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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."
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.
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.)
I went from D&D to AD&D2ed, somehow skipping 1st edition...
In 'normal' D&D it was rather simplistic. Your choices for what to play were basically fighter, thief, cleric, mage, dwarf, elf, halfling. Good for getting new people into roleplaying without 10 different rulebooks.
AD&D opened up the doors to class / race combinations, was a lot more rule-heavy, and let them sell a slew of new books.
If you're really genuinely curious, then the best place to ask is here. These guys will be glad to explain the minute differences to you. They'll do a much better job than I can.
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.
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
AD&D came after that, it was published in 1978 as three hardcover books: Player's Guide, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. It's a format that's follow even to this day. Various player race were introduced, and the rules were changed so that races are no longer classes.
Then came AD&D 2nd edition in 1989. For a while, they went to a 3 ring binder format for you to keep track of all the monsters, which drove me crazy. It may have been a good idea for adding new monsters, but pages tear and fall out all the time.
D20, or D&D 3rd edition, returned to the original Dungeon and Dragon name. The changes are quite drastic compare to any of the previous editions of D&D/AD&D.
The most recent release is 3.5E, which was last year. (2003)
For a history of D&D/TSR, take a look at here
The core of D20 is also published here as a set of rtfs.
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...
As one of the other posters said, its pretty much a more advanced version that needed a dozen books to understand.
:-)
Standard D&D came in a single box with everything ya needed to play. DM Guide and Player Guide. I remember, I spent $16 on this at the local gaming store when I was in my preteen age (cripes more than 2/3rds of my life ago). That was a lot of money back then
Limited player classes. Limited Alignments. It was a LOT more black and white -- Lawful Neutral and Evil. Not to note that this makes no sense from a legitimate scale. Advanced had alignments based on your law following and your general disposition. For instance, someone could be Chaotic Good. More or less ya say fuck the laws, but you do what you feel is right -- Fucking dope smoking hippies... Or Lawful Evil. Think Dick Chenney. Oh wait, he makes the laws...nevermind.
Classes were limited...and levels were limited to a ceiling of around 20. No switching classes. No multiclasses. Advanced allowed you to be both multiclass as well as switching classes where this wasn't possible. For instance, if you became a fighter, you might not be able to be a magicician because the need for physicial training got in the way of the spiritual training -- but you'd still have some of the leftover abilities at the lower level.
That and there were a *LOT* more classes and subclasses. Some classes couldn't be some alignments or races. A hobbit souldn't be a palidin...and a Palidin needed to be Lawful Good -- even if the laws were unjust, you followed them. At least how the game was supposed to be played, I don't think anyone cared about this when actually playing as role playing was always minimized with ?D&D.
AD&D had a lot more subtlties to it...and manuals that wen't along with it. The monsters in the D&D books were limited and didn't have much back story to them. In AD&D, I had I believe the Monster Manual 1 & 2. Monstor Companion. Deities and Demigods (before they were forced to change the name by religious groups). Lots of back stories. A lot more to remember. A lot more abilities and weaknesses.
Fuck, the last time I looked at AD&D, the books had gotten so out of hand that not only did you have the players handbook (which use to be 200 pages of a large with legal sized pages), but now with the same for each character type.
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?
Personally, if I were playing again, I might look at the AD&D books for the back story, but stick with the rules of the D&D side simply because simplicity focuses on the role playing as opposed to charts and having a dozen DM cheat cheats / screens and having to carry 100 dice type (lets see, I had a D100 which just rolled for 10 minutes before stopping, a D50 -- which was as hard to find as the 100 at the time, a few that were designed for cards in case the players decided to gamble -- I think that came with a module and a dozen more -- that all us geekies would carry around in our Crown Royal bags attached to our belts even in nongaming situations as if they were bags of magic).
AD&D -- rules. D&D Roles...
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.
The latest set of rules from WotC remains true to the original rules, but is much more consistent and easier to use once you get use to it.
