I'm a gamer, into the old-fashioned role playing games. Not the computer ones, like World of Warcraft (those are ok, too, I guess), but the cool ones where people get together in a room and tell each other stories and roll funny-looking dice and look stuff up in books.
It's pretty hard to get any gaming done these days. As an adult, it's hard to find the time. I'm not likely to leave the wife and kids and go game once a week. Family time is too precious. Plus, coordinating everyone's schedules is nigh impossible. My old gaming buddies are scattered across the globe, as well, and finding a new group is like starting a new garage rock band. You won't like playing with just anybody. They have to like the same kind of music, at least.
In the last few years, most of my gaming has been done on the road. I gamed in hotel rooms with friends while on business trips. We all figure, hey, we can't be with the family anyway, so might as well make the most of it. To make this convenient, we switched to PDF versions of our books. I even created some simple dice rolling applets.
So there we were with everything we needed to play contained on our laptops. It worked great. At home, on those rare gaming occasions, I still found it easier to use PDFs on a laptop. Furthermore, I altered my little dice applet to handle the peculiarities of the new game system we were using, which made use of multiple dice types, where the highest of exploding pairs was selected. It had a to-hit roll and a separate damage roll, but the to-hit roll could influence the damage roll.
I spent an hour or so and coded these complexities into a little applet (did it on the plane ride, actually). Over several sessions (and more plane rides), I kept adding more detail and refinement to this little software tool. The more I automated the game system, that is, the number-crunching part of it, the more fun we had, the more story we completed, and the better our role-playing became.
The math and bookkeeping called for by this game's rules was easy, but any such stuff requires some share of a gamer's cognative powers. It's distracting, drawing your attention away from envisioning the scene and the actions of your character.
I know that in game design, there's always a trade-off between the versimilitude (call it “realism”, if you want) that you get from the simulation-focused rules and the complexity. In other words, taking into account all the variables makes if feel more “realistic”, but that added complexity makes the game unwieldy and slow. But computers can handle all the complex calculations in milliseconds. Using a computer, you can allow for vast complexity and not pay the price (except during the programming).
How far could I take this, I wondered. So this is my experiment.
I'm actually getting pretty excited by the idea.
I call it a "Coded Story Game".
Getting Specific
There are lots of computer-assisted tools available already. I'm tryiing to create something specific here, and it doesn't fall into some of the established categories.
My coded story game is close to traditional face-to-face pen-and-paper role-playing. I'm only taking the mechanics of the game system and expressing them as computer software tools. And not in the pages of a book that players must learn and master.
Almost everybody uses computers to handle their character sheets, write up notes about adventures, create maps for printing, etc. But mostly, the rolling of dice and the calculation of combat results gets done the old fashioned way. I'm going to provide tools that let the GM and the players click a button and generate results of actions, whether that be an attack on a foe or the use of a lockpicking skill. Furthermore, because the computer can instantly do the math, lookup untold complexities on reference tables, and so forth, those generated results can be more specific and more interesting than simple numbers.
If your character is attacking an orc, for example, the computer can, at the click of a single button, account for a multitude of variables: your strength, your weapon type and its interaction with the orc's armor, the orc's defensive abilities (parry, counter, dodge, etc.), your agility, your skill level, and the orc's, both your health conditions (injuries, stun effects, poison, fatigue, etc.), your combat stance and style vs. that of the orc, and so on. Then it can make your attack roll, the orc's defense roll, compare the two (adjusted for all the variables mentioned), look up the results on tables that store juicy descriptions of the damage possible from such an attack, and present you, the player, with as many of those results as your attack roll qualifies for. You then choose which to read to the GM and game group.
Even better, since the complexities of the game system are contained in the software, players and GMs need not concern themselves with learning it. The player never needs to know what dice to roll, how to calculate damage, how precisely armor absorbs damage, or any such thing.
They simply run the software, make up their character (again, using an automated tool), and click buttons to do things. This frees the GM and the player to concentrate entirely on making decisions about what the charcter should do, what it looks like, how they react, etc., without the distraction of all the math and lookups.
Now I really want to have this thing be a product. I want it to be a database online that people can use to make and store their game worlds, their characters, custom monsters, magic items, spells, etc.
It should cost a subscription fee. Free to casual players, cheap for serious players, More for GMs.
Thinking outside the book
It's important to make this thing different. It must stand out. But without losing what is best about pen-and-paper experiences. Each of the elements of game design: character generation, task resolution, advancement, combat simulation, and such must be done not as per usual, but by leveraging the computer's power.
The computer makes you powerful as game designer. You can do stuff that you can't in a manual game system. Complexity is not a problem, lots of rolls is no problem. Difficult math is no problem. Large numberrs are not problem.
All the stuff you have to abstract becomes fair game again.
1. Complex interactions (armor type vs. weapon type),
2. Detailed injury tracking (blood loss, detailed wounds, disease),
3. Detailed movement and encumbrance rules,
4. Vast and numerous result tables (e.g., wound charts by monster and attack form),
5. Huge arrays of variables, all accounted for (e.g., how strength mitigates encumbrance of armor, for example),
6. Weird, fun, and creative character generation (simulated back stories)
The GM side of things should be pretty cool, too. What if the GM can have a database for designing his world and campaign.
If I properly categorize all the entries on the content tables (say, like monster attack descriptions, and magic effect descriptions, and weapon damage tables), then it should be possible to allow the GM to customize the experience he will provide his players.
There can be "dials" for setting his preferences as far as lethality of combat, the rating of damage descriptions (tame, bloody, or total carnage), language used (allow profanity? how about simulated profanity like "frak"?), what kinds of magic effects are possible, strength of magic, effectiveness of missile weapons like bows, technology levels allowed, monsters allowed, player character generation rules (how many design points, what sort of randomness to allow or demand), and so forth.
I intend to start on a prototype immediately.
