Nice Rant.

My review of the new D&D on epinions.com sheds some
light onto why "stats can be good"

http://www.epinions.com/content_20178046596

on the other hand, I loved the fact that weapons had
no stats. I had a hard time figuring out which weapons
to keep because some just seemed better in certain
situations or over all, but I had no way of knowing
for sure, except maybe by going to the Enchantress.

I'm working on an article for my site about AI in
games. I'll let you (that's the royal you) know when
it's done.

Role Playing Games seem to center around combat and
the definition of characters. It's what seperates it
from "Cowboys and Indians" you know 'pow, you're dead'
'no i'm not' 'yes you are.'

Since RPG's center around combat and grew out of board
games (and spawned CCG's), the definition of the
character and strategy is important. Unfortunately,
the only way you can simulate strategy *without* a
human DM to say yes you do have an advantage is to
have stats, so people want stats.

That said, I think a statless CRPG could work. Look at
Castle Falkenstein and Amber. Those are both
'statless' or at least 'diceless' games. Castle
Falkenstein uses a card based system to resolve
issues, and as such can involve complex strategies
like holding back and bluffing, while Amber assumes
that one person is always superior and will always
win, so once you know this, you're going to want to
find other ways to gain the advantage - all through
ROLE playing.

What do these have to do with Computer RPGs? A lot.
There's an Amber MUD that I believe is still around in
which people MUD without random number generators.

Imagine this. A Dragon is always going to be better
than you, you could *never* defeat a Dragon based on
combat alone. I know this flies in the face of tolkein
& moorcock based games, but your character is *only
human* and a dragon would eat you up and spit you out.

How then could you defeat the Dragon? Possibly
tricking it, or cutting off it's supplies, poisoning
it, or *gasp* through teamwork. "A party of 11 failed,
let's try with a party of 20."

But then this is all very un-AR. In AR you gained
strength and status so you could defeat those who
captured you, or even survive past a few days. (I
believe most of my characters lasted around a week -
I'd average around a level a day and by 8th level I'd
decide I had done everything and would start over.)

Ravenloft suggested you take character sheets away as
a novel way to instill fear in your characters. Your
descriptions of their damage levels would be a lot
scarier than the numbers. Numbers are nice comfortable
things you can hold on to.

Lucas Arts in the 80's was famous for creating games
that involved senses other than sight. In Rescue on
Fractalus / Behind Jaggi Lines, the pilots you rescued
knocked on the space-ship door. I'm betting AR could
do the same.

Wounded? You inflict less damage, hit less often, move
slower, characters would become fuzzy "is that a
friend or an enemy?" You'd have to get closer to find
out, which would be more dangerous, causing you to
want to flee the scene entirely. Perhaps you could
loose peripheral vision, or peripheral sounds, making
combat more dangerous.

Tired? The screen would dim ever so sleightly, you
wouldn't even notice it but the accumulative affects
would be noticable. "Is it getting dark out?" "No my
friend. Perhaps you should rest." Eventually the
screen would totally black out - you pass out.

If I know Phil, a broken leg ignored would permenantly
affect the way the character walks. Death might be a
rarity, but who wants to lose stats due to wounds?
(effectively this is what the Dungeon did by removing
a stat every time you died, I had a character that had
over-all had -60 stat points! My first character...
did a lot of exploring.)

I heard that the latest D&D game starts out with loose
controls that get more precise as your character gains
levels. Now that's innovative.

Just some random thoughts.

Mark



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