Getting Back To Consumer Driven Creation: D&D but not D&D

It may shock some people to know that, once upon a time, I would sit with some friends and play D&D - the Forgotten Realms settings, for those in the know. It was relatively cheap entertainment - lots of caffeine, snacks, some dice, character sheets and your imagination were all that were needed once you had an agreeable group together. Sure, you had to buy the books from TSR, Inc. Of course, there are some denizens of the RPG community that support the stereotype of D&D players - and then there are also the born-again-but-don't-believe-in-reincarnation-Christians who believe D&D is devil worship and that the armor class of their beliefs is infinite. Still, I know a lot of people who have enjoyed D&D to a great extent and some who even continue to.

The beauty of that era was that with guidebooks, the Monster's Compendium and some photocopied character sheets, the rules and books were guidelines and were general rules to be applied within a setting that any dungeon master wished. A great dungeon master (DM) made a game interesting and enthralling, but all the die rolling a DM could make the game stutter. Sitting on the carpeted floor of an apartment in the 1980s with enough caffeine in me to kill a small dragon (pick a color), I saw that a DM could use some software to keep from having to roll a die all the time to guide the game. Back in 1987/1988, I wrote TSR, Inc. about the idea - back when one paid for postage. I never got a response, and soon after that I stopped playing D&D altogether, but I continued reading the Forgotten Realms books. What a rich setting the chosen few had to unleash their imaginations!

Wizards of the Coast took over the franchise back in 1997, and they have tried to do good things on computers. To some extent, they have done well. They have put out some good games and some really bad ones - but in a niche where there is no competition, they decided to become the content creators and the framework maintainers. This takes away a major part of the game - the user created content. Sure, they have had stabs at user created content through their games, where people could develop quests and so on, but the reality of it is that that aspect of their products seemed more of an afterthought than a feature - perhaps even handicapped purposefully to assure people paid for the content. Over the years, since its release, I've played through Neverwinter Nights 2 in almost every possible permutation - but once you play a game, it loses the surprise and context. It becomes less about the story and more about, "well, I need to say xyz here to get <insert something> here so that I can beat the ending" - blech. Yawn. Puke.

In case you missed what I'm saying: It sucks and it sucks vast quantities of orifices and appendages found in the hairy nether regions of land mammals. Yes, I went out of my way to be nice.

Then came the MMORPG. I tried MMORPGs back in the days of Asheron's Call and Everquest. The concept was pretty good, though it had one major flaw: you're implicitly competing with people who, apparently, do not hold jobs and who have the maturity level of teenage boys - perhaps because they are teenage boys or suffer a peculiar form of arrested development that has them screaming at their mother for more cheesy poofs. In fact, the word 'fucktard' was created to describe these players that infest MMORPGs. If there's anything that the Internet should have taught MMORPG designers, it's that some people enjoy screwing things up for others in games. I see no reason why a mature adult, or someone aspiring to maturity, would work a full day and deal with all the morons.

Some things shouldn't be played with large numbers of people. Very few people have the time to build the uber-high level characters that everyone aspires to. No one plays to be the 10th level swordsman in a world where 70th level morons will come by, whack you over the head and sell your equipment for some potions. And so they made some environments were PK (Player Killing/Killer) were not possible - but people, particularly the person whose maturity never graduated elementary school, will always find a way to thrive by annoyance.

That's why the desktop games are so potentially entertaining. You can completely avoid annoying people, perhaps playing by yourself or playing with a few people across a network. For some reason, though, Wizards of the Coast hasn't taken that all too seriously and their stranglehold keeps others from doing it. In my eyes, they are completely killing what could have been a thriving industry - and the way that they could have gone about doing that was by simply building great tools for people to tell their own stories. Sure, 'Mask of the Betrayer' and other NWN2 addons were pretty well done, but they were railroaded and the tools for the quest creation were not at the same level.

Instead, they try to be everything to everyone and failing quite well at it.

So why doesn't someone build their own framework that people could use? There is a world of possibility, actually. The Second Life grid, while proprietary in and of itself, has caused other grids to be created under open source licensing. How hard would it be to build a world where people could tell their own stories and create their own interactive fiction, to share with friends or for profit? Something that people could run on their own server or their own desktop, depending on what they wished to do?

Why don't I build it? Good question. Issues related to rent, etc. - but if someone actually wanted to build something like that, I'd be interested. I'd love to do it. Sure, it won't make a bazillion dollars - but I don't need a bazillion dollars. A framework that could be adapted, allowing interactive fiction to be created could be worth creating for financial reasons, but the real reason would be that people love creating their own stories.

And it would make online publishing much more worthwhile and satisfying for everyone involved.