D&Dvolution?

[Mark CMG]

As for the economic gain to be had, I think it has been the perception of large companies such as WotC that the gains would be modest at best.

I honestly do not know what the perception of large companies has been in the past . . .

Shall we light the Dancey-signal?

 

[Mark CMG]

No, but I say that no change that would only be there to make the programmers' lifes easier, or that would even hurt the system to help the programmers, should be even considered.

I don't know that any decision that could be made that would make a programmers life easier would ever be made only for that purpose, would be admitted to have been made only for that purpose, nor would actually be made only for that purpose. As to whether decisions are made that hurt the system for whatever reason, that's something that gets debated endlesly with every change and is often a matter of perspective. It is the crux of edition wars.

 

[Aeolius]

edit: wrong thread... that'll teach me top keep two EN World threads open at once

 

[theemrys]

If you haven't already you might want to take a look at DM Genie (www.dmgenie.com).

I have found it a great tool for my D&D (D20) games. It's pretty good "out of the box" and also provides lots of room for customizing as needed...

 

[Mark CMG]

(snip)

Thanks but this is meant to be more of a discussion about the direction of the system and not about specific third party products that handle character generation/management programs. That's certainly a good one, though, so no offense to anyone concerned.

 

[theemrys]

No problem. Sorry for taking it down the wrong path!

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

I've spent a lot of time, and I do mean a lot of time, thinking about computerizing character generators and even the entire D&D rule set. It's non-trivial. I'm fairly confident that given enough free time (or paid time), I could come up with something cool, but I hesitate to say that it would sell well to a wide audience. Everything from here on out is related to how I, as a software engineer, think that a computerized character-generator should work, meaning IMO.

In order to support everyone, you need to make it easy for GMs to enter their arbitrarily complex house rules. I don't use character generators because inevitably I come to a point where I'm using a supplement, or a house rule, that the generator doesn't support. At that point it's, Wham, bam, thanks for playing because the entire point of the generator (mainly validation), is out the window. That means that logistically you need to be able to support supplements as soon as they ship (assuming that you want to support said supplements quickly), meaning that you need to coordinate print and electronic releases. In my view, this gives you one of two development models: (1) you have a simple document editor that basically just sums up numbers in boxes but doesn't really validate anything (see Mad Irishman's form-fillable PDFs) or (2) you have a highly abstract system, tied together loosely by some sort of scripting language, and you keep a permanent staff of developers to code each supplement.

In reality, I think that Mark is at least partially correct. From a business standpoint, if you're going to produce an electronic character generator, the electronic generator will, on some level, influence the published material.

 

[Umbran]

The target market being discussed is the combined markets of tabletop gamers and CRPGers, not one or the other, nor just the current overlap.

No, we were not. At least not yet.

Your contention seems to be that the rules are too complicated to do good software tools (for the combined market) - your examples being the failures of the WotC chargen projects like Master Tools (which were never intended for the combined market, but might stand as a suggestion that the rules are too complicated for software).

My contention is that the rules complexity has nothing to do with those failures - those projects failed because they were not properly managed or developed, likely because they'd be risky to do "with four part harmony and feeling" in the current market. You questioned my thoughts about the economics behind that failure, and I backed up my logic with an off-the-cuff estimate.

So, I return - the rules complexity has nothing to do with it. WotC doesn't have good electronic support now because developing it is expensive for the size of the market now. If the target market were to change, so that they stood to make more money, they could throw a proper team at it and the rules would not impede them from creating good stuff for it.

The DI may well be an attempt to change the size of the market....

So, what we then need to discuss is what the "combined market" might be, or if it can exist at all.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm going to have to agree with Umbran: Every MMORPG is more complicated under the hood than D&D is, just in the sense of how fiddly the rules are (although I guess they could just go OGL and solve a lot of that in future). But since there's an expected return on investment, they all manage to run just fine.

 

[Mark CMG]

The target market being discussed is the combined markets of tabletop gamers and CRPGers, not one or the other, nor just the current overlap.

No, we were not. At least not yet.

Yes. The target market being discussed is the combined markets of tabletop gamers and CRPGers, not one or the other, nor just the current overlap.

Your contention seems to be that the rules are too complicated to do good software tools (. . .)

My contention is that there might be a feeling that a trend to simplify the rules could make crossover between platforms (tabletop, CRPGs, online tools, etc.) more attractive to consumers from all walks due to a certain amount of homogenization.

So, what we then need to discuss is what the "combined market" might be, (. . .)

It is already a part of the discussion of this thread. The target market being discussed is the combined markets of tabletop gamers and CRPGers, not one or the other, nor just the current overlap.

 

[Mark CMG]

No problem. Sorry for taking it down the wrong path!

Not a problem.

From a business standpoint, if you're going to produce an electronic character generator, the electronic generator will, on some level, influence the published material.

Plug in the simultaneous development of the CRPG (and the homogenization of the three) and you'll be discussing the scenario I think might be in the minds of some developers.