I have an idea that I have been tossing around in my head recently. I just recently got into playing Dungeons & Dragons, the old pen & paper edition w/ a bunch of friends. I love the customizations of the game and the fact that I can do anything my creativity can come up with. If I want to flirt w/ some inn keeper, I can and the Dungeon Master must conform the story to suite it in someway. This is amazing. Why can't video games be this interactive.... I can tell you why because they are restricted to the animations and graphics that are designed for them, and that is where the hard work comes in, having to draw all kinds of sprites, and backgrounds. Well I come from a world where words can be far more vivid then a picture. I love reading a book and seeing the world the way my consciousness sees it. It may be totally different from another person but the general theme will be there. I am considering writing an engine that will allow you to play a pen and paper style game except on the computer. Something that can be as simple or as complex as the Dungeon master chooses. Basically I want a person who is DM to host a game via TCP/IP. They will have a screen that has all the tools they need to type out a scene, display stats, roll dice, and basically anything a DM can come up with. Then some other people on their computers can design their characters, and connect to the DM (Host Computer). Essentially is would be a very fancy chat-room but better organized, especially for the DM. I see monsters being in a database and if the DM needs a monster he can go in the database do a search, and drag and drop it and the information and general discription would appear, of course it could all be customizable on fly. The DM would also be able to set up the general flow of his campaign ahead of time if he so choose. Such files could be saved in separate file which he could drag and drop causing some event to happen for all the players. The DM could even have access to pictures if he wanted to show some visual aids, and even send sound effects to bring the players more into the game. A full digital Pen & Paper RPG, would come alive. As far as I know no engine does this and yet it is so simple. I would want to design the engine separate from the general content of the game, so rules could be total customized and you could create any pen & paper game you can come up with. That is what I am considering creating. What do you think. Thanks for your input, Blake

Oh I almost forgot, It would also not require a field to be filled if you didn't want to. For example if you didn't want to type the descriptions and the game went, you could skip that and have everyone connect to Teamspeak or Ventrilo, and still use voice to tell the story and to do things, and still use the general engine to display dice rolls, comments, imagery, sounds, and stat management. Let me know what ya all think.

Thanks,

Blake

BStoltman, check into OpenRPG. It pretty much does everything you just described. If you're going to keep making your program, though, I would highly recommend referencing OpenRPG's features and seeing how you could adapt them to your own.

I found OpenRPG shortly after getting into D&D, and I'm lovin' it. Awesome program. :)