Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption Kickstarter Campaign Update #9 and #10, $194,000 and Counting

There’s a ninth and tenth update awaiting you over on the Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption Kickstarter campaign page this evening, with the former featuring a great discussion about the definition of role-playing and the latter spotlighting a variety of new digital and physical add-ons we can add to the mix.

In a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons game, I am an elf – an elf fancied from my imagination – not a human playing the part of Legolas and trying to guess what Legolas would do in a situation. I’m not, as on a movie set, an actor learning a script and pretending to be an elf while he delivers his pre-written lines.

In Sins of the Fathers, this IS where I actually play a role, the role of Gabriel Knight. The ONLY difference with a movie is that the director doesn’t give me the script, I must guess it (what will you as Gabriel do?), otherwise this would be a fiction, not an Interactive Fiction (and therefore not a game).

So Adventure Games are Interactive Fictions, where you have to guess the script. The more well written the script is, the more entertaining the game is. You’ve said that Day of The Tentacle was one of your favorite adventure games; well, imagine how great it would be as an animated comedy movie, or Grim Fandango as an animated film noir.

Role Playing Games are Simulated Worlds, where you can live a second life. But even the greatest RPG sessions would not necessarily make great movies, mostly because they would not be structured enough or strong enough in terms of storytelling (just like true stories have to be romanticized before making to the big screen).

What makes great movies/Adventure Games are not only the problems the characters have to face, but morevover the great solutions the script writers/game designers have invented : how will Marty McFLy/Bernard Bernoulli go back to their own time ? The question is a good start, but without a great answer, it would be totally uninteresting to watch.

And there is a big issue with the (Simulated World) concept. While a good Pen & Paper RPG Game Master will have no problem to satisfy all your desires and turn them into an adventure with some twists and climaxes without you knowing it, a computer just CAN’T. Elder Scrolls games can be great fun, but only if you accept the fact that almost EVERY problems are solved through combat tactics. The world is simulated through the perspective of a fighter.

This explains why I’m interested in the Hero-U project – because while simulating a world like a Pen & Paper RPG Game Master does is impossible with a computer program (even with the multi-millions dollar budgets Bethesda Softworks grant for their games), mixing mechanics from Adventure Games and Computer RPGs would still be a GREAT experience, especially if you try to do more than (just) including stats and combats to a classic Adventure Game (which is a good start but still a Adventure Game, not an RPG).

To me, the best Computer RPG someone could possibly program would be one that replaces the problems (really fun to solve in P&P RPGs but impossible to be told properly by an artificial intelligence, other than finding the best solution to slay everything that stands in your way) with the puzzles of an Adventure Game, assuming that those puzzles would have 3 or 4 different solutions, and that ALL those different solutions would reach the quality of a good movie in terms of storytelling.