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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 2456406" data-attributes="member: 22424">Adventure Specification LanguageAnother one, this time letting my geeky software engineer side through:It strikes me that most location-based adventures, and many event-based adventures as well, can be described as a flowchart of interlocking rooms. (Actually, this is obvious - just look at the map.) What would be useful is a PC-based tool that allows the DM to quickly whip up the flowchart, without necessarily generating the map itself. The tool would the allow the user to click a button to generate the shell of an adventure, showing boxed text, spaces for monsters, traps, treasure, development, and so on.(The idea is similar to some of the specification languages used in software engineering, and the automatic code generation facilities of the associated tools.)However, the real power of such a tool comes when it allows the user to associate a state machine with some of the boxes, allowing the generation of dynamic dungeon environments. The user is then allowed to generate events that, when they occur, change the state of some of the rooms in the dungeon. (For instance, you have an "Alarm is Raised" event that, when triggered, causes the guards in rooms 4, 6 and 8 to move to room 3.)This can then be used in one of two ways. The DM can either prepare the adventure as before, and print the whole (with very large "Development" sections in the adventure descriptions), or he can run the tool on his laptop while running the adventure. By keeping track of events on the laptop, he can always have an up-to-date status for each room in the dungeon at hand over the course of the evening. (And, at the end of the night, he can store the adventure status in the same tool, and have a clear record for the next session.)(I haven't looked at Dunjinni. It may well do something like this already. However, I would be surprised if it didn't start from the map and work outwards, where it may well be better to start with an abstract of the adventure, and generate both the map and the descriptions from that. If nothing else, it's easier to squeenze an extra room into a flowchart than a carefully-crafted map of the dungeon.)</blockquote>

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