Jason Streetz

Paradoxia: The Commodore 128 Role Playing Game that Almost Was

When I was younger, I somehow got the idea that I'd be able to write a role playing game on the C128. What was I thinking?

I'm pretty sure I wanted to stress size and scope of the game over graphics and "wow" factor (the last part at least is evident from the screenshots that follow).

I pretty much just replaced the character set and used primitive 2d windowing and map-tiling for the graphics, but the engine for the game's interactions themselves (combat, trade, skill use) was pretty "sophisticated" by comparison.

Or at least I thought so at the age of 11 or 12. Heh.

Characters

The characters were not preset or fixed. I would allow for the player to create and save up to 5 characters in a party, based on a race-n-class model popular in most RPGs.

The mechanics of the game from a character creation and development perspective were precisely the same ones I used to run the paper and pencil (well, by this point, calculator,graph paper and pencil) Paradoxia RPG with friends and family at the time.

A look at the character status gives an idea of what was going on.

Wait a second, "Mogwiia", "Advanced Mogwiia"?

Yes, yes. The race of this character does indeed say "Advanced Mogwiia". It gets into the embarassing origins of Paradoxia, and I won't even go into it here.

Combat

A crumbly little round-based tactical sequencer was used for combat. Move, use items, check status, change equipment, attack with melee or ranged weapons, and good old "RUN!".

Once more, the mechanics here in combat were the same ones I had been running for the "real" Paradoxia RPG on calculator, graph paper, dice and human players.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

I had a pretty extensive overworld map drawn up for characters to cavort around on. Oh, how I tried to make sweeping scenery using tiles of colored custom character-set patterns.... sigh.

Yes, Even Towns

Yes, no RPG would be complete without towns. A place to buy and sell equipment, talk to people, and rest up before heading back out into the wild.

A look behind the scenes...

Ok, so none of this looked like much. I mean, it certainly didn't keep pace with even the crappiest commercial or freeware games of its time. But I didn't care, it was my baby, and I worked on it every minute I could. This included jotting down BASIC programming routines in my school notebooks.

Below you'll find a sample of some of my hand-written programming notes, variable tables, and design notes for the Paradoxia C128 game that never was.

And, sad as it may be, it took separately written programs to effectively build Paradoxia C=128. Disk management utilities, message editors, and character set editors were all necessary first.

Predecessor of much to come

It didn't stop here. Paradoxia continued to grow as a fictional universe in my mind, and I kept running it as an interactive RPG with paper, dice and calculators and interactive human participation.

In later years, Paradoxia got too much to handle in realtime using paper and pencil. I would write a DOS program to help me actually manage running a session, a kind of GM toolkit.

And nowadays Paradoxia continues to grow.