Any Pen & Paper Role Players here?

An excerpt from the HPQuest Dev Adventure "Blazer Rising":

After a long night of drinking, you awake in a cubicle no larger than 8'w,8'l,8'h. You lay on a damp crickety floor made of dried hardwood 2x4s. A billion dust particles flow in the streams of yellow sunblades piercing through the slits of the misaligned ceiling planks. The room is calmly illuminated. The walls and ceilings appear to be made of the same wood and there are no windows.

You feel wetness on your skin from the heated moisture in the air. The smell of meldew fills your nostrils. The pungent sour of ale and stomach acid coats your mouth. You take a long-deep inhale that stretches into a yawn. You exhale, smacking your tongue against the roof of your mouth in a feckless effort to remove the rancid taste.

BAM! You feel intense cranial pain as if you just gulped down a massive mouthful of SLURPEE. A Sour Ale Slurpee. You shut your eyes tightly. You use both palms as a vise, clamping your head firmly as if you are trying to keep your brain from spilling out. As the brainfreeze fades you slowly open your eyes. Your head hangs over, staring downward. You notice a deep carving into the wooden floor:

I think it might help if you decided on a genre first, then develop a rules system that works for that genre.

Why re-invent the wheel. Just utilise the Open Gaming License and use the D20 ruleset.

HPQuest (Hit Point Quest) is a "First-Person", Play-by-Post, User-Driven Fantasy Role Playing Game that takes place in a imaginary world filled with Magic-Powered Technology, Sword-Wielding Warriors, and Dragons. A world known as Ryloth.


IMHO, DnD is the father of all RPGs, no matter the ruleset, DnD rules exist somewhere in there:) However, I desire a Ruleset unique to HPQuest. I aim to fish out anyone interested in getting on the ground floor of developing this RPG.

Why do you need help coming up with the ruleset? Keep it simple and it should be a one man job.

Agreed. Perhaps, I should have said Rule eBook that includes Monster/Spell/Skill Catalogs, that would be more precise. I'm developing the rules based on contributions from others. I have ideas, but others may offer better ideas. If you have any ideas you would like to contribute register your Character at HPQuest to get in the ground floor of development.

Do you realize how long it takes the creators of rule sets such as DND, Adventure Quest, and Mutants and Masterminds to come up with those rule sets? It's no simple task. Let alone coming up with full catalogs of monsters, spells, skills, items, etc....

I DM for DND 3rd edition and Mutants and Masterminds every other friday night.. The rule sets for a good pen and paper rpg are very complex and well thought out.


Forgive me Frank... But your reputation for starting projects and leaving them half in the bag is getting very well known... I don't believe you have alot of 'fishing' you can do here anymore, this pond is 'fished' out....

Plasma
THE REBIRTH OF PROJECT PLASMA FPS
PersistentWorld3D
Tournament Blitz
A few community projects

I was part of two of those, both were abandoned....

Good luck to you though

I saw there was a chat program designed for people to play pen and paper rpg's online. I can't remember the name of it though. It was pretty cheap if I remember it correctly.

> I DM for DND 3rd edition and Mutants and Masterminds every other friday night.. The rule sets for a good pen and paper rpg are very complex and well thought out.

I'd have to disagree, DnD is one of the least thought out and worst systems ever. You want a well designed system play GURPS, HERO, or the GDW house system.

Agreed and this is the reason for seeking other RPG Fans who would like to create the rules and content. I don't expect this be created over night.

True. I had my share of failed overly-complicated Blitz3D Projects. I have learned a great deal from these failures and have made efforts to give back to community when I can. I would like to believe that one day I will be forgiven.

The Blitz Community has been my inspiration for a "First-Person" Forum-based Role Playing Game. Everyone here communicates in their own unique way. You can feel the personality behind the words. I want to capture this experience in a Forum RPG.

HPQuest is Game Ready. Character Sheets and Dice Rolling System are implemented and fully functional. All that remains is to establish some basic gameplay rules for GM's and Players to add their own content and create their own Quest.

Thanks Craig. I'm using phpBB version 3, which supports "Chat-Forums".

It's not an issue of forgiveness, because there's nothing to forgive. The issue is whether you're going to do the same things again. You're back here trying to start another huge project, and again you can't do it alone, so again you're asking for it to become a community project? So what exactly has changed? What exactly have you learned? Both the sites in your profile ( TB and PYF ) appear to be dead. Your current project has all the same signs as the previous one. It's not exactly screaming "I've learned a great deal from these failures", is it?

