The Next BIG THING? Dynamic Adventure Generation

[winter]

I just tried out a new online adventure magazine, direkobold.com (after reading some threads in the D20 Publishers forum), that creates customized PDF adventures. It generated a very customized adventure, complete with pictures, mini-character sheets, treasure, etc. My immediate thought was:

--> Why didn't anyone ever do this before?!

Perhaps the technology was not really up to it until now, but I am just surprised that this hasn't already been done.

Last month I tried scaling an adventure for the campaign I run, and it was way too painful and time-consuming--I gave up. DireKobold, on the other hand, let me scale the adventure EXACTLY for my party. I was impressed that it's a full sized module, with lots of encounters and NPCs, and as far as I can tell, it has dozens, maybe even hundreds of possible variations. I'm going to run my party through the dire kobold adventure this Friday.

There must be a lot of extra writing that went into it. One of the D20 authors who writes for dire kobold mentioned that it was harder to write dynamic adventures, but I wonder HOW much harder.

Is the idea really that non-obvious, or is it just really hard to do? Could this be the next big idea in adventure publishing?

This is the first time I've been brave enough to post here--please don't flame me too much!

 

[Terraism]

Hiya, then, Winter - no flaming on your first post, promise! Maybe the second, or third...

Seriously, welcome to the boards. May you find them as engrossing - and addictive - as the lot of us seem to.

Ok, on topic - first off, I've never heard of the thing, but I'm definitely taking a look right now. As far as it being difficult - whew, boy, I can only imagine. I'm not sure the exact details, but in order to see it all piece together? That's gotta be nuts. Wow. Anyway - thanks for pointing it out, 'cause it looks incredibly interesting - and, again, welcome aboard.

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

I agree that this is AWESOME.

I'm sure it takes a lot of extra development to do this, but hey, as a publisher, you can significantly increase your target audience by appealing to DM's with groups at different levels. I'm SURE I'm not the only DM to skip buying a module because my current party level is way different.

Super marketing hat on:

Other publishers can enter a licensing agreement with Direkobold.com allowing them to customize adventures for their customers ( print module + key code? )

Lots of possibilities!

My sample download is in the queue...

 

[Ashy]

I actually had the idea about two years ago and almost got my own D20 company up and running to do this, but my funding kinda went away at the last minute. More to the point, I am working with Ross and DireKobold on this and let me tell you - this is just the tip of the iceberg! More awesome ideas to come!!!!

 

[Terraism]

Alright - having taken a further look, I can only say that I'm more astonished. I'd thought originally that you meant it was a kind of random dungeon generator, save the final result was packaged in a PDF and had flavour text and all; at the time I had no idea this was what it boiled down to. This is awesome stuff. If I wasn't already getting some form of online money for here, this would be my incentive - and, Ashy, if this is just the tip, I can't wait to see more.

 

[wighair]

I haven't actually read the contents of my 5 characters, level 7 version of this yet, but the principle behind this is excellent.

Now signing off to read MY scenario!

Top quality first post btw!

 

[Graf]

Nice.

Not sure how I feel about the subscription thing. But the beta will give a good chance to figure out.

While having a level range is nice I would like to see more of a range. 1 to 7 is decent but you'd probably get a much bigger swath of the gaming contiengent with something like 5-12 or so. I suppose it will depend adventure to adventure.

The submisson form also doesn't work with Opera but worse things have happened. I'll use explorer for a good cause.

 

[Zappo]

Hey, this is nice! Could someone - Ashy? - say something about the technicalities of the system? Is it XML-based?

 

[Ashy]

I think that Ross will need to comment on that - there are very likely some things therein that should not be mentioned, which I would probably (and accidentially) mention... Anywho, I'll direct Ross to this thread ASAP.

 

[EOL]

Nice.

Thanks!

Not sure how I feel about the subscription thing. But the beta will give a good chance to figure out.

That's why we're doing it we want to give everyone a chance to try before they buy. Which is why When Dire Kobolds Attack! will always be freely available.

While having a level range is nice I would like to see more of a range. 1 to 7 is decent but you'd probably get a much bigger swath of the gaming contiengent with something like 5-12 or so. I suppose it will depend adventure to adventure.

It does depend on the adventure, essentially whatever level the core adventure was written for I take it a few levels down and a few levels up so that there is always at least a range of 7 levels, and there will be plenty of adventures in a higher range.

The submisson form also doesn't work with Opera but worse things have happened. I'll use explorer for a good cause.

I had been meaning to check it with Opera, I'll take a look and see if I can fix it.

Hey, this is nice! Could someone - Ashy? - say something about the technicalities of the system? Is it XML-based?

It's all done with perl....