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The DPnP system so far is developed primarily for two purposes: creating and managing campaigns, and creating and managing characters. One of the first future expansions to the suite will be to create an adventure creator. However, I have found that DPnP is still quite useful in the creation of adventures out of the box (per say as there is no real box).

I created a sidetrack RPG about a week ago. I had decided to actually pump out a few of these fairly quickly to cover up some Ironwood expenses coming up soon. Writing the adventure is usually the longest, and most fun part of the experience. DPnP won’t ever change that. It will help with organizing some threads and data, but ultimately you will generally write your own adventures. What DPnP is doing now is simplifying the tedious part of data entry. By this, I mean, it quickly and easily builds the new creatures, equipment, etc that is needed in adventures.

With the sidetrack I needed several new things. One was a new racial template, Dragons in this case. The dragons created were wingless and land based for such creatures as a basilisk, and for this story a lindworm. Which brings me to the next creation, the lindworm.

Here’s the problem when creating creatures as a publisher. First, it needs to fit the rules. Second it needs to have a certain level of balance. These things are much more comp-licated than simply saying “I’ll use creature X with certain modifications”. Developers don’t have the same luxury GMs have for weekend campaigns. Therefore, you typically have a design. Then you have to check to make sure the design conforms to the rules, then you have to check its encounter challenge against your target difficulty. Then, for good measure, double check.

Invariably there are problems. You will always find a mistake in rule conformity, and difficulty. Then, as you make changes in one spot, you find problems arise in another. It makes the entire creation process a huge endeavor. Very rarely do you get lucky enough to get it right in on go around.

DPnP fixed this by giving you a score for balance on the race and creature. It also does not make mistakes on rule conformity, so you don’t have to worry about that. In fact, the most difficult issue is choosing how best to apply your vision of the creature’s race to the overall difficulty it is presenting. Since this is easily represented with numbers all you really are doing is choosing how many skills/abilities/powers the creature is and how strong they are.

At the end of the day you are left with just being creative, and not any of the balance or mistake issues that make creating things a misery in some cases.

The entire process works for ever element, including new items, spells, and toxins/poisons. So, when creating the adventure I simply wrote a story, in effect. I then created the elements in DPnP, which was a fairly quick and easy process. It cuts development time down to a fraction (its still in editorial limbo however), and made the entire process more enjoyable. Meaning that one goal has been proven to a resounding success with DPnP: Easy/Faster product development!

The adventure creation program uses many of these same tools (they will be directly imported from the CRM) as well as adding a host of new features to further streamline the process. The entire scope has always been about fostering creativity. We filter out the cumbersome work and all we are left with is creating great content in an accessible way.

Until next time,

Happy Gaming!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 9:29 am and is filed under Campaign Resource Manager, DPnP, Developer Blog, Writing Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.