NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 2385957" data-attributes="member: 2067">Wow, Gentlegamer, that's quite a conspiracy theory you have. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />This is actually wrong. Videogames are *overwhelmingly* eager to embrace easy to understand, light rules. They only have so many buttons on a controller, after all.The more rules for more situations helps at the table, not on the screen. Adding rules for grappling, weapon sizes, treasure, tripping, etc. is not what a videogame looks for. You have one button to press to swing your sword and hit the guy x number of times to kill him, then you move on and do it again to the next guy. Think of some of the most complex CRPG's on the market: MMOs like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, single-player opuses like the Final Fantasy series...every resolution system is astonishingly simple. And I bet to translate D&D into an MMO, Atari has to simplify things, too...because the power and technology doesn't exist to have a character that can grapple, for instance. Or one that can bull rush. Or one that can run a farm. Or one that can knock down any wall given enough time and sword blows. Or one that allows you to cut down trees. Or make jumps. Or climb "unscalable" walls.Videogames exist in a limited, predefined world where the rules need only be as complex as the things that the heroes do. There's no treasure generation rules. There's no CR/EL rules. There's no rules for object hardness and hit points, no rules for snatching items from someone's hand, no rules for grabbing a rope in the rain, no rules for laying seige to a castle, no rules for winning over a crowd or using diplomacy. These are all rules that D&D has that would largely be ignored in a CRPG based on D&D, and have been. So in a CRPG based on D&D, you actually have to *simplify* the rules. It hardly sounds like they benefit from complexity. Speaking as the guy taking Final Fantasy and turning it into a Pen-and-Paper RPG, I've had pretty wide experience with the difference between what makes a fun computer game and what makes a fun pen-and-paper game. And a pen-and-paper game benefits from a complex rule system, where whatever option a character can do is already accounted for in the balance of the rules, making sure that no option becomes overwhelmingly powerful. Systems with a lot of rules (D&D) have to be *reduced* in complexity to accomodate the limitations of computer hardware. Complex rules are a PROBLEM for CRPG's. Which means that the complexity of the rules, far from being there to inspire easier CRPG game play, is actually there in spite of the fact that they make it HARDER to translate into the digital realm, and the complex rules are usually *discarded* in the translation to computer games. While I might need to know in a PnPRPG how to wrestle a hog to the ground, in a CRPG, all I need to know is what button to push to kill things.In fact, the thing that probably makes D&D compatible with computer games the most is the grid system, which is a *simplification* of rules, forgoing complexity and embracing an artificial simplicity.D&D is absolutely NOT designed to be a CRPG first and a PnPRPG second. If it was, it would be a simpler system, more abstract...much like FFd20 is, in trying to mirror a CRPG.</blockquote>

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