Anarchists never rule
That's actually a reinterpretation of the Dead Alewives' D&D parody, which was audio-only. Here is another one which I think people might be more familiar with.
Rob
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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
I think you missed my point on the halberd. Its not a general purpose fighting weapon.
Says you. I guess what I didn't understand, because you haven't said, is what experience or expertise you have that leads to you make this claim.
Now I'm no expert in medieval weapons myself, but I've read stuff, been to museums, and kept my eyes open. And I fight with re-enactment weapons, so maybe I know a thing or two. And as far as I can tell, the halberd (or any variant of the polearm) is in fact a "general purpose weapon." You might want to ask the generations of samurai wives expected to defend their homes - the halberd (naginata) was their weapon of choice. You might care to ask the thousands of infantry for whom the blade or axe on a pole was their weapon of choice. You might care to ask the Swiss mercenaries who guard the Vatican who wield halberds to this day if the halberd was used as a "general purpose weapon."
You claim it has no defesive power, so I guess you've never fought with one - the pole across your body is a pretty powerful defensive advantage. You know, and there's the thing about how you can kill someone before they've come within two sword-lengths. That's another pretty strong defensive strength.
How exactly is using it on the field a good idea?
I dunno. I guess you might start by asking the generations of fighters who used it on the field, unhorsing knights, making trip attacks, etc.
You seem to think that, because not everyone agrees with your views on battlefield doctrine, that the only concievable reason they choose to use the weapons they do is because they're cheats. Furthermore, you seem to think that role-playing constitutes "what would my character do in the real world?" Pardon me but I play my character based on what they would do in the game world. If it's a world where halberdiers have mastered the art of not getting killed using their weapon on the field, and everyone sees the advantages of their methods, then it's reasonable for my fighter to follow suit.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
dude if you like NWN, you should also check out morrowind. That game gave me such a feeling of D&D, quests available for the taking, but still in an open world. Its a beatiful game as well. Rich with items, quests, monsters, etc. Also has a nice mod scene which allows DMs to program thier own quests.
Actually, there was a first edition of AD&D. Here's how it went: Original Boxed set (mid-late 70's - I remember getting a photocopy of the rules before they were released in Canada and then buying the first set when they came to Canada). Three booklets. Later, you could get addons such as Greyhawk. Basic Edition Advanced D&D - DM's guide, Monster Manual, Players Handbook. Was followed by a number of add-ons such as Dieties and Demigods, Fiend Folio, etc. 2nd Edition 3rd Edition, whatever. I found the best campaigns were always those where the DM had dumped many of the core rules, or misinterpreted them badly, then redesigned them to a completely different, but balanced system. Ah, the days of a swing a level!
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
"I think you missed my point on the halberd. Its not a general purpose fighting weapon."
Says who? In our world? Sure. But in the game world you are playing the stats determine when and where something is useful. If a halberd was not useful in a field then it would have penalties. As such I would say that halberds, like magic, do not function exactly the same there as here. Unless you are roleplaying a psychotic person who thinks their reality is based on another world I would have to say that you are not remaining faithful to that world.
"How exactly is using it on the field a good idea?"
Well, if it didn't work well in that situation the game rules should take care of that shouldn't it? As such in the make believe world of where you are talking it works quite well in the field. How is it a bad idea if it is the most effective killing impliment.
"If you would put yourself into that role I think you would understand that in general field usage you would get killed very quickly."
So, if I played this mythical character and put him in this role he would have to think "Well, I could slay many people in the field of battle with this mighty halberd. But in another world I know nothing about it will not work so I will use this rusty sword!!!" How is that accurate role playing?
"If you put yourself into the role of a master of fighting prowess, for example, I would expect you to more likely pick a weapon that is more general purpose."
Actually I tend to pick whichever weapon I could kill with easiest. Since, at that time, the halberd was obviously the best tech in that world I would use it.
