Motivation: Internet forums being a effective (?) communication and storage medium has spawned people role playing online, however I know of no good game system that exists for the forum environment. I was discouraging to see an Gundam RPG ran with only rules such as "you can not dodge too much or avoid taking effective damage for too long" and leave discretion at the players and requring alot of outside intervension to make the game fair. A resolution system, no matter how flawed, is at least fixable and objective. Disputes would be about the system rather than a billion disputes between players. While I have seen systems that are run on forums, most are either boring or ineffective.
Strength and Weaknesses: Any gaming system that is to be build up on a forum must acknowledge the strength and weakness of the said medium, which is listed below.
Weaknesses:
1. Slow response time, as different time zones and such can result in posts needing something on the order of a day to respond.
2. Lack of build in random number generator.
3. No face to face contact might limit some forms of communication.
4. Lack of build in processing capacity, requiring player calculation.
5. No way of doing a double blind without outside intervension.
Strength:
1. Potential for a large player pool. If properly organized, a forum game can be magnitudes larger than a table top or pen and paper game.
2. Large data storage capacity, magnitudes more then card games and still larger than board games as text can be easily manipulated to store petty much everything. The limitation lies only the player's attention and processing capacity.
3. Potentially long times can be devoted to the game, as forum junkies can spend hours a day over years on forums.
Objectives:
Create a game system, in the order of importance
1. Result in interesting game play
2. Is paced so that each command is long, but the number of commands require to resolve a event is low
3. Allows mutiple people to participate in a event effectively
4. PC to PC interactions should require low/no third party intervention
5. The game must be fair and not allow cheating
6. The system must be simple to learn
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Now the problem is two fold, one is the lack of random number generation and the second lies in difficulty in creating a turn system that can allow some kind of reasonable pace.
With random number generation, if a suitable pseudo-random seed number can be found on the basic forum software than a third party application (on websites) can be used to generate the random numbers. Even if such a system is potentially cheatable by hacking the third party algorithm, it would be too difficult for casual gamers. The problem is that there is no suitable seed number, as the traditional seed number, time, is only accurate up to the minute for forums, where the player can certainly cheat by timing it with the clock and entering the potential times ahead.
Now of course it is possible to make a game without probability and still be interesting, however they require someway of building up complexity so that the optimal solution is not obvious, and that is difficult in a rpg setting where player only play one or two pieces.
The second problem lies in the turn structure and how games tend to grow far too long for something to happen. For example if we look at the traditional turn structure.
Player 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-......etc
Now this structure is reasonablely fair if the first turn is not overtly powerful. However this system is also slow, since everyone have to wait for the next person to post.
Ideally, a turn structure that is as restrictive should be faster, for example
4 players in any order - resolution - 4 player in any order - resolution -....etc
However the player that orders later than other players have a advantage in this case.
Alternatively, the turn structure can be made into this:
1 player that hadn't moved - resolution - 1 player that hadn't moved- resolution -player - resolution - player -resolution - next turn
However there are potentials for expliotation here, for example countious attack from the end of one turn to the start of the next, and deny the opposition time to respond.
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So anyone have any good ideas? I'm sure my lack of experience with pen and paper system probably have limited my imagination on what can be done.
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