying to identify with RPG and come to terms with some problems that exist in porting PnP to CRPG?
We all have to start somewhere...
From dictionary.com: distributed database
A collection of several different databases that looks like
a single database to the user. An example is the Internet
Domain Name System (DNS).
Anyone who has coded a CRPG knows that there are quite a few tables and sometimes even interconnected databases in use at any given time while the engine is working; and for some, a bsp file could be considered its own database. Your comment was largely out of context, anyway.
... that no Simpsons were harmed in the making of this article!
Finally someone with a brain; yes, D&D was created with multiple sources, but you are so correct in stating what should be obvious to most; everyone who has had anything to do with RPG has been influenced by Tolkien.
Nehwon was a very fun experience for me to play; a DM once tossed my character into that realm for a quest and I enjoyed myself tremendously. He made excellent use of the Grey Mouser and Fafhrd characters. Fun fun fun! :-)
Okay so you dislike my writing style, but trolling slashdot about it with a goofy post is just annoying to me. Why don't you discuss the article instead of going off-topic?
> Well the paper rules never cover anything about behaviour of the monsters in these situations unless it's something like fear/flee response, it's the GM that does so.
:-)
Actually the PnP rules used *do* cover monster behaviour. I won't post the spell's rules here because of copyright, but that stats area next to the description of monsters indicates intelligence and the rules explain how behaviour is affected by intelligence. I can understand how you would miss this fact, because you have to connect the dots in order to fully understand the connection, but you really should research more before stating blatant falsehoods.
You are correct about how this could be an AI problem, yet to me I think the developers did this behaviour deliberately. They left out many of the rules for Meld into Stone, as well; like the damage you take when the spell expires. The fact that the use of concentration was required in TOEE doesn't seem to be present in the rules, although I could be slightly misinterpreting them...
Anyway, feel free to respond.
> The rules aren't really that important in a video game, as opposed to a pen and paper RPG. It's mostly done behind the scenes.
Well, that makes for a lot of different games, but it also adds to the development cycle, if you ask me. Do you know how long it takes to build the kind of rules that exist in many RPGs? Standardization could limit the length of time it takes tenfold, because rules could be moved from game to game, publisher to publisher, and that would make all our lives/jobs/profit margins easier.
> Having actually implemented AD&D rules in a commercial video game (way, way back in 1989) , I can say that the rules SUCK for computer implementation. There are special cases and exceptions to everything.
This is indeed a very insightful comment; and it re-inforces the basic claim of my article. The exceptions are what makes it difficult to create a CRPG out of PnP rules, and debug efficiently.
I enjoyed BG quite a bit, I might add.
I always wondered why everybody is jumping the wagon to make D&D compatible system a 'plus' to any RPG game.
These rules where a good point to start with, since they offered a fair amount of complexity and a means to transfer the idea of RPG to PCs. But now I want just more. I mean not only more complex rules, I want them to be more reality driven. Like, I hate to feed the party with healing potions while figthing for instance. That is way to unrealistic behaviour, its ridiculous. Not that RPGs are realistic in the first place, but this is too far over the border.
I want 'emotional stability' represented in the games. Someone who is instable will then not always achieve 'masterpoints' in 'leadership' for instance. It might even be, that this character fights badly due to temporary fear, even if he has 'conan' hitpoints. Also he might become berserk if a party member got kille. Whatever, just give me more flexibility and more interaction of the values itself, besides that just more values.
It is good to have variable hit points, but, by use of strategy for instance, it should be possible to win 'david vs. goliath' fights.
lets face it, as complex the D&D rules already are, it does not do much more to generall gameplay than working your character from a low level to a high level in more or less much time. There are no real surprises in between.
To sum it up. D&D rules where good in the beginning, but I think it is wrong to now treat them as a quality mark, since IMO they do not even slightly meet current players wishes. It was a good starting point, but for long we passed the point where things should already have gotten us further in this regard.