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<blockquote data-quote="Glyfair" data-source="post: 3487914" data-attributes="member: 53">In the last Dragon I covered in my thread there was a quote I found interesting in the Electric Eye column.&nbsp; Essentially he suggested that computers would be great at dealing with the mechanical parts of roleplaying with DMs to deal with the parts that deal with imagination.&nbsp; This was in the days of BASIC programming on Radio Shack TRS-80's with 4K of memory.What we have seen with the computer MMORPGs is that the mechanics are dealt with, and the imagination element is reduced significantly.&nbsp; You don't have to imagine the scenery, the combats or the magic because they are displayed for you.&nbsp; This is somewhat like the complaints about TV taking the skill of using your imagination compared to books that were somewhat common in the early days of TV.What I think would be interesting to see would be to take the Electric Eye quote and build a quality RPG around it.&nbsp; I think D&amp;D would be best, because the brand name would give it the sales to get it over the adoption hump easier.&nbsp; Make it parallel to the standard D&amp;D game.Have an electronic device that handles your character.&nbsp; Electronics are getting to the point where each player could have a comparatively inexpensive electronic &quot;character sheet&quot; that would deal with all the mechanical elements of the RPG.&nbsp; Eventually you might have interaction for combats and the like, with DMs being able to tweak results based on their imagination and stories.What this would require, however, is for the game designers to base the game design on it working with the electronic character sheet.&nbsp; The biggest problem with computer character generators today is that when a new rule is introduced the designers put no thought into how the computer will handle it.&nbsp; They come up with a cool new game mechanic, and the character generator programmers have to redesign the character generator to deal with this mechanic, sometimes making major changes for a minor addition to the game.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Glyfair, post: 3487914, member: 53"] In the last [I]Dragon[/I] I covered in my thread there was a quote I found interesting in the Electric Eye column. Essentially he suggested that computers would be great at dealing with the mechanical parts of roleplaying with DMs to deal with the parts that deal with imagination. This was in the days of BASIC programming on Radio Shack TRS-80's with 4K of memory. What we have seen with the computer MMORPGs is that the mechanics are dealt with, and the imagination element is reduced significantly. You don't have to imagine the scenery, the combats or the magic because they are displayed for you. This is somewhat like the complaints about TV taking the skill of using your imagination compared to books that were somewhat common in the early days of TV. What I think would be interesting to see would be to take the Electric Eye quote and build a quality RPG around it. I think D&D would be best, because the brand name would give it the sales to get it over the adoption hump easier. Make it parallel to the standard D&D game. Have an electronic device that handles your character. Electronics are getting to the point where each player could have a comparatively inexpensive electronic "character sheet" that would deal with all the mechanical elements of the RPG. Eventually you might have interaction for combats and the like, with DMs being able to tweak results based on their imagination and stories. What this would require, however, is for the game designers to base the game design on it working with the electronic character sheet. The biggest problem with computer character generators today is that when a new rule is introduced the designers put no thought into how the computer will handle it. They come up with a cool new game mechanic, and the character generator programmers have to redesign the character generator to deal with this mechanic, sometimes making major changes for a minor addition to the game. [/QUOTE]

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