Can anyone explain to me the concept of a "TextRPG" and how they are different from your average chatroom aside from having the option to roll dice and store character information? A lot of people out there seem to be interested in copying this idea now...Maybe someone should setup a big nasty (as it would appear to anyone attempting to duplicate) version with enough to scare away those little guys out there...
This would be Spuzzum's cue, but I don't think he's interested.
ID:193133
 Mar 18 2002, 12:39 pm
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Mar 18 2002, 12:43 pm
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Mertek
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Well, if you ever check out some of the TextMUD games (read: TextMUD, none of those clones) they are usually a lot of fun. The other ones are basically how you described them, chat rooms with dice rolling. *Shameless plug for TextMUD* I urge you to check out TextMUD. It is a ton of fun when you get a good game concept going.
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The concept is simple: make a paper & pencil RPG, minus the paper and the pencil.
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Foomer wrote:
That would help, accept I don't know what a paper and pencil RPG is. Picture a board game with no rulebook. That's basically about as pen-and-paper as you can get. The GM makes up stats on the fly and assigns them to players. A GM can either be really good at it or really bad at it. Most people are bad at it. =P Generally it takes a good amount of experience with actual board game RPGs before someone can consider themselves skilled enough to move onto a pen-and-paper RPG. | |
No rulebook? Spuzzum, did someone make you cluck like a chicken and then tell you it was a pen and paper RPG? Kids can be so cruel. :)
Although I loved the HeroQuest boardgame, I started with D&D pen and paper. (I'm more into Rifts and Heroes Unlimited now. I'd get into MERP again if I could still get stuff from ICE.) I've been a GM on and off since gradeschool. Stats don't have to be made up on the fly, but being versatile is what keeps the game flowing. I tend to have a very rough idea of what I want to do and then I let the players jump around it. I have never really understood why adventure packs sell. | |
Well, TextMUD is (at the current moment, at least) just that: a decked-out chatroom with a too-crude char sheet system (I say that because my new one looks so much nicer!) and char saving. However, it is advancing quickly. If only the new TextMUD on my computer was working (and I was willing,) I would show you all just what I've been doing. A lot of things have been moved to browser windows, and the whole system is becoming less 'chatroom Plus' and more 'TextMUD,' the way I planned it to be in the beginning.
Now, I'm sure Spuzzum or a number of other individuals could outdo me if they wanted to, but I think that you will be pleasantly suprised when I come out with TextMUD 2.5. I plan to make TextMUD unique enough (possibly even with a name change) that it's ripoffs will be nowhere near it and besting it will be quite the job. Look forward to TextMUD release 2.5 this summer, all! -Lord of Water | |
Spuzzum wrote:
Generally it takes a good amount of experience with actual board game RPGs before someone can consider themselves skilled enough to move onto a pen-and-paper RPG. As far as pen and paper RPG's go, this isn't really my experience. I find that a good GM is someone with a vivid fantasy, sense of humor, and knowledge of how to utilize those aspects of their personality. I don't think that previous experience with board games really makes that big of a difference, not compared to the difference the actual person makes anyways. Hope that made sense... Alathon | |
Spuzzum wrote:
Generally it takes a good amount of experience with actual board game RPGs before someone can consider themselves skilled enough to move onto a pen-and-paper RPG. As far as pen and paper RPG's go, this isn't really my experience. I find that a good GM is someone with a vivid fantasy, sense of humor, and knowledge of how to utilize those aspects of their personality. I don't think that previous experience with board games really makes that big of a difference, not compared to the difference the actual person makes anyways. Hope that made sense... Alathon | |
You started with D&D and don't understand why adventure packs sell? D&D started as a dungeon crawl. In fact, that's largely the only thing it's good for. D&D is all about numerical and statistical advancement (read number crunching and dice rolling). "Adventures" encapsulate this in one easy to use (cobat focused) package that is especially handy for the imagination impaired.
