It's been a while since I played D&D but I was thinking that your work might be extensible to general descriptions of inhabited virtual worlds.

Granted. You'll have noticed, elsewhere in this thread, discussion of Call of Cthulhu and other systems. A major part of this project is the development of a text adventure system that can accept rules sets as additions.

In that case I'd try and boil down your huge knowledge of D&D to the absolute basic minimum number of concepts you need to describe what playing D&D is about.

I was thinking of boiling it down to 'what is a text adventure' and 'how do we make the format extensible' myself.

Maybe the basic ideas of players, monsters, and Dungeon Master are something you want to use.

Curiously combat and monsters in the sense of physical adversaries are inessential. And the Dungeon Master in my original concept was to be me, coding the behaviour of rooms, characters, etc, to be interacted with by the players.

I don't know how you intend to use the module(s) but I just read Neil Stephenson's The Big U and it describes using a huge computer to run the game (with a DM seated in front of it) while the players actually run through the sewers in 2-way radio contact.

How can I say that this would be a very bad idea? I am a member of a Live Roleplay group, and any suggestion that players might be sent into a genuinely inimical environment without any form of direct supervision is...frowned upon. The intended format would be players sitting at one or more terminals, taking turns to issue actions, to be parsed by the computer and used to alter the state of play. Something like a MUD, people will say, although my idea of the passage of game time mandates a turn-based approach which means it won't actually be a MUD.

Sample output of a modern-idiom version:

------------------------------------------------------------
It's your turn, Dave.

[16:24 GMT]

This is Earlham Street, just north-west of Seven Dials. On
the south-west side of the road is a small games shop,
'Orc's Nest'. Other quaint and curious shops line the road,
and there is a market stall here selling gothic gewgaws.
Further along the street to the north-west you can see
Cambridge Circus, and the narrow streets of Soho beyond. The
weather is slightly overcast, and seagulls overhead suggest
storms in the Channel.

A stallholder, a goth and a passer-by are here.

You feel slightly hungry.

What now? > nw

Going north-west to Cambridge Circus. Next move at 16:26 GMT.
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That's just an idea, but I hope it captures something of where I'm coming from. D&D, CoC or whatever other rules system and campaign idiom the operator chose could be applied to the core program to produce an appropriate campaign. I've looked at Games::Maze - it looks interesting, but the idea of the system at hand is that it should produce a realistic, deterministic, mimetic world for game play. As to monsters, I agree with you - not yet. I suggested the production of a dice module because doing so would make the subsequent implementation of _any_ deeper rules system easier. So it's not what D&D is about, because if you ask that, the answer is 'first and foremost, it's a work of creation and imagination, and not about rules at all'.

What does all this talk of metaphors mean? I've just got out of a meeting packed with talk of 'frameworks' and 'outcomes' and other civil service bafflegab, and I need a breath of fresh English/French/Swedish/Latin.

Tiefling

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GAT d++ s:- a-- C++ UL P++ L++(+) E? W+(++) N+ o? K w+(--)
!O M- V? PS+ PE- Y PGP- t+ 5 X+ R+++ tv- b+++ DI++++ D+ G+ e++ h!(-) y
+?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
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