Delicacy of a D&D CRPG
-
Category: EditorialsHits: 5242
Article Index
Page 2 of 2
To give you an insight on the extensiveness of this D&D rule set, I will illustrate a bit of the Player's Handbook. This is the book that details the rules that players need to know to get a firm understanding of the game. The book deals with character races, classes, skills, feats, equipment, combat, adventuring, magic, and spells. These are all features that are used in a standard game. The book contains roughly 280 pages of information. Aside from the Player's Handbook, there is also a Dungeon Master Guide, which is useful for successfully leading a pen & paper session (another 260 pages). The problem computer game designers face is that it is virtually impossible to include every possible feature of the D&D rules. Thus, we will always have a situation where hardcore D&D fans will complain that certain features of the rules have been left out. This is not the case with a game such as Arcanum for which there is no pen & paper version. In other words, fans cannot comment that the makers have left out some critical element that is featured in the pen & paper version of the game. This is something that constantly happens with D&D games, which can cause fans to be more critical of these games. If the designers aren't careful, complaints can come rather quickly when people find that, in their opinion, an important feature of the D&D rule set has been left out.
Of course, developing a D&D game also has two enormous advantages. Firstly, the Dungeons & Dragons name is widely known, helping to boost sales because of the recognizable name and in turn decreasing the possibility of a "failure." Secondly, the use of the D&D rules saves the development team a lot of work. The development teams does not need to spend any time on developing a set of rules, as these are already present in the D&D books. They only need to edit these rules in such a way that they can succesfully be incorporated into the game.
So on the one hand, the use of the D&D rule set offers considerable benefits to a computer game developer in the form of recognition and time savings. On the other hand, the use of the D&D rules comes with a few major hurdles to overcome. The designers are not the only ones that know the D&D rules, and they will most likely be criticized by fans for their implementation of those rules. Of course there is also the time frame dilemma of coming out with a game before the graphics are outdated (which is the situation Wizardry 8 could find itself in and Might & Magic VI had to overcome). There's a delicate balance a developer has to achieve when creating a D&D CRPG as opposed to one with their own ruleset (which has its own set of issues). But considering nearly 30 D&D computer games have been produced within the last 13 years, it's pretty obvious developers are willing to dive into the challenge to make a successful D&D game.
