The Basic Premise- Intro to the DorthkWorld

This is the first section of a lot of notes and though it doesn't fully explain how silly the game is- it does explain the very basics of what I'm trying to achieve.

The premise:

The Ancientist History
In 1985, a thirteen year old boy, Logan Ronald Hillsby, had his backpack confiscated in the lower cafeteria of St. Benedicts Middle School. The backpack and it's contents were never returned to Logan, for the Sisters of St, Benedict's felt it contained the tools of devil worship.

Miraculously, nineteen years later, the school's renovation has uncovered the long forgotten backpack. It was returned to me, his childhood friend. Apparently my 8th grade school portrait order form was inside, providing the only usable contact information. I was excited for such a find, because I knew exactly what was in that backpack and why the St. Benedict nuns had never returned it. Crammed inside the nearly bursting maroon backpack was the sole legacy of Dorthk, probably the most amazing roleplaying game ever created.

Over the subsequent years myself and a team of dedicated researchers and specialists have preserved and transcribed the original manuscripts, using today's most advanced computer technology to bring a game many considered too complex to be played to life.

Forged in Dorkness

Dorthkworld is intend to be dorky, very very dorky. This is part of the fun, one can revel in the outlandish fantasy and leaps of logic a bit easier if there is a tongue-in-cheek element, and those who enjoy role-playing are often very good at taking their silliness quite seriously. It is not pure a pure send up, like Kingdom of Loathing, but it does revel in it's lack of self awareness.

Since the game is based on the mythology of Dorthkworld by Logan Hillsby, a precocious, socially ostracized 13 year old boy in 1985 middle America; the game's character and feel is from a simpler, more battle-axe friendly time. This will hopefully strike a chord with many generations of gamer and will be outright fun for younger players and those who might be self-conscious about taking the fantasy too seriously.

The Dorthkworld Universe is more Napoleon Dynamite mixed with classic module D&D, a little mix of nostalgia and incredibly bad fantasy novels. This keeps things fun and makes it unique hopefully among RPGs today, which includes some horrendous spelling and grammar, adolescent artwork, random tables for everything and lots of elaborate drawings on graph paper.

The Features of Dorthk- the best worst roleplaying game ever

The game itself is designed to offer something pretty unique and it's based exploiting some interesting conventions of RPGs as well as removing the primary barriers to getting into the game.

The game is played with a computer: I'm counting on a high crossover demographic of people who would play this and computer users with internet access. The online format is great because the game has tons of content and more uploaded everyday, the database of weapons, special moves, spells, and classes just keeps growing.

You don't have to know how to "play" Dorthk in the computational sense, the programming handles the rules resoultion, supplies the skeleton adventure, manages the map and location, and does all the math.

Classic RPGs almost universally depend on a game master or referee to create the world, who play every opposing force and form the plot in response to what the players do. This is serious impediment to game play, for most people it's just too much work. It's too much time or too hard to prepare and draw a map and synthesize a stack of campaign guides, monster manuals and the basic charts and rules of the game. And most importantly it's a creative burden that can take the fun out of the whole thing. Dorthk let's the authoring of the adventure happen reactively, it works from a kind of fill in the blank format where the DM (DorthkMaster) for that round provides the color to flesh out the scene and challenges the other players with

Everybody is the DM: (DorthkMaster) in turn and the players have a collective task to improvise the story based on what pops up, each episode provides a location, a little randomly generated color and the obstacles the other must face. It makes for some pretty crazy storytelling, but in general people have more fun trying to explain and dramatize a given situation than generate the plot themselves and maintain the story direction.


There is just one campaign: The world of Dorthk is set upon by the great and evil DorthkLord and he's out there with his minions and you put enough quests together and you get a chance to face him and save the world from the forces of chaos. There is also a chance (very slim) that you could run into him randomly, resulting in almost always death. If you do vanquish him your character is put into the Hall of Heroes and that retired hero can then aid your subsequent players in various ways as well as being featured on the website.