Well, although I would agree to a certain degree, the system is still better then the 1st or 2nd versions (THACO sucked).



I have nothing against you personally. Voicing my opinion in this thread was merely a observation really as I try to avoid the threads you start chalking them up to "Frank is starting another 'soon to be dropped' project".

Personally I hate to see other's time being wasted to an un-recoverable degree. And putting as much time I did into plasma to find out later on that you had moved to other projects left me feeling that it was a complete waste of personal time (since I was still devoting alot of time to the project). That one sort of ruined the whole community project experience for me.......

Oh well, live and learn eh?!

Surely that was a joke. I mean GURPS has a breathing skill. A BREATHING SKILL. And HERO is so complex it used to come with a computer program just to help make the characters.

The D20 system is simple and adapable, it could at least be used as a base ruleset. It just seems silly to spend months playtesting a new ruleset when you could just use one that Hasbro's R'n'D team has been testing and refining for years.

The thing with D20 system is just that to me it seems to make role-playing a lot less role-playing sometimes. There are more simple systems out there, and one such should not be too difficult to create either.

> Surely that was a joke.

No it was not. I cringe in horror every time I see an old game system I liked translated over to D20. The rules in D20 are convoluted and not easily transferrable to any other setting. But to each his own.

[EDIT] as for the breathing skill, you don't need it for the characters to be able to breath. If you want to create Harry Houdini it is probbly helpful though. Being a universal system GURPS has lots of things that sound silly - until they are need in a particular genre.

I'm a friend and beta tester of the editor of Osric, a copyright free remake of 1st edition AD&D. You could try it out: http://www.knights-n-knaves/osric

I've done a few forum based roleplay before, and i've found that by far the best games where those that hid the system behind creative writing - when the characters treated each post like a few paragraphs of a book, it worked best. When you get characters that just post their actions then it gets really dull really fast.

Unfortunately no amount of rules will determine what sort of a writer a person is.

Thanks for the excellent reference. Took a lil time to figure out why the link wasnt working. Missing the '.com'. hehe



A majority of the Forum-based RPGs that I have participated in, hid the system so well that they became moreso a adventure in collective creative writing than a adventure in a RPG Game. Simply put, mechanics that make a RPG a game, disappeared. I would like to promote creative writing with a "First-Person" perspective, combined with RPG mechanics (character stats, inventory list, dice rolls, maps) for a interactive 'game' experience.

Only LoreCrafters (GMs) narrate the story from a third-person perspective. They describe how the environment and events effect the players/inhabitants/etc and introduce the interactive elements to players. The LoreCrafter can control all aspects of the Quest (to include players) through the story from a third-person perspective. Example: The group moves swifty {North:9.0.1} through the woods to the Cave of The Dracos Siren {7.0.1}.

The players describe how the environment and events effect them individually and their response to the experience from a first-person perspective. This is slightly different from a third-person perspective for example: "Sir Vigil takes aim with his trusty Bow, inhales deeply as he steadily pulls back the bow string; he exhales slowly chanting the {Attack Spell: FireFly} ."

In first-person, Players use pronouns to refer to themselves such as I ,me, and my. So taking the above third-person example one could apply personal pronouns: "I take aim my trusty Bow, inhaling deeply as I steadily pull back the bow string; I exhale slowly chanting the {Attack Spell: FireFly} ."

IMHO, posting in this manner can offer the same creative writing experience. I also encourage Players use very detailed descriptions to avoid posting simple actions which would get dull really fast. I encourage both GMs & Players to use a "5 Sense Approach". With the 5 Sense Approach, Players describe in vivid detail what they see, hear, taste, smell, feel in response to the environment/events.


True. However, we can provide guidelines/examples of creative writing that help convey how ones physical, mental, and emotional state towards their enviroment, group members, take on the world etc. IMHO its all in the words one chooses, arranges, and displays in their post.

For example, you can shout in your post by typing words in ALL CAPS. You can convey the level of your characters intelligence by using longer words {IQ=30+} or skipping words/letters {IQ<12} . You use a secret language/code within post to communicate with others unique to your <Species, Guild, etc>. You can add dialect in your post by using archaic/middle-english second-person pronoun such as Thou.

IMHO creative writing in first-person is more intuitive.

On the contrary, Frank didn't do anything that anyone else here isn't guilty of. He got bored with projects and started new ones. We ALL do it. He just did it in a more public manner. So before you start throwing stones, go look in your Blitz3D folder at all your unfinished projects...you might be a hypocrite.