I never had much use for the D&D school of thought (though, sadly, many players never seemed to understand that role-playing does not equal hack 'n slash). To me, role playing was more about the acting and social interaction, after all, I could design horrendously long, complicated dungeons and roll dice on my own. Additionally, I blame the lack of focus on the social implications of an largely anti-social system for much of D&D's early media problems. -James | |
Alathon:
I'm talking about average-joe GMs. If you're just an average person, if you don't have any experience beforehand you're going to flop, and badly at that. That picture changes when you use some other universe, like Final Fantasy or whatever, to establish the background. Then you can flop and no one cares, because it's still Final Fantasy. =P When you're making a true pen-and-paper RPG (which I define as a minimalist system) you need a lot of creativity and ideas for ways of having game mechanics flow. In some situations, you can make very successful systems without having any mechanics whatsoever. The TCS-Ticonderoga, for instance, was one of the penultimate RPG systems -- it wasn't even a pen-and-paper RPG, just sheer roleplaying. It had no rules other than "be reasonable". It depends more on the quality of the roleplayers, but the session I had turned out moderately well (after a shaky start), in my opinion. I haven't fired it up again, though, mainly because people wanted some maps and stuff of the ship. I have the outlines of every deck done, but I don't have actual floorplans made, and I'm no longer in the mood to finish them. =) My point here is that you can't always make an incredible roleplaying game without at least a little background with rules and mechanics. I think people should always start with board games, move onto board-game/RPG systems like HeroQuest and/or Talisman, then actual RPG systems like D&D or Shadowrun, after which checking out things like GURPs, before finally moving onto pen-and-paper systems. You can skip steps and be successful, too, but for the average person, those are the steps I'd recommend. (In my case, I learned D&D first, then Talisman/HeroQuest, then pen-and-paper.) ACWraith: What I meant by "that's about as pen-and-paper as you can get" is that, in the specific case of a game without a rulebook, that's where the term "pen-and-paper" came from. There are many pen-and-paper RPGs with rulebooks, more so than ones without, but that makes them less of pen-and-paper RPGs and more of board game RPGs. A pen-and-paper RPG in my books is basically interactive fiction with some on-the-spot dice rolls along the way. Any "rules" that the GM comes up with would be advisable to copy down, but the amount of actual rules that are present would be next to nil, except in the cases of the most repeated actions. Obviously there needs to be some kind of basic rule surrounding combat, and whatnot, but otherwise the GM can just make it up as he/she goes along. For example, say you come up with an elaborate adventure, and someone goes completely in the opposite direction than you expected. A true pen-and-paper GM would be able to make up a new adventure as it unfolds with only a minor loss in creativity. A board-game GM would be forced to make up a new map, a bunch of new tricks, traps, and encounters, and so on and so forth. It's true that you can accomplish both and do it almost seamlessly at that, but a pen-and-paper RPG just makes it easier and more intuitive. Remember that one of the popular board-game RPGs that everyone is familiar with, Dungeons and Dragons, most likely had its roots in pen-and-paper. Gygax probably made up rules on the fly when roleplaying with his friends, and after a while when the rules began to become hefty, he created a whole game system out of 'em. This isn't to say that that's what happened, but that's my educated guess. Game systems like GURPS and the like are probably the best pen-and-paper RPGs that actually have rulebooks, because they're designed to be completely adaptible to any situation. Basically the rules in GURPS are just a framework -- if you change them, things get unbalanced, but you can take steps to modify that unbalance during the whole adventure easily and quickly (with a little imagination, of course). In D&D, the rules are cast in stone (or at least very hard mud) -- you can change them, but you risk upsetting the whole balance of things if you change too many. Making new rules is acceptable, but even so, you very rarely find people with massive databases of rules changes for D&D. Not so with GURPS, where entire labours of love are completely fleshed out in their entirely. To make a long story short, I think the minimalist approach to pen-and-paper RPGs is best (hmm, now would be the time Guy makes a plug about a certain RPG system), which is followed by a not-so-minimalist-RPG system like GURPS, followed by pre-fabricated-rules-based-RPG systems like Dungeons and Dragons, which in turn is followed by board games like HeroQuest and Talisman. That's not to say I don't like HeroQuest or Talisman, despite them being the lowest on the roleplaying scale. They're just barely roleplaying games, that's all. =) And truth be told, minimalist RPGs don't always catch my fancy either. I like a healthy blend between minimalism with some framing rules on top, like a skill system, character system, experience system, and combat system fleshed out. The actual skills, weapons, and the like are all generated completely at run-time -- there are no pre-made weapons nor skills in place. Of course I can make a list of skills and weapons beforehand, but that's just for reference and inspiration, not cast in stone. | |
Spuzzum wrote:
The TCS-Ticonderoga, for instance, was one of the penultimate RPG systems -- it wasn't even a pen-and-paper RPG, just sheer roleplaying. It had no rules other than "be reasonable". It depends more on the quality of the roleplayers, but the session I had turned out moderately well (after a shaky start), in my opinion. I haven't fired it up again, though, mainly because people wanted some maps and stuff of the ship. I have the outlines of every deck done, but I don't have actual floorplans made, and I'm no longer in the mood to finish them. =) ----- I only wish I had TextMUD's mapping system done... tactical maps will surely be in by version 3.0! There is hope! In the meanwhile, do finish the TCS-Ticonderoga maps. I had fun that night, even though we did have a shaky start. | |
in a real mud there are rooms witch hodl players objects and mobs. in a real mud you have a larg list of commands and scocal commands. in a real mud if you say something only that room will be able to hear you. in a real good mud you are forced to stay in charicter as to enhance the fact that it is a fanticy game. in THE MUD you can do just about anything you can do in real life (run water in a sink, keep food cold in the firdge, have sex, make a paper airplane shoot someone in a specific area of the body, open the window, get stuck to a frozen pole by licking it.. just about anything.) the only problem is it was only up for 28 hours in 1989. | |
jobe wrote:
in a real mud there are rooms witch hodl players objects and mobs. Why not do something like this in BYOND? Its amazingly simple, once you've grasped the concepts of the language. I would have Dawn of Hope to a playable state by now, but I stopped it in favor of another game idea, which seems too cool to pass up and just forget. Mayby I'll work on it again, when this game is up and running. Alathon | |
"...but I stopped it in favor of another game idea, which seems too cool to pass up and just forget. Mayby I'll work on it again, when this game is up and running."
You'd be surprised how often Spuzzum says that. | |
Foomer wrote:
"...but I stopped it in favor of another game idea, which seems too cool to pass up and just forget. Mayby I'll work on it again, when this game is up and running." I don't say that. I say something more like: "...but I stopped it in favour of another game idea, which seemed too cool to pass up and just forget. Maybe I'll work on it again, when this game is up and running." | |
Alathon wrote:
jobe wrote: A game where you can do anything is amazingly simple! mob/verb/emote(msg as text) world << "[usr] [msg]" A game where you can do anything and have the game respond realistically is incredibly complex and takes a bazillion man-hours to write. Though with BYOND you could probably cut it down to 999 kajillion. Z | |
