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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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