quote:Original post by Extrarius I haven''t played many, but I''ve used a few different systems: Shadowrun, GURPS, Hero, and D&D. In all of them, the RPG contains rules for numeric manipulation of events. The DM made the story, not the RPG.

Now, could you play without the DM? How fun would that be?

So.. so far after reading two threads about this I can only conclude that you are trying to produce a program that generates a story.
The story generation could be acheived as well with a sequence of random selections from tables, what benefit would your method achieve over this.
Ultimately every attribute you describe must be given a weighting whether numerical or descriptive or you will not be able to apply it to the game or even the content generation itself or the characters will make no sense e.g a cripple lifting heavy weights.

So it either is a random story with no connections to in game play (so you might as well just randomly generate it) or you need to be able to compare attribute values.

Simply dismissing everyone as "pah you are one of those dirty RPG thinkers" is a cheap way of getting out properly discussing this subjecy with those you see as not sharing your view.

As for programmtic content creation for RPGs, yes I haven''t seen much about it bar randomly generating encounters

quote:Original post by Extrarius

quote:Original post by sjelkjd
Now, could you play without the DM? How fun would that be?

Not very, which is why I can''t understand why people play cRPGs and MMORPGs so much =-P

And we come full circle

I think there is a bit of a mix up between story and plot. This point maybe creating some confusion in this thread and its sister thread (The one about filling story gaps)

When asked what I did yesterday, I''d say "Went to work. Met Adam who gave me this CD. and had dinner at the Chinese restaurant next door."
This is a story (Quite a boring one too) that has no plot. The fact that it''s boring IMO is not due to lack of plot, but rather that the events themselves aren''t that interesting.

Now let''s move on to another example:

Actors:
Frodo and the hobbits
Elrond half-Elven
Tom Bombadil
Strider
The Ring-Wraiths

Settings:
The Shire
The Old Forest
Bree
WeatherTop
Rivendell

Story Objective:
Frodo has to deliver the magic Ring to Elrond Half-Elven.

Story Main Events:
Frodo recruits some friends and forms the Underhill party.
The group meets with Tom Bombadil and gains some weapons.
The group reaches Bree. Strider joins the group.
The group is attacked on WeatherTop. Frodo is critically wounded.
The group Reaches Rivendell. Frodo is healed, gains magical weapon and armour. A new Objective is given.

This is Book 1 of LOTR described very superficially. You can also imagine it at different levels of detail.

allow me to dump some ideas here
1- LOTR has plot. Our story virtually none. Most computer RPG games only have a very thin plot (if any)that most people could do without.
2- LOTR is written much better. Computer games'' main strength is not narrative, but rather gameplay, of which LOTR has none.
3- Most of the character histories in LOTR were developed seperately and in relation to characters you never (or rarely)encounter in the book. The story teller was under no obligation to tie all the stories together to create a believable and engrossing world.

I think that with a bit of work (or a lot of it) you can write a program that creates stories.How good they will be we cannot know until we try, but it will probably depend on how much effort is put into it.

As to means of implementation I would say that LISP and similar languages do present themselves as the most logical choice. But a good programmer can approach the problem with whatever language they feel comfortable with.

Peace Out!

Well, I''ve been tweaking and enlarging the use of the above stated functions, making them more "intelligent" in that a slot has to be defined for an existing category as well as all of the other little nuances that crop up with setting up such broad utility functions. If anyone is interested in the code I could throw it on my site easily enough, though it''s not very efficient nor really safe at this point. Just thought I''d state that this is still being worked on by me. Cheers.

bjmumblingmiles:

It isn''t thinking in C; its the abstractions people think in. There are many books for authors on character generation. Those are about as unconstrained as you can get. Perhaps, given a thousand years of literature, a few people have taken time to write out how they generate characters in their works.

Ummmmmmm, isn''t it our knowledge of C (or any other programming language) that enables us to make games in the first place? Being aware of your limitations and working with them is a much stronger tool than blind enthusiasm.

Peace Out!