Author: Kuma (---.64.91)
Date: 03-13-2002 06:43
This is an answer to both David Shayne and Judas. I'm trying to remember how these old forums work again - I keep trying to type vB commands.
The Mix-O-Tronic started as a joke, of course.
Someone was complaining that there weren't any new ideas for RPGs out there, so I put together a list of 100 words in an Excel spreadsheet and then wrote a macro to pick 3 of them and display them. The idea was to take those three concepts or terms and turn them into an RPG idea. After a while, and with help from Germany (thanks, Stanoje!), the Excel spreadsheet went ballistic. In the current incarnation of the Mix-O-Tronic, there are 625 terms, capable of approximately 200,000,000 unique combinations. And I add more about once a month.
All of this took place in the last incarnation of the forums, and some searches that I've done reveal that most of the posts that dealt with the Mix-O-Tronic are gone forever. I approached Sandy with the idea of doing a column, and here it is.
So yes, the Mix-O-Tronic is essentially a list of 625 terms with numbers by them and a virtual 3d625 being rolled to find out the result. I have since created a simpel Win32 application that does all of the leg work faster (and looks purty) and have abandoned the Excel spreadsheet. I want to offer the program for freeware download, but frankly I've come up against a weird snag: I've gotten it to run on all of my machines at home (except my XP machine), which run the gamut from Win95 to W2K Server - but when I e-mail the damn thing to my brother, he can't get it to work ANYWHERE. So there are development issues.
As for where the Mix-O-Tronic is going in a more philosophical way, Sandy and I are talking about a lot of small projects to whirl around the central concept of a 'font of ideas'. I have to admit that, for me, the Mix-O-Tronic has been an incredible boon. In the past 6 months that I've been using it, I've gotten no less than 50 ideas - GOOD ideas - for either new RPGs or add-ons for current ones. It's been a huge watershed for me.
Which brings me to what the Mix-O-Tronic is and isn't. Judas mentioned that he'd like to see the ideas presented with a system in mind. When I was developing the computer app, I had to consider whether I wanted to add check-boxes for say sci-fi, fantasy and other genres. I considered adding in fields for game system and *game type*, since I'm interested in developing games along the entire spectrum from RPGs to boardgames. In the end, I dropped all of the genre stuff and added what was essentially another small generator that turned out say {Dyson Sphere . Wild West . Victorian . boardgame}. I haven't included genres in the Mix-O-Tronic because the it is, at least for me, a way to BREAK the genre box wide open. Some of the most interesting game ideas that I've seen in the last couple of years have come from Jared Sorenson and others who take wildly disparate elements and fuse them together. Which is ultimately what the Mix-O-Tronic is about. Taking ideas, like the above, and MAKING them work.
In future columns, however, I will be sure to include at least one or two systems that the idea could work well with. The two that Sandy started with are actually two of the smaller ideas from the proposal that I sent him - I'm hoping that we can extend the length of the column in the future.
I'm also developing my own website with Mix-O-Tronic ideas that I've reserved for far more detail and developement than I can do here in a column. I'll post the URL in the fora when it's completed.
So that's it. That's what the Mix-O-Tronic is. Hope it sets the record straight, and thanks for the A rating so far! :)
From Dave Shayne:
I thought this was a semi cool short little thing but why nothing about what the mix-o-whosit actually is? Perhaps I missed something really big and absurdly obvious but aside from some form of random word database thingy I have no clue what this thing is. Is it (as it seems to me to be) a program available on le web? Or just a set of look up tables with the numbers 00-99 in one column and words in the next?
Inquisitive minds want to know.
and from Judas:
What would be a neat add-on is if you could enter a system, and then it would limit the mix-o-things to those that are recommended for the system. That way I can look through the mix-o-things that are recommended for the systems I actually have. Just a thought. :-)
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