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The_Jaffe
2017-07-29, 01:50 AM
Greetings,
I am DMing for a few preteens, and I am going to attempt to turn a D&D premade campaign, like strahd, into a prompted choose your own adventure style "digital" assisted game.

I want to split up parts of non-combat encounters and NPC conversations into story tree style conversations, pick 1-5 options get A-E results. Pass a survival check, go to S-2, fail a disable check go to T-1 ETC

The problem I'm running into is what I should use to frame the adventure. I thought of MS word documents that would link to each other, or "skipping" to bookmark A-4 in a PDF file, but both of these seem cumbersome. Does anyone have a good idea for this, or maybe there is a product or program like this already and I can just fill in my story/consequences? I would love to share this end product with the community, especially for engaging new players who don't fully understand all of their "options" during encounters. I think this would GREATLY help new DMs also, even if they aren't letting their players see the screen.

jayem
2017-07-29, 02:22 AM
Greetings,
I am DMing for a few preteens, and I am going to attempt to turn a D&D premade campaign, like strahd, into a prompted choose your own adventure style "digital" assisted game.

I want to split up parts of non-combat encounters and NPC conversations into story tree style conversations, pick 1-5 options get A-E results. Pass a survival check, go to S-2, fail a disable check go to T-1 ETC

The problem I'm running into is what I should use to frame the adventure. I thought of MS word documents that would link to each other, or "skipping" to bookmark A-4 in a PDF file, but both of these seem cumbersome. Does anyone have a good idea for this, or maybe there is a product or program like this already and I can just fill in my story/consequences? I would love to share this end product with the community, especially for engaging new players who don't fully understand all of their "options" during encounters. I think this would GREATLY help new DMs also, even if they aren't letting their players see the screen.

HTML is good for linking and light in content. And at that point you could arrange things in substories, and fill in the gaps as it works out.
The overhead would be sticking a

<html>
Text, NB the text wouldn't build up.
<a href="nextPage">You describe a choice</a>
<a href="nextPage2">You describe a choice</a>
</html>
On each page, and giving each page it's own file.

You could possibly do something better with JavaScript

The_Jaffe
2017-07-29, 03:43 AM
Thanks for the quick response. Unfortunately I'm not any good at coding or I probably would have done that already.

Basically I'm looking for anyone who has done a thing like this or heard of a way to do this. Surely I'm not the only person here who has thought of it.

A body of text with a picture, then a sidebar that could give quick pop up info with photo about a race (drow), monster (mindflayer) or factions (Harper's) that are mentioned in the text. Since these players did not grow up knowing all about forgotten realms or even WOTC style fantasy, it is more ambiguous what they are, or what this companies version looks/acts like.

After going through that, there could be a picture of a town, or mapped region, with areas numbered. Picking through this list would give a quick description if it's character knowledge, then they could choose to "go" to the cave etc. New picture, new descriptive text, then a list of skill checks or "blunder on ahead" with each of those having more options with a pass or fail answer (which would be rolled on table with their own skill check).

Anonymouswizard
2017-07-29, 04:49 AM
Yeah, this is really a job for HTML and JavaScript (or very potentially C/C++). Otherwise, you'll just have to make do with links within a document (or powerpoint presentation, one slide per 'section' and disable skipping with anything other than the hyperlinks, I used to do that for interactive stuff).

Anxe
2017-07-29, 11:00 AM
PowerPoint could let you do this as you can jump between slides with text or picture links. HTML and Javascript are more traditional tools for accomplishing this, but PowerPoint should be easier to learn and give you the end product that you want.

PowerPoint doesn't have anyway to simulate dice as far as I know though. Javascript can do that. If you want dice in PowerPoint you'll have to rely on player honesty with what they roll. Which is how traditional choose-your-own-adventure books work, so that's probably fine.