[plug] I am a genius...[warning novel ahead]

[Patrick Tehvand]

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 09:46, Adam Hewitt wrote:
> Well at least I thought so when the idea came to me last night..
> 
> After a good game of AD&D last night I came home rather late and got 
> into bed and I had an epiphany, and the more I thought about it the 
> more I realized the implications that this would have. Of course after 
> waking up this morning and rethinking the idea I realized that 1. I am 
> probably the only one who will be excited about this, and 2. that the 
> extended implications would only work if others are as excited as I am. 
> So anyways I will let you know my idea and you can feel free to give me 
> some feedback. If you are going to write me to tell me I am a tool then 
> please do it off list ;)
> 
> At the end of the game of AD&D the DM gave out the experience points 
> for the night which put nearly all of us up a level. This then made us 
> spend about 30 minutes changing out saving throws, rolling hit points, 
> spending skill points, choosing spells etc. Now the 'epiphany' that I 
> had was to write a program that effectively mimicked an AD&D character 
> sheet and put all of the rules in the background so that when you go up 
> a level it would do the calculations and automatically adjust the 
> things it can adjust (base attack bonus, XP for next level, etc) and 
> put a red flag up next to the items that need user intervention 
> (choosing skill points and rolling HP etc). This can then be extended 
> so that at the end of the night all players "log off" and the current 
> character sheet is stored on your drive as well as the DMs drive, and 
> when you log in for the next game your character stats are pulled from 
> the DM's drive, allowing him/her to keep track of all the players 
> character sheets. The DM could then have his/her own interface which 
> allows them to have a brief screen for each player, allowing the DM to 
> monitor the HP and users stats in real time throughout the game. We 
> could then add a messenger service as well which allows a user to send 
> a message to the DM or any of the other players in private (removing 
> the need for passing paper).
> 
> Now the reason that this is exciting for me is two fold, firstly I have 
> been wanting to learn to program for a while now but I have never 
> really found anything worth while to actually write (I can't see the 
> point in learning to program by programming something someone else has 
> already done, or is crap), and secondly because I am an avid AD&D gamer 
> and the thought of being able to speed up the game to get more gaming 
> in is always good.
> 
> Now for the "implications". This is easy, I can't do this by myself 
> which means I need to get others to help me. Who better to ask than 
> PLUG? But if I am going to ask for help then why not make it into an 
> event and get all the interested gamers, programmers and others to get 
> together and 1. Teach the gamers how to program, 2. Teach the 
> programmers to game (as if you aren't already...come on tell the 
> truth...nerds!) and 3. Teach the people who are neither to do both. Its 
> a perfect opportunity to learn something and at the same time see a 
> result at the end.
> 
> If this has already been done or you think it is stupid then please let 
> me know, I tend to get grand ideas at times that others think are 
> stupid. If you dont really want to join in but have some cool ideas 
> about it anyways then please also contact me. I would also like to make 
> this a cross platform program so if you dont want to program in linux, 
> but you are able to make sure portability is viable then please also 
> contact me. Anyone else wanting to complain about your mothers cooking 
> or your crappy life...then get out of the house and do something, and 
> then contact me!!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Adam.
> 
> PS. If noone is interested and one of you steal this idea and do it 
> yourself, feel free but let me test it and give me some credit.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> plug mailing list
> plug at plug.linux.org.au
> http://mail.plug.linux.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug

there are a number of options.

e-tools springs to mind (thou it is only win32, but runs on wine, and it
doesnt have the networking tools you are thinking.)

also the opensource PCGen may be an option.

If you were to go down that path probably a customisation of phpnuke or
similar would be the simplest.

A couple of issues,

all players would need a laptop or pc handy,
our gaming table is pretty damn full already with books, dice, cola, big
arse grid paper etc. so having pc's there would probably make it
collapse.

as a side note, all the stats research and increasing is all part of the
leveling up "fun" why would you _want_ to streamline it?


-- 
Patrick Tehvand
IT Consultant,
www.tehvand.com

Member - Society of Linux Professionals (WA) 
gpg fingerprint = 5301 448A 722D 6305 90EC FD31 277F 2227 14A7 24D5 

support running on Linux version 2.4.20-8.
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