Places in my Past
I invoke the Book of James Taylor (Chapter Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon) within the title to bring up Sigma again, after having read a very dry Wikipedia article about GURPS, which is a very dry alternative to D&D with some interesting thoughts behind it.
Apparently, the Fallout system was based on GURPS, but then it was changed and whatnot. But, the core is there. Some core of “D&D sucks in some ways, guys. Here’s how we’re going to change it.”
The fruity factor is there, no doubt. Getting assigned “points for having a good roleplaying session” is not only difficult to automate, it is not friendly to anything but the most friendly of tabletop games. Having never even sat in on a tabletop session, I would be at a loss in many ways.
One thing I like is the missile/melee idea. I could see having a “shoot” and “charge” command, which would flip a toggle between “I’m too far away to take a swing” and “I’m too close to get a shot off.” However, as a fairly individualistic MUD player, I prefer to avoid deliberately hampering one-on-one combat playability. In my opinion, instituting a system for missile weapons constrains missle-lovers to two-player-plus grouping interactions with the game.
Kind of like Dennis Leary’s bike cop bit, or the existence of clerics in virtually any game. “Here’s a whistle and a pair of shorts. Stop crime.” “Here’s a heal spell. Help someone else stop crime.”
Basically, range guys are tools. Especially in text games. Yeah, if you have the freedom of an n-by-n grid hexagonal tessellation gameboard, you can put on your running shoes and do some damage (Champions of Norrath, by the way, was all about this in sticky portions of the game).
However, text makes things difficult, as the whole tick-based temporal resolution and room-by-room spatial resolution are a little too grainy for such sophisticated visual analogs.
This, strikingly, is the whole reason I am irrevocably drawn to MUDs. Much like physics or any other hard science, MUDs boil reality down to a simplified model. They posit, “We only have text,” then ask, “What really matters?” “What do we actually have to provide to make this believable, captivating, entertaining?”
Speaking of television within a parable, Vonnegut states (you can actually read the whole excerpt here), “Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit.” This, to me, is World of Warcraft compared to the art of constructing a believable textual environment. As brilliant and beautiful is the gameplay and system, a significant binding constraint seems to lie in the visual effect of the game.
Anyway, I will probably never really make the game bigger than it is. It was a proof of concept from the start. To make myself feel better about letting this child of mine die, I might list what I managed to do:
- Select and integrate a script interpreter
- Prove that DTD-validated XML is probably the best way to get clean data into a designer-oriented program
- Prove that inheritance and polymorphism actually become a boon to the programmer when you’re not just writing a Yahtzee program (“Yeah, I’ll teach the class.” Ah, high school.)
- Learn what synchronous I/O multiplexing means
Anyway, as I’m coming to a close on this immeasurably long post, I get the sense I have written about GURPS before. Oh well.