Editorial ToEE post mortem light on Hulver

[Saint_Proverbius]

Tags: Temple of Elemental Evil

There's a neat semi-short <A href="http://www.hulver.com/scoop/story/2004/4/30/14159/4449">Hulver</a> talking about the rules implimentation in <a href="http://greyhawkgame.com/">Temple of Elemental Evil</a>, apparently written by one of the people who worked on the game. It's apparently a reply to <A href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/4/10/231927/504">this piece</a> on <A href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/">kuro5hin</a>. Anyway, here's a clip:
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<blockquote>D&D 3.5E, more than any other version of Dungeons and Dragons, is very well suited to computer representation. The rules are extremely well defined, with often little or no room for interpretation on the part of the DM. The rules for the players apply equally well to the monsters, and there are far fewer exceptions or special cases to the rules than in previous editions. Care was taken to facilitate play with miniatures on a map, and so there are many rules involving movement and line of sight. This corresponds more directly to a computer game than previous editions, which represented the battlefield more abstractly. The fact that all the rules are so precisely documented was a great asset to the implementation effort.</blockquote>
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Five foot step! Not four foot or four point five foot, just five foot!
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Thanks, <b>protobob</b>!

 

[Jed]

Too bad the average computer gamer no longer posesses the attention span to learn more rules than, say, Diablow.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

I think this is the time for me to say: Fuck I hate D&D.

The wonderful benefit of making your own system for a PC game is that you don't have to deal with 100,000 variations or potential problems with 'breaking the rules' depending on how you implement them or how a rule nazi feels about it.

The level cap is partly responsible for a lack of deathmatching capability in single player or otherwise, and this therefore means a lack of robust gameplay at this time. My specific point being, if there is an end to player development, that is parallel to an end of character development (in what you may find in a movie), which is a show-stopper. CRPG must support infinite leveling in the future or people are going to continue to be bored or annoyed with future releases. Furthermore, future releases of content must be content only releases that add new areas of exploration and new ideas; perhaps by leaving quest creation in the hands of willing Story Tellers, or Dungeon Masters (like Neverwinter Nights, only better).

I completely disagree with this (in the original article at kuroshin). If you finish a game, that's the reason you buy another game. The same way you buy another adventure or more rule-books with tougher monsters etc... Infinite levelling so you can face infinitely tougher opponents in wave after wave of infinite attacks? Give me a break, that's nothing more than boredom central.

 

[Sol Invictus]

The guy who wrote that is probably one of those people who watches daytime soap operas all day, preferring the 'on-going' storyline over a good movie or a well produced, high quality TV series with a limited number of seasons.

You know what, I'd take The O.C. over Days of our Lives any fucking day of the week.

 

[MrBrown]

The difficulty in implementing DnD 3E to CRPGs probably lies in the huge amount of special abilities (feats, spells, class abilities, monster abilities). Alot of them might work in a completely unique way, which makes the programmer's job of creating the data structures and the routines for interaction between objects (creatures) in the game even more harder.

Well, there's been some developers saying it's hard some saying it's easy, but not many give a comprehensive view, really. The most information that article had was the part Saint quoted.

 

[Rosh]

Well, with the right kind of data structures, it should be fairly easy. Hell, you could do the rules precalculations in Excel if you wanted to and felt froggy enough.