Last year Hasbro was entirely clueless about what to do regarding the Scrabulous application on Facebook. They should have purchased the application and used it as a way to promote Scrabble, with some minor ad support to pay for the server costs. Instead, they went to court and the process is still working itself out. It is my hope that the result will be to expand creator rights to include the "mechanics" of an individual game, since that will be a boon to small designers who have been ripped off by big companies in the past and who will be ripped off in the future. That's neither here nor there. Scrabulous had been online for years, worked great, was better than the non-existent product from EA games. Hasbro should have just ponied up some cash and bought out the Scrabulous creators.
Well, it seems like they might have learned one lesson from the ongoing Scrabulous saga. They have put up a D&D based application on Facebook entitled "Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures." The game isn't the greatest simulation of what it is like to play D&D, but it does give some ideas and the encounter descriptions are amusing. One of my favorites so far:
Christian Arthur Lindke saw a spiretop drake harassing a merchant.
Christian Arthur Lindke made an Attack Bonus check with a difficulty of 14 . . . and rolled 10
Not being able to kill the drake, Christian Arthur Lindke was forced to retreat. He tried to imagine that the merchant was a swindler, embezzler, or charlatan instead of feeling guilty about it.
I love how my half-elf Paladin tries to justify his own failure. It made me laugh out loud.
Here are a couple of glimpses of what the interface looks like.
As cool as D&D: Tiny Adventures is, it even includes a "help your friends" ability which will help friends finish there adventures more easily, it isn't without one major drawback. They don't have enough server space for the app. It keeps crashing due to the number of users. Aargh!
No comments:
Post a Comment