There's nothing to forgive.

Hello.

MERP.

Goodbye.

True about unfinished projects however before you jump on the defense perhaps you should look at the number of "Starting a community project" or "I have an idea, anyone else want to help" threads that I (or anyone else) have started, and that Frank has started....

Tell you what, anyone who has started a community project or asked the community for help with their current project please post "Aye". If you haven't, post "Naye"

Naye

As for my unfinished projects in my Blitz3d folder, well yeah, the unfinished will always outweigh the finished, but I am getting very close to a 50/50 ratio between the two..

But if good ole Frankie Taylor wants to start another community project, and you feel so inclined to join in on the 'fun'.. Don't complain when it's dropped after a month or so when "He got bored with projects" and your still working on it to find your the only one working on it.... Perhaps you'll be "throwing stones" then?!?

Why would someone take this so personally? Because some believe their time is valuable, at least to a certain degree. When one's time is utterly wasted, you feel taken advantage off. When a project is started, you expect that at the very least the coordinator has the motivation to finish it, esp after going to all the trouble to gather people for the project. When the coordinator drops projects before completion (best of all without letting the rest know) and starting another project looking for people again. You feel a bit jaded......

I'm sure Gabriel can agree that there is a pattern emerging here. Mr. Taylor only comes into these forums when he is ready to start said community project. After that, he disappears, the project fails, he lays low for a month or two, and then comes back to start another...


http://www.blitzmax.com/Community/userposts.php?user=223&page=2

I'm just simply pointing out that everyone has done it in one way or another. Some private, some public.


If he did I'm sure a lot would be hesitant to join in...but it's a risk you take. Thousands of companies are started and fail every year. Not everyone can succeed, but you can't scold them for trying. I'd rather try and fail than to not try at all.


/agree


I call this persistence. Persistence = success. He knows what he wants to do and keeps coming back to it. He may rub a few people wrong in the process but eventually, he'll get it right. Those that don't want to take a risk with Frank anymore don't have to.

Yeah, your right, let them learn the hard way......

The Rules for HPQuest are shaping up quite well. My goal is to keep tight Attribute set, Calculations simple, yet allow lots of flexibility for LCs and Adventurers. I have taken influences from GURPS, Osric, Adventure Quest, and Final Fantasy.

I'm still open for any new ideas.

An excerpt from the HPQuest Dev Adventure "Blazer Rising":

After a long night of drinking, you awake in a cubicle no larger than 8'w,8'l,8'h. You lay on a damp crickety floor made of dried hardwood 2x4s. A billion dust particles flow in the streams of yellow sunblades piercing through the slits of the misaligned ceiling planks. The room is calmly illuminated. The walls and ceilings appear to be made of the same wood and there are no windows.

You feel wetness on your skin from the heated moisture in the air. The smell of meldew fills your nostrils. The pungent sour of ale and stomach acid coats your mouth. You take a long-deep inhale that stretches into a yawn. You exhale, smacking your tongue against the roof of your mouth in a feckless effort to remove the rancid taste.

BAM! You feel intense cranial pain as if you just gulped down a massive mouthful of SLURPEE. A Sour Ale Slurpee. You shut your eyes tightly. You use both palms as a vise, clamping your head firmly as if you are trying to keep your brain from spilling out. As the brainfreeze fades you slowly open your eyes. Your head hangs over, staring downward. You notice a deep carving into the wooden floor:

Making a mental note never to carve your name into strange floor carvings, you close your eyes and try to catch a bit more sleep. Retrieving the Qune of Fury and possessing the power of the Gods are all well and good, but right now you'd be happy if the room would just stop spinning and to be wearing a shirt that didn't reek quite so much of vomit. Gloomily, you can't help thinking that both possibilities are, for the moment at least, even less likely than a hungover amnesiac defeating the Fire-Metal Dragon Bahu.

THE END.

Adventure over!

You should thank me, Frankie. Now you don't need to go through the hard work and difficulty of creating a role playing system! Think of all the wonderful things that you can do with your newly free time. Like taking a walk in the park. Or watching TV. Or reading a book.

@JustLuke: You reawaken refreshed. There is no vomit, no hangover. Your HP is fully restored to 100. What you imagined to be a hard dusty floor of misaligned planks of wood, has been replaced with the comforts of your own bed. You have exited the HPQuest Dev Adventure "Blazer Rising".