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New Open-Source Tabletop RPG
ClintonRNixon writes "A new open-source tabletop RPG has been released, The Shadow of Yesterday. People have been putting RPGs online for free for years, and Wizards of the Coast has their Open Game License, but this is the first time a game has been written and published using only open-source tools, and is published under a Creative Commons license.
To make the online version, vi and Python Docutils were used; the published game was laid out using Scribus, The Gimp, and OpenOffice."
this is the first time a game has been written and published using only open-source tools, and is published under a Creative Commons license.
While the CC license is good, I don't understand the fuss over OpenOffice and the GIMP. Did people really care earlier about what RPGs were developed with? Were there really groups of people proclaiming "this RPG was written on a typewriter instead of with a pen"?
The license is what matters. It allows players to modify and redistribute the game, according to the rules stated in the license. Whether or not it was typed in OpenOffice, or written on a stack of napkins, is relatively insignificant.
What a shame. There is nothing more broken in all of RPG's than the combat damage system, and this system follows in the same tradition.
D&D used it, because the creators borrowed the concepts of "armor class" and "hit points" from a naval-combat simulation tabletop game. Not much thought was put in to it... like most of the original Chainmail and D&D rules, it was all about keeping things simple for experienced war-gamers.
The vast majority of RPG's have borrowed the concept, as have most combat and RPG computer games. I like to call it the "Big Red Bar" system of damage. You fight like nothing is wrong with you as you continue to take generalized "damage" from combat, until a wound to your big toe takes away those last couple "points", and then you drop dead.
It was understandable in 1978, but there's no reason for it in this day and age. In my RPG group, everybody has a laptop. Why not come up with a combat system where the computers calculate for you just how much harder it is to swing a sword with a deep shoulder laceration (or a bruised hamstring, or a slight concussion, etc.)
For that matter, on-line RPGs and combat games should be doing this already.
Armor does not evade blows, it distributes impact to mitigate potentially lethal damage. Yet even the latest computer RPG's, such as World of Warcraft, use armor as a means of calculating a "to hit" target number. There's no reason it has to be this way.
A few maverick games out there have come up with some very novel solutions. The fact that this one does not is further evidence that the Open Source community rarely, if ever, really innovates. Linux is a UNIX-alike. StarOffice is an MS-Office-alike. KDE is a Windows-alike.... and this game is an Open Source D&D-alike. (Except D&D is already Open Sourced now, so nobody really needed it.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Most people who play a lot of RPGs don't care much about any of the things you are looking for in an entertaining "world sourcebook" to read.
Tabletop RPG folk like to creat their own worlds, their own histories, and their own mythologies, and then let the games take place in those worlds. Any setting info is simply used as a guideline for the tone which is supposed to be represented. (Or a template... I wish I had a dollar for every time I pulled out the old "Keep of the Borderlands" map that came free with the old D&D box-set because I quickly needed a generic military outpost in one of my campaigns.)
The only exceptions I can think of are the famous "Ravenloft" scenario book from AD&D, and the entire Paranoia & Acute Paranoia line. Both of those were such fantastic works that almost any game master who thumbed through them immediately wanted to take their players through them, right out of the box, with minimal changes. (I'm sure there are others, but those seem to be pretty universal stand-outs.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
UNIX is a MULTICS-alike. MS-Office includes a Wordperfect-alike and a 123-alike. Windows is a MacOS-alike.
It's turtles all the way down. Anybody who thinks any of the market players are "innovators" is a naive fool. It's all about imitation and incremental improvement, no matter if you're from FLOSS or otherwise.
Part of the reason that this hasn't happened is the sheer amount of math and dice-rolls involved in a more complex combat system. This means that the only way the game stays fun (although rolling 4d6 + 5d10 + 3d20 + 2d12 to resolve a single hit might be fun) is to use a laptop. However, laptops aren't dice, part of the appeal of the tabletop RPG is that it's a pencil-and-paper game. Basically what I'm saying is -- Thou shalt not part a gamer and his/her dice!
He effected a bored affect.