Web Based NWN style

[hallsofvallhalla]

As it has been said many times by many different people, I miss the old days of Pen and Paper RPGs, the old fun of games like Hero Quest. It draws a question to my mind. Would players play a game where they have a rule set and a vast collection of items, creatures, ect.. but they have the ability to create adventures for any player to play.

In other words have a website/community where players build their characters online, then they can play player made adventures or build adventures for other players. All adventure building is rule bound by your level or status, for instance a level 1 player could only use level 1 creatures and items to build an adventure, while a level 10 could use up to level 10 things, or have it open ended for people to build what they want.

The main thing is a place for people to build adventures and other players to play them. It could be like Pen and paper where it is all text or more like Hero Quest where you build the maps and it is board game style. All the rules, items, creatures, ect are already made much like NWN so it would be easy to build adventures. It would basically be like a web based NWN with a close knit community.

[Jackolantern]

One of my problems with the NWN games, is that it was too much like game development, and not enough like DMing. While this isn't really a bad thing, it really doesn't hold true to what they were trying to do. What I mean by that is that a "DM" who made adventures in NWN had to sometimes spend months making areas and scripting quests and dialog. Because of that, the adventures tended to be more generic and mass distributed. It was really not economical to sit down and make a full, 8 - 16 hour adventure for one group of your friends and then throw it away and make another when you were done.

One of the great things about pen'n'paper D&D was the content creation vs. consumption ratio. An average DM could make an adventure in about 16 hours that could last for about 8 hours (provided they did not go crazy making digital maps and all of that kind of stuff). So you could make personalized, detailed adventures that could be discarded afterward, and quickly make another for next week's session. That way the adventure's players could have an adventure that is targeted at them, and offering them situations and decisions that help them truly role-play and grow as characters.

I guess where I am going with this, is that it would be nice for a game to somehow have both. Maybe a very fast "wizard-style" adventure creator to just plug-in the basics of the adventure, dialog, etc. to make an adventure tailored to a specific set of players that would allow them to grow as characters like in a pen'n'paper game. Or, if DMs have higher aspirations, they could also spend months working on an adventure down to every detail and distribute it to a wide audience.

[hallsofvallhalla]

you hit the nail right on the head. That is exactly what I was trying to say. All the content created, you just put the adventure together in a fast and easy way. I agree about NWN, such a pain to make a long fun adventure.

[MAruz]

NWN was quite complicated to create adventures in, nothing I would do to have a RPG session with my group, but I think the potential for online persistent worlds were excellent. I played on the server Arabel for three years or something like that, and enjoyed it allot.

It's true that DMs had to spend allot of time developing the quests and areas, but in a 2d (I assume?) web based system you could avoid that. I'd also say that halls idea of restricted adventure building, you could have the same kind of restricted DMing system.

A DM (in reallity, just another player who take the role of a DM for a particular adventure his friends want to play, could be made by the player, or someone else) could run the adventure, with the ability to distribute appropriate amounts of xp and loot suited to level of the characters involved.

With the DM, the adventure could be just as dynamic as with pen & paper, reacting to the players actions. Allot would be impossible to do/represent in the browser, but that's where the traditional imagination kicks in as with pen & paper

If you intend to start up a project like this, I would gladly want to help out. I've actually just started to create a "character builder" in Java, mostly for my own learning though.

[Jackolantern]

I had an idea that could help with fast adventure building. What if every piece of every adventure (outside of dialog and proper names) was shared in the community? There would be no "make an area, and then decide to share with the community or not". If you make it, it is part of the community's toolbox. That way, your more endeavorous developers could spend as long as they want building up the pieces of their adventure, but a ready-made collection of adventure pieces would build up quickly. When a more classical pen'n'paper DM simply wants to create a tailored, throw-away adventure for his friends, all he has to do is assemble the ready-made pieces and write some dialog for their core quests. Some assets that could work like this:

1. Areas
2. Random NPCs with pre-programmed dialogue (so the DM has background characters to interact with)
3. Mobs
4. Bosses
5. Items
6. Gear
7. Quest templates (to fill in specifics by the designing DM)
8. Full quests (this one would probably be best to make optional for sharing)

Designers could be ranked by how many DMs use their story assets, and maybe the top designers could get some kind of perks to reward them for making content.

[hallsofvallhalla]

all good ideas and this is somewhat what I meant with HeroQuest. You have "pieces" you added to the map to quickly build an adventure. Same with this system but like Jack said, have pre-made ones built for everyone to use that would make adventure building a snap.

[The fix]

I seen games similar to NWN style, but more or less applying Jack's ideas. They seem to go off well, at least I think the games I have seen had a decent amount of player base. Nothing large scale like 1K plus, but a few hundred. Personally, I have never really gotten into those types of games.