Paradoxia: The DOS Gamemaster Utility

The Paradoxia RPG got to be just too much to run on paper and pencil, dice and calculators. As the number of players steadily grew, so did the sophistication of the rules and universe.

So I hacked together a crumbly little DOS program that would handle certain well-known difficulties. Complex combat rules, party management, character creation, magic usage, and so on.

Time went on, and over the years it began to accumulate more and more functionality, until Paradoxia could not effectively be played without it.

Suddenly I realized I could actually leverage the computer's processing power in the rules, not just use the computer to run paper-and-pencil mechanics. The game got more sophisticated as a result. I became more and more entrenched in updating and patching it... all the while never having time to sit down and re-write it properly from scratch. After more than 10 years of incremental feature additions, this thing got to be quite a monster.

First and foremost, it had to do basic character and party management.

Each character has several screens of manipulable information to describe it. Attributes, skills, inventory, spells, vitals, armor information, and so on...

One particularly useful (and thus, complicated!) feature of the software was the tactical sequencer. Perhaps among the most characteristic elements of Paradoxia is its fairly precise sequencing of character actions and environmental effects in gametime.

Ah, combat! A farily large number of the menus and screens in the program pertain to combat resolution routines. Once the sequencer had determined the order in which character actions were sequenced, it would often wind up in someone hitting someone else. Enter the combat routines.

Legacy

Over 10 years of heavy-duty role playing. This thing has been my invaluable tool. Stories, so many stories were forged through this primitive crucible for computer-aided roleplaying. Some players came and went, others remained. All the while, this thing was what I used to run their games.

This damn thing! It has also been a perfectly inscrutable problem for me to "upgrade". I have entire CDs full of almost-upgrades and nigh-rewrites. My quest to update this program (and the game of Paradoxia itself in the process) has taken me on a decade tour of various computer languages, platforms, and design philosophies.

Sad as it is, this program and my inability to properly obsolete it has served as the underlying impetus for my growth as someone who writes computer programs.

All the false starts I have made trying to rewrite this thing were not entirely for waste. In my job as a software developer, I often encounter scenarios that call for a particular widget or sprocket in code. One that I'd already written at some point trying to re-write this Paradoxia DOS utility. Plug, play, done.

Anyhow, this DOS GM utility is pretty pathetic now. Thankfully, in mid 2005, I finally achieved its successor.