Quote:Original post by Shpoonj
I'll tell you if it's a story when I play the game, alright?

No, that doesn't work. While the issues may be tricky to figure out, if you wait until the game is done it's too late because you may be well off the mark. You've got to find a way of testing this out before you commit to too much code.

Quote:Original post by Ketchaval
In a game, the player is active, and can interact with other characters so may be able to deform thread to an extent. *Within the bounds that the game allows* -the designer can limit the interactions within reasonable bounds, ie. stop the player randomly killing off NPCs (because this causes lots of logistical and narrative problems).

This is such a great point. And the player accepts those limits which are naturally within the rules system expected. Just as in combat, if you throw an "immunity" or massive HP challenge at the player, you can get him to back off (rather like your impervious forest idea a few threads back).

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(Oh yeah, and I'd like to see games where you can interact with the plot as seamlessly as you fight in Prince of Persia, ie. you can interact in small ways every few seconds and take the experience in a different direction via gameplay.

This is as close to an perfect explanation of what I'm talking about as I've seen. Thanks!

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However, this is a pipe-dream for the moment.

Right, and that's kind of what I said in the beginning, this is theoretical for now. I do think an overlay over a traditional game that has a structured "big picture" story might be closer at hand, though. The level design and overall story objectives could frame how you play out each part of the story.

A few more thoughts on this:

I'd like to really expand on Ketcheval's definition of "moment to moment decisions that can take the experience in different directions." First of all, we need to know what exactly this is. I keep coming back to character interactions, though it's the hardest, because that's what the bulk of story is. Often, people are either fighting covertly or overtly, or battling against nature or some similar man-made system (city hall, the computer, whatever) or trying to solve some mystery or puzzle.

Okay, that's too broad. So maybe let's focus just on character to character conflict. To be interesting, we need a minimum of a couple of things:

1) Diversity - We can't stand seesaw interactions because repetition gets old. If two characters are in conflict, we need to run the gamut from verbal sniping to sabotage to open violence.

2) Resolution - Things that never get resolved are frustrating. So we need to impose a time frame for conflicts, either by outside force or via a mechanism that makes conflict naturally cool or heat up. A simple mechanism might be an internal NPC patience which runs out and causes the NPC to back off or escalate.

3) Player input - We still don't have a clear idea of what this is. We are hampered by past gameplay options, which are mostly combat. So what have we seen in the past? The conflict needs to happen as a result of something the player does (moral decisions would be best). But what's the low level interaction made of?

__A) Dialog trees?
__B) Symbolic interaction using glyphs / icons?
__C) ??? (any other gameplay?)

Can it be as simple as "quest requires choice A, B, C, etc.; and these choices will tilt NPC A one way, NPC B another?"



Jumping ahead just a sec: Babysitting.

How do we arrive at the notion that we are not babysitting bickering characters? The suggestion arose in previous posts that this would be a Sims game, or that some people didn't want to micromanage character interactions (probably because it would be dull compared to combat).

If characters have a will of their own and parties are necessary for survival / success and relationship of the team determines survival / success do we still have the impression of babysitting. We really need to dump the notion of player created parties to make this work. As in adventure stories, the party has to be in part formed not of clones, but of NPCs with their own agendas-- and there must not be any other option for success (i.e., don't tease the player with options from other RPGs).

So, if the archer is the only one who knows the terrain, and the mage is the only one who can get through the magical doors on the route, and the archer tells your mage, "Stay the hell away from me!" at some point (and this affects tactical positioning in combat), is the concern now elevated from babysitting?

The problem is in how the idea is sold, I think. If you're told that you're a team leader, and rated by how well you hold the team together (leadership skills), then it might be acceptable. But if you're rated more on whether you get the job done, then conflicting teammates are a hinderance.

Hmmmm... players dependent on NPCs. There's something REALLY valuable with this.

Part of the problem is that the player is so independent that he can normally override every concern except those related to combat (or stealth, or puzzles when allowed).

But at the most simple level (still imagining this was overlayed over a traditional RPG for starters), let's say we want to deal with inhibiting the player's ability to attack allies. Rather than handicap them physically (which is a very situationally specific solution), what if we tried to capture how this dynamic would work in a more generally (and thus widely applicable) case?

What happens if we're all at a party and I suddenly go bezerk and attack one of you guys? At the most simple level, someone will likely try to stop me (depending on what I'm armed with, but let's assume all things are equal for the moment).

The degree of force you use against me is going to be dependent on how much damage I've done. If I kill one of you guys, you'll use a different amount of force than if I bloody one of your noses.


So what good is this?

Having the textured / varied levels of responsiveness now ties my hands as a player if I want to respond to a plot event with violence (e.g., I think one of you is a thief). I can't just whip out my cutlass and behead you, because I now risk the wrath of the group. This has been done in games for ages, but rarely at this level of attempted nuance. (For instance, even if I've killed one of you, you may wish to subdue me so I can be brought before an arbiter who can kill me legally.)


Okay, complicating it a bit:

The degree to which you dislike / like me is going to modify your response if I attack one of you. The degree to which you like / dislike the object of my attack will also modify your opinion.

Your response will then be based on your opinion of my action (do you like / dislike violence?) and an assessment of what you think is a matching response to what I did.

That's going to give some value that will act as a threshold you'll compare to all the things you can do (this is the typical AI weighting stuff).

Now, two more complications: First, your response will be based on the rightness of my action, which can be derived from an identity (e.g., I get an "evildoer identity flag" for attacking an innocent; I get a "righteous defender flag" for attacking the guilty; I, by default, might have a "I'm a soveriegn lord and can do whatever the hell I want to peasants flag" by birth or title, etc.).

Second, your response is going to be determined by our force ratios. I may be weilding a lightsaber and you may only have a rock. So you may want to run and live to fight another day. If we accept more nuance in conflict, you may be able to threaten me, or barter with me. If there is some way of logging a future plan, you may decide to appear to surrender, but plot to stab me in my back or push me off a ledge.



Now, if you have a traditional RPG that's tactically varