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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."
Where are the cheetos?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
For success they must roll at least an 18
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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"
Now to get him to port it to gtk or qt...
That'll work, if by "port" you mean "completely rewrite in another programming language".
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
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.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=35eaccc3.6520 1896%40news.earthlink.net
-- Old Man Kensey
I'm sorry, Citizen. You are not allowed to know that you are playing a game. Please report to the Computer for routing debriefing and clone incrementation.
Thank you.
Have a nice day.
The computer is your friend.
(You know, I seem to remember someone doing a text adventure of Paranoia...)
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Not everybody wants to play the role of a whiny, neurotic, tortured Gothic denizen of the night.
No, you go to Slashdot for that.
Of course, that's not really fair of me.
You're probably not gothic.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
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-
Because he learned. He wanted power, and he learned better and better ways to get it.
Powergaming happens in the meta-game above real life. The guy who plays me, is probably explaining to his DM why the character switched to Python a few years ago. I can see it now, the DM says, "But Sloppy was into C! You're playing him wrong, you fucking munchkin, just to get a +2 on your programming roll." Then the player tries to explain that the character learned something about the relative values of programmer time vs compute time, but the DM shakes his head. "Sloppy is too dumb to learn," he says.
The player complains, and the DM threatens, "Look, just shut up, already. I'm getting tired of this." But the player persists.
Finally, the fed-up DM says, "That's it. Cthulhu appears and kills your character."
Ok, Aglassis, I want you to think about what you did. You just got me killed in what we call "real life", and Cthulhu is now wandering around. Do you think anyone in the world is safe, now? Cthulhu is out, and you're going to die too. Way to go. I hope you remember that, when your player rolls up the next Aglassis. And ask yourself: who is the real munchkin? The guy who was trying to convince the DM that I could learn from experience to try to become more powerful? Or the narrow-minded DM who thought characters shouldn't adapt, and then in a childish tantrum, set Cthulhu loose on the world?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
then if they keep repeating the same actions over and over, you could potentially detect this and trigger appropriate events accordingly.
It looks like you may be trying to write a letter!