Only the fun numbers are visible: the rest is hidden. Players can see their basic stats (15 Strongness, 19 Agile), their skills ranked semantically (master convincer, adept lizard style wrestling) and their Life Points (40 is a full tank, 0 is deciding whether to go to the light). There is TONS of info on the character sheet, but most of the number content is hidden, and when fighting a foe or overcoming an obstacle the player rolls a simulated dice and chooses special options if available- they don't get to see the opposing side numbers- they just get the result.

Dothk also leverages inconsistent gratification: with the datbase that runs the game, not all special moves (not necesarily just combat based) are available all the time and certain "rolls" unlock special options or create outlandish negative results. This makes the offering of options more interesting and adds value to the randomness of the game.

D21: the 21 sided die, the 13 sided die, the 3 sided die, the 7 sided die, the 99 sided die -are all faithfully recreated digitally and you can see your rolls.

Graph Paper, Fantasy Art, and Character illustrations: difficult to explain here - Dorthk will be art directed to have a distinct old school pencil and paper feel, and feature some really terrible artwork and some not so bad stuff too. It's not just text. Magic the Gathering would just be a complex card game if it wasn't for cool pictures and interesting descriptions. The artwork is half the fun of most RPG books and dorthk continues that tradition with a constant stream of art and colorful descriptions. Players can upload artwork to be randomly featured as well, provided it matches the style of the game and is not executed too well or was drawn on unlined paper.

User Generated Content: the players can log on and make characters just for fun, but they can also design obstacles, add weapons and item descriptions, upload artwork, create monsters, design locales and scenes, make new spells, etc. These are fashioned from a series of templates to ensure game balance, and they grow the world at an incredible rate.

The map is huge and tough: the world map is massive and can be infilled in a structred way thus that a wilderness that might once have consisted of 40 interconnected locations with a 50% chance to encounter the cave entrance in one of the 8 center regions, this can be restructured to hold 80 locations if content permits. Certain regions are just randomly generated and the chances of moving productively north for example are 20%, maybe 40% if someone is a specially skilled or has a map item, thus the characters might wander in the mountains fighting the random creatures and obstacles. There is no omnipotent DM that really knows where the "ruins" are so the whole partly is truly "lost", their foods ticks down and they can be slowly killed by all kinds of ambient effects like cold and thirst. This is a world of dangerous overland travel, no real accurate maps or distances, and real danger presented by the sea, desert, jungles and mountains. Towns, roads and dungeons can be handled in the more othodox structured sense.

People love detailed characters, and just making characters is fun: One random chart leads to another and you are instantly playing an orphaned lizard man pirate whose zodiac sign is virgo and his favored weapon is the war shovel. The barrier to entry for creating a character is virtually zero, but the detail level exceeds most games.

.... Part of the Theory
A lot of the play style is based on my concept of Adaptive Reasoning. Which is my paraphrasing of a cognitive science study that states that peoples mind are much better at filling in details and rationalizing a given situation than generating plausible outcomes. We know being a convetional DM is difficult because it invovles a structural creative writing skillset, and it requires a somewhat channeled experience for the players if they are to experience a "good plot". When a game gets into full improv mode it starts to get interesting for everybody- the players cease to try to decipher the plot they know the DM has and they get to riff on what's happening with equal authority because it's apparent the DM is in full reactive mode, just like the players.

The game is just designed to facilitate this process: the tone is a little goofy and everyone is on the "same side of the screen" in that they all have to take turns rationalizing this outrageously obstacle ridden fantasy saga. The fact that the DM seat changes each time puts everyone under the same "rules of agreement". The one rule of improv theatre, which is simply that no matter where the other person goes with the sketch, you must agree to where they take the scenario, you will have your opportunity in turn.

Conceptual logic aside, the end result is a game that takes virtually no setup or design and can be played casually online, turns can be traded via email, and you could plausibly play at work, in real time with on the site or over longer periods with notifications of turn progress like the original play by mail games that spawned RPGs.

It captures both what people love to hate about classic RPGs and seeks to eliminate the labor that would be required to get into them on a casual level.