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="clearstream" data-source="post: 8289434" data-attributes="member: 71699">I was asking myself - what separates SP from a videogame?1. One element (there may be others) might be that SP relies on the availability of improvised-action resolution. Players faced with a concrete challenge are expected to be widely inventive in an RPG, but so far most videogames require very specific actions to address each obstacle. That is changing, with games like Valheim offering players far greater ability to inventively deal with challenges. They do that by establishing versatile and consistent world physics and creature behaviour, so that players can leverage what they know in a vast number of ways.2. Another element could be dungeon variety, although I suspect videogames are overtaking this. The DMG contains guidelines for procedural dungeon generation, trap construction kits, and monster creation. Procedural game worlds are already vast. AI generated game worlds will be vastly varied.3. Then there is the matter of DM response to player success. The arms race. So far videogames adapt only along fairly simple lines to player ability. Detection of player skill is at a basic level, and response is dialling up a relatively narrow set of parameters. That said, success training AIs to play videogames will amount to producing AIs that can judge player skill, and perhaps adjust challenge far more diversely. I was also asking myself - is a VTT like Fantasy Grounds the best format for SP? The VTT helps a DM to more consistently enforce equipment limits, encumbrance, many of the process rules, most of the action rules. EDIT However, VTTs can make managing improvised actions - especially those intended to be in-the-fiction - more difficult. For example, in Fantasy Grounds if you want to let a player spend a Hit Die for something that shouldn't heal them, you must process the heal and then remove it. Possibly though, this is just a matter of giving players a few more options for control over what the system enforces. The VTT can - but does not have to - also intrude in roleplay. I believe developers of VTTs have a lot more user experience design to do in future.</blockquote>

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