The Dresden Files Role Playing Game Form

One word: computers.Hutch Hubbard did a great job of describing the social side of it. But I think the greatest effect was the result of computers. I wasn’t the only Game Master who wrote his own programs to take care of tedious things like generating monsters and all their treasure and other aspects at need, or generating quickie villages/towns, or generating NPCs and even characters (with every imaginable bit of background including childhood diseases, innate talents, hobbies, parentage….). It was also easy to write a program for “rolling” massive numbers of dice, or any dice at all — with the advantage it gave the GM in not letting players know a roll was even happening. I even met a guy who wrote a program to generate entire “dungeons” and their contents (that were ecologically balanced!).Such programs freed up the mechanics and allowed more play time, but they also paved the way for letting the computer run the show, and all the player needed was a character. So most “role playing” these days is on computers, especially online where one can play against (or with) others from all over the world, in everything from Lord of the Rings flavored realms to galactic trade or empires. Initially this took out some of the human interaction, which was a big plus for role-playing games, but first with text messaging built in and now audio connections between players, that’s no longer a limitation.About the only thing that computer games can’t do is deal with the totally unexpected. My favorite example is from an early text-and-diagram game where our characters were in a room with a small ledge around the ceiling, with dozens or orcs bashing at the door — we wanted to rig a rope around the ledge and bottles of oil, and tie the rope to the door so when the orcs came in the oil would be jerked to the floor and ignited while we hoofed it out the back way, but the game didn’t allow that — we could put one bottle of oil on the ledge, but not a rope, and we couldn’t tie the rope to the door. So the big advantage to dice-and-paper RPGs is a human game master who can respond to the most ridiculous (or insightful) courses of action by players.

//on submit you can do like this