On Fri, 10 Jul 2015 21:06:56 -0400, Edward Anderson
<dalthor26@hotmail.com> wrote:

[I had written...]

>> Other than the (obvious) Traveller background/terminology/props, what
>> features of Traveller-the-RPG would you want to see included in the
>> game? How do you envision those features affecting game play?

>Closest simile is the old Ultima generators -  options with 3 or 4 choices,
>similar to

[bandwidthectomy]

OK, I see what you did there. The Ultima games weren't actually "Infocom
style text adventures" [I'll refer to them henceforth as just
"infocoms", lower-case, referring to the style rather than the publisher
- and there's plenty of them still around!], they were closer to the old
printed "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

The key to infocoms is that they're "parser-based" with interaction with
the game-story environment being critical to progress. Think of not the
Ultima games, but of the original Adventure by Crowther and Woods: "You
are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around
you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a
gully." That game, which predated Infocom-the-company, only accepted
commands of the form VERB [NOUN]: "GO NORTH" "GET CAGE" "THROW AXE"
"WAIT" "XYZZY". It was parser-based, but a very primitive parser. Still,
it's the original "infocom" (or perhaps "proto-infocom" is more
accurate), and spawned the genre - there were lots of two-word-parser
games created following its release to the world.

The "true" infocoms, starting with Zork, had much more sophisticated
parsers ("GET THE AXE AND THE CAGE, THEN THROW THE AXE AT THE DWARF."),
but were still fundamentally about interacting with the environment.
Eventually, they got more and more complex and the limits stretched
(check out some of the games on IFDB (ifdb.tads.org, and search for
"format:z*"), but regardless of how they handle the puzzles, story, or
game-story-environment, they're still using essentially the same parser
as Zork, and still require interacting with the environment. It's this
type of game - the 'true infocom' - that I'm asking about; I
(personally) find the CYOA format to be too restricting - and often, it
gives away too much of the future story in its choices.

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