QuoteOver the holidays I had my first experience with Action Castle -- and more importantly, its underlying game system, called Parsely. I'm incredibly excited about this. Very rarely do new game concepts come along which impress me, but this one stands out as being something truly revolutionary. And yet, like many of the most brilliant ideas, it's so fiendishly simply that you say "why hasn't anybody thought of this before?"

Action Castle was published last year by Memento Mori Theatricks in the modest form of an oversized, folded, laminated card. I first discovered it by reading the OgreCave.com Stocking Stuffer idea list last December. I was so intrigued that I put it on my Xmas list, and was delighted to receive it. (Thanks Jean!) Alison ran us through the Action Castle module the following Thursday, and it was such a hoot that several of us left the session intending to create our own scenarios for the system.

The Parsely engine, created by Jared A. Sorensen, is really quite simple: it's a way of playing an 80's style text adventure game without a computer, or rather, with a human pretending to be a computer. Instead of typing "GO NORTH" or whatever, you simply speak your commands, and the "computer" tells you what happens. A Parsely session is a lot like every other RPG (Role Playing Game) system except that the Dungeon Master is an android who only understands a limited number of commands and instructions.

Parsely is a cross between two great game systems that work together, like hot fudge sauce and vanilla ice cream, to create something that's even better than either component alone. (Most writers probably would have gone with the peanut butter & chocolate analogy, but that one seems overused to me.)

Parsely games are better than old-school text adventures in lots of ways. Firstly, it changes a solitary activity into a group event, transforming something that isolates people into something that brings them together. Secondly, it's just a lot more fun telling your commands to a friend rather than typing them into a computer. (Yes, even when that friend is deliberately slowing you down with "syntax errors.") Thirdly, human-ware is more sensitive to the player's needs than hardware, and thus can react to player frustration with hints. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, it's vastly easier to create a Parsely scenario than to program a full-scale text adventure game.

Parsely games are also more appealing, at least to me, than any other RPG system I've tried. In the first place, text adventures are all about puzzle-solving, whereas games like D&D often devolve into elaborate battles with imaginary monsters (which I find terribly dull). It's vastly easier to run a Parsely game than to become the Gamemaster in any other RPG, since a well-debugged Parsely "program" will have everything you need all figured out in advance. A standard Gamemaster has to be able to handle it when the players say "Let's do this totally different thing" and go running off in a direction you hadn't planned for (and are possibly unable to cope with). In a Parsely game, the computer can easily shut down any "fast ones" the player is trying to pull by saying "You can't do that," or "There's nothing special about that," or "I don't understand that, try again."

All of these factors combine to make Parsely a role-playing system that I finally want to create modules for. In fact, I've already done so. I dusted off the ideas from some of my earliest game design creations, i.e. a couple of text adventure games I created when I was in High School, and I've blended them into a really fun Parsely game I call Muffins. I've run increasingly complete versions of Muffins several times now for different groups of my friends, and I'm simply delighted with the fun it delivers.

Quote from: Silverlion;375504Same weird indie thing, different day.

Quote from: Mistwell;375467I was curious what folks think of this game.  Sounds like a fun beer and pretzels type casual one-off game to me.  I'd like to give it a try.

Quote from: Lawbag;375683One other point, how would running this game be any different from a lazy GM turning up with a Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own-adventure book for the evening?