What about Neverwinter Nights and Vampire:The Masquerade? Would you consider these to be "RPG Makers"? You can create custom adventures and GM/DM players through them. Granted you will probably be limited in the amount of art/music you can import (if any) but you can tweak the engine and gaming system with scripting.

I''m very excited about the possiblilty of creating custom modules for NWM and Vampire, and running friends through some particularly nasty dungeons.

In my opinion, using RPG makers is most certaily cheating. if you want to make a good RPG, you should write your own engine, thus giving you more control over the way the game is played and works...
This is probably just repeating what almost everyone ere has said, buy hey ... some things just have to be said...

This post is terribly unclear on the concept:


RPG Maker (r-p-g mak'er) n. A piece of software that was designed solely for the purpose of making home-built RPGs, typically comes with engine, sample art, sound effects, and music.

RPG (r-p-g) n. Acronym meaning Role-Playing Game. Comes with engine, sound, graphics, and music, built for commercial sale or personal gratification.


Most RPG Makers are a horrible disappointment, but if there's a good one, I'd buy it. Actually, RPG engines should be programmed in that fashion, but the RPG engines that come with most RPG Makers are just too stereo-typed. They usually provide the flexibility of pre-school fit-the-shaped-blocks-in-the-proper-holes software. That's just my opinion -- I think most RPG Makers simply make outrageous claims just to sell their products to unsuspecting people who think they can make the next Final Fantasy without any experience. I think it's great for people to shoot for high goals, but false advertising is doing more harm than good!

Good Luck!



Sabre Multimedia

- null_pointer

Edited by - null_pointer on 3/28/00 5:42:00 PM

I think RPG makers are good if you dont mind limitation,
like not being able to change the way battles are represented, the engine (ie: 2d or 3d, isometric ect.)

However if you really want something different or if you would like to make money off the RPG you made , you would be better off making everything from scratch.

Edited by - Blah! on 3/28/00 6:13:30 PM

I had been ignoring this thread, but I guess I''ll throw in my $0.02:

Yes, many of us would like to create everything from scratch. Ultimately, that''s not a realistic goal for most of us. I can''t draw or write music to save my life, but I could probably produce a decent engine and story. Others have different skill sets. Good software is produced when people with varied skills come together and produce something that none of them couuld have made on their own. However, we don''t all have 30 friends to fill all the spots on a game design team.

Enter RPGMakers (or any other tool). It''s horribly cliched, but why reinvent the wheel? If I have a really good story to tell, and I can''t code my way out of a paper bag, what do I have to lose from using someone else''s engine?

The "I must write everything from scratch" mentality simply serves to kill productivity. If it were cheap enough, would you license the engine from UT or Q3 (or BG, to stay on topic)? Probably. Granted, those engines are better than most (all?) of the RPG Makers, but the idea is the same: stick to what you do best, and let someone else handle the rest. If that means finding friends to do it with you, great. If that means getting someone else''s canned package to do it, so be it.

-Brian

PS: To those discussing AD&D... Yes, there are some real problems with the system. In trying to create bizarre metrics to approximate what happens in a real battle they''ve managed to neither simplify, nor accurately represent anything. Yet, I still play every week with my friends. Why? It''s damn fun. All I can do is wait with baited breath for 3rd Edition, which truly appears to have fixed many of the major problems. (Combat time being the biggest.)

Hi

I think that the ideal thing to have was a sort of middle-way between making everything yourself and using an RPG Maker.

After all many RGP engines shares a lot of common properties: They have a representation of the game world (or map) which is broken down into tiles. They have items lying about in that world to be picked up, objects to be manipulated by the player (doors, chests, ect.) and finally PCs and NPCs.

What I envisions is a common Framework developed in an Object Oriented style and documented by using UML (Unified Modelling Language). The "Tile Game Framework" Should be a collection of documents and diagrams desriping the class structure, events and message flow in a RPG engine.

When someone whished to build an RPG game he would download a standard skeleton of the Framework (implemented in his language of choise) and then code his own game by extending the base classes in the framework (by inheritance) and overriding methods to supply ones own combat system logic, graphic routines and so on.

What do you think of the idea???

Regards
Nicolai Buch-Andersen

A little late to this discussion, but just the other day, me and my good friend Nathan were discussing these RPG makers he is experimenting with. To my dismay, he told me his newest find was able to produce different sized tiles(not all that special) and seperate .exe files. This really ticked me off. To me that is just cheating, and it makes me mad that someone who thinks they will be able to make a "Final Fantasy Killer" from this program without any previous experience prior to it. It really takes the thunder away from the magic that all programmers weave. If someone wants to do something like that, more power to them; its just the fact that they can do it without having to do all the studying and toil that we go through to make something cool that ruins it. That is my view.

Maybe this has been said before, but what the hell:

If all you want to do is tell a story and do it in a game form and you have no experience in programming and you dont know anyone who does: then go ahead and use your RPGMaker.

If you truly want something different then put a team together (or try to do it yourself) and make it.

That had been said before

But, i agree... If you wanna make another mainstream, un-original CRPG, go ahead. Use a RGPmaker.

Or maybee if you wanna train or try out the GFX, story w/o an engine

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