I've been thinking about this for ... about 6 months now, and I'm still struggling with the same problem; maybe some of you guys can give me some suggestions?
Basically, in my view, the d20 system is nice, but a hideous mess for the purposes of consistency checking. Consider: We have an open extensible system with a well defined base rule set. In THEORY this is a brillant place to start making little modules, the basis is set. We can have feats, prestiege classes, rule-changes, and so forth. We can build a custom meta-game by taking the base rules, adding our own little variants to taste. The problem is, there is no way of doing decent consistency checking or error resolution on the results. Latent dependencies are undocumented and often impossibel to find until too late. For an obvious example, look at something like a Red Wizard prestiege class. Obviously including the class as it stands is implies the presence of "Red Wizards" in the game world. What about something more arcane like magic-psionic equivalence? Or including elementals when your world forbids planar travel? Until you've gone and test played some of these things (and even then sometimes it doesn't even click) can you figure out you've created a paradox in the game world. Even worse, because people base their new feat/spell/class/monster/etc. on the existing ones when (mostly) no single clear template exists you can get spells for example, with no defined school, or no type (like ray). These things just pop up again and again when you mix in new module into the game. However, this is not a rant. What I've been thinking about is this: IF you had a clearly defined set of high level structures that defined a set of characteristic requirements for elemental components in the world (eg. a spell requires: name, type, description, caster level say). You could then build on that a set of basic rule-sets. (Yes a SET of basic rule sets) such as combat, magic, and so forth. On top of that you could build a set of custom rules each giving specific rule-set requirements, and a set of custom objects (spells, mobs, etc.) that conform to the high level structures. Even better, you could CHECK anything you wanted to use, look at the requirements and either alter the thing there and then or avoid it completely. Even better you can come up with a set of conflict resolution processes or rule problems and well... STUFF. That's all possible; I've gone a long way toward actually drawing up the documents for a trivial game system example to do so. The problem is, play testing it shows that it puts huge strain on the DM to be hip with the gaming processes, and basically involves an intolerable level of pre-game-world paper work (the bright side is that this is a one-of thing, done for a game world system you plan to use; the down is that you have to do it all again every time you want to add new content). There must be some way of striking a balance, but I cannot for the life of me figure it out. Computerisation helps but puting finite limits on the creativity of an item doesn't work for the examples I've played with. Any suggestions / ideas? I'm -convinced- that d20 (or some super system that we can then port d20 to) is a good idea, and would be fabulous if we could publish a system of formal requirments that made module consistent with the game system, yet allowed for the flexibility and so forth that creation requires... ideally a two phase process of 1) make creative thing and 2) port it to system requirments so DM's don't have to rip their hair out trying to use it. but..like I said. I'm stumped; I'm only doing this in my spare time, and progress has pretty much ground to a halt... Incidentally much of the inspiration comes from software design techniques; since what I initially invision was basically a pen & paper dynamic library system. ... cheers! Doug. _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