" A powergamer picks it because a simplistic game world gives it more points of damage"
This is correct. A powergamer can still roleplay. I can look at tables to figure which spell will kill the best based on damage. That does not mean that I can not roleplay as a researcher of effecient killings by reading various texts on the effectiveness of weapons and choose accordingly. It would be foolish to think that anyone that thier life depends on thier equipment qould choose anything other than the best available weapon and exercise program (in any world, real or make believe). Since those points represent reality in that game world it is a good place to look. If you wish to use the real world you have to look no further than our own wars - most everybody has the same weapons (except for the specialised troops) and it was the best combination of cheap/killing power at that time in history - exactly what you are bemoaning in said game.
Now, the most telling thing about what you have written is that you constantly use a form of "If you think like I do" and guess what, not everyone does. Just because you do not like said role (or would not play it the same as another person) doesn't mean it isn't roleplaying. I am certain that there will be quite a few people that do not like your methods (and, given that you are using the real world to base what a weapon is good for I would say that I am one of those individuals).
Ultimatly you are making no distinction between a powergamer and a munchkin. A munchkin is one that is strickly min/max best weapons and no role playing.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
All that & you didn't even give them a link!
:]
The Slashdot story about the new version, and Paranoia-Live, where you can find folks online to game with
How do I know all this you ask? That's far above your security clearance, citizen, as is this ULTRAVIOLET (white) page you're viewing. Report for Reactor Shielding Duty immediately!
Knights of the Old Republic uses modified DnD 3rd Edition rules. They had to modify it a little for new feats, skills and weapons (such as guns).
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
Ultima IV balanced party
What?! Ultima IV allowed you 8 party members including yourself, one for each virtue, and there were only (gasp!) 8 possible characters to pick up for your party. Better yet, they were one for each class, and the character for *your* class always made some excuse for not joining you. Heh. Balanced party indeed. Ultima V definitely improved the idea, though.
Nice thing about Ultima IV in this thread, though, was that while there wasn't a way to descend into darkness and still 'win the game' (i.e. no victory conditions available unless you chose the path of the avatar), the decisions (when they were there) were very much grey area decisions.
Like what I said? You might like my music
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.
Aha, I see, we have a perfectly lacking understanding of AC. It's like this. AC doesn't mean the probability you will hit someone. It's the probability your hit will do damage. So your guy who's 12 feet wide with a really low armor class is probably stone-skinned, so you can hit him all day long, but your hits don't do any damage. Mass misinterpretation of the intentionally vague concepts of Armor Class have brought us to the point where people think it's "hit or miss". Nope. It's "hurt or not". The DM I used to play with would translate the dice for us if we were too unimaginative to do so ourselves, but it didn't take long for a newbie to get the hang of it once you see it really working.
"What AC did you hit?"
"Crap, -1. Did I hurt him?"
"Nope, your sword bounced off his leathery knee, but at least you touched him this time."
Next round.
"What AC did you hit?"
"-1 again. Did I hurt him?"
"Nope, the dragon moved his wing right when you swung, so it was a clean miss."
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.
Computers *can* do it now, they just haven't. I think the main problem is that the Ultima line didn't progress much more. Ultima IV and V were strongly moving towards real role-playing, and I figure we should have it now, but sadly the game companies don't seem to have continued in that direction, including Origin. :( If I only had the time....
Like what I said? You might like my music
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
Actually, you've got a few problems here.
.
1) Experiance need not be gained through slaughter. There's a lot of other ways to get experiance. Any problems with this land squarely upon the DM's.
2) Now the restictions arn't absolute. Nore are the inane. You can wear armour. However, due to arcane casters need to gesture when casting some spells, they occasionally fail. And due to being utterly inept with armor (you have not trained with it, eka taking a feat for it) you're not as effective attacking with it on. Same goes for the weapons. You've not taken the feat, you're not that great with it... you'll miss a bit more often
While NWN doesn't do these things, they do exist within the D&D game.