CDDA is awesome.
CDDA with friends could be even more awesome!
Party Control
Simply, as friendly NPCs ally with the player he/she then gets the option to either directly control them or let the computer control them, or maybe both, as desired, switching views as needed.
Multi-Player
A simple variation of a party control system - multiple players could each control their character as their turn comes up.
Additional players could be added from the start or inserted at any point in the game to accommodate game play just as if an NPC had auto-generated via the menu system.
Table-top
In this variation, the game master simply runs the game from the multi-player version, using the text descriptions of the game to describe the gameplay to the players while letting the game do all the calculations and heavy lifting. Giving the GM their traditional powers is as simple as using the ‘debug’ menu to add insert and change things as the GM sees fit.
I may play Mines & Mi-gos or whatever with my friends at some point. I was going to replace pretty much all of the combat with our own version, but the world would be simulated by me running around in a Cataclysm world with a debug character.
[quote=“Taerzik, post:1, topic:14234”]Party Control
Simply, as friendly NPCs ally with the player he/she then gets the option to either directly control them or let the computer control them, or maybe both, as desired, switching views as needed.[/quote]
I like this, but it probably won’t happen for awhile, if ever. sounds super complex to pull off and maintain without breaking everything. I’m not holding my breath.
Multi-Player
A simple variation of a party control system - multiple players could each control their character as their turn comes up.
Additional players could be added from the start or inserted at any point in the game to accommodate game play just as if an NPC had auto-generated via the menu system.
This sounds good, but what constitutes a turn? Is it one action? Actions have different speeds. Is it something like 30 seconds game time is a turn? This could work, but that's not a roguelike. Do the enemies all move at once? This doesn't really happen ingame except by coincidence and if they move separately it would take forever to do 1 turn. What happens if a vehicle has two controls and two players are driving? The only way I see this idea happening at all is by turning the game into a JRPG, which I don't personally want too much in the main fork.
Table-top
In this variation, the game master simply runs the game from the multi-player version, using the text descriptions of the game to describe the gameplay to the players while letting the game do all the calculations and heavy lifting. Giving the GM their traditional powers is as simple as using the 'debug' menu to add insert and change things as the GM sees fit.
Same problems as above, along with requiring much more work done to NPCs. You can't run a tabletop game without good NPCs, and they are just too dumb currently. They should at least be able to drive and have conversations between themselves before thinking about this, and some way to keep important quest-givers from being stupid and dying would also be useful. We would also need a quest writing GUI for the GM, a custom artifact spawning system for the GM, a way to spawn specific NPCs on the fly, and some way to tweak values of single instances of items ingame.
The game you propose sounds fun, if someone wants to fork a JRPG version of cata I don’t think anyone would mind, but I doubt they’ll do it to the main game. It’s just too different from what they’re aiming for.