Brilliant Idea: Nethack!

You know what would be a really fun pencil and paper roleplaying game? Nethack. Player characters would all start out with kittens or puppies and travel deep into a randomly generated dungeon. Maybe it'd come with a CD-ROM with an automated mapmaking program.

I never really went through the whole "kill stuff and take its stuff" phase of roleplaying, and I think it's largely due to my playing Nethack, ADOM, Angband and Moraff's Dungeon. You don't really need a gamemaster and other players if all you're doing is killing innocent demihumans and gathering loot.

However, there is a large subset of gamers who like doing nothing but. And a random number generator might be able to control a horde of hill orcs, but it sure can't eat all your pizza and bombard you with bad puns. Nethack needs to make the transition to the face to face roleplaying world.

Anyway, people would wander through the dungeon, eating orcs and elves and gnomes and anything else they killed. Or, with equal frequency, being unable to kill anything besides lichen and starving to death. There would be lots of killing and acquiring. Any stuff that players found they'd have to set on the ground and just wait for the cat/dog to step on it so they'd be sure they weren't going to have a cursed crude dagger welded to their hands until they found some holy water or a scroll of remove curse.

If anyone in the party referred to a crude dagger as an "orcish dagger" before someone found a scroll of identify or sold a crude dagger to a shopkeeper, boy howdy! they'd lose experience points.

And if the game was started on a full moon players would automatically have good luck, and if the game was being played at midnight gremlins would hit people and steal their intrinsics.

There would be a box on the sheet for a character sketch, but it'd always be a little @, maybe fighting a big D if the player was feeling artistic and wanted to have an action pose.

That would be the absolutely most cool thing ever.

Ooh. Unless we did it live action. Monster costumes would be a snap -- there'd be 5 or 6 NPC players wearing sandwich boards that'd have, say, a green uppercase F for a lichen or a brown lowercase o for a hobgoblin. Players would attack by just walking into the NPCs over and over again.

I'm not really sure if I'm joking or not.