Addventure Frequently Asked Questions

This FAQ is no replacement for the beginners user manual or the addvanced users manual.

If you continue to have questions that I don't address here, feel free to send me email at

addventure@addventure.com

Preliminary questions

Is this a MUD or an RPG or what?

I like to think of it as a "shared story". It has many features that are similar to MUDs and RPGs - but it doesn't have to. MUDs and RPGs are both "first person" stories - you're the one that is in the story, while Addventure can be written in first person, but can also be a "third person" story - where you, the narrator, control the fates of the people in the story.

How can I run my own Addventure?

Source code for the previous version of Addventure is available at http://www.addventure.com. To run your own game, you need access to an HTTP (or WWW) server that will allow you to run CGI scripts.

Beginning questions

I started writing a episode, and then my browser died. How can I finish it?

You can't. Addventure does, however, clean up episodes that were not finished. Most games do this cleanup every 24 hours or so for episodes that are over 24 hours old.

How can I put spaces in between paragraphs I write?

You need to learn how to write in HTML. The basic way, however, is to put <P> wherever you want to separate paragraphs. Putting more than one <P> together will not give you any more space.

I just wrote a episode, but when I go to view it its gone!

Many browsers try to be smart and save a copy of the page when it originally retrieves it, and never goes to check to see if the page has been updated. You can usually force an update by reloading the page.

Addvanced questions

How can I "sidelink" to sibling episodes?

Ok... lets make sure we understand the question. Given a parent episode P and children episodes A, B, and C you want A to link to B and C, B to link to A and C, and C to link to A and B. (See diagram.)

(If that isn't an ugly diagram, I don't know what is.)

The answer is: "you can't". It's not possible to link to rooms that haven't been created yet, and no matter which room you try to link to first, the other rooms won't exist yet.

The way around this is to create intermediate episodes, let's call them D, E, and F, that are children of the respective episodes. Each one of these lead to the other two base episodes. So: D links to B and C, E links to A and C, and F links to A and B. (See diagram.)

(Well... there's an uglier one.)

This works because A, B, and C will all be created first as rooms that may be linked to. When you create D, E, and F you can link to A, B, or C since they have linking enabled..

How can I end a game?

You can't.

It always bothered me that people seemed to want to end a game more than they wanted to continue it. I pretty firmly beleive that most stories are still good if you talk about what happens after "happily ever after".

If you're insistent on wanting to end the game, you can always backlink to another room (if the game allows it) which will essentially start the reader/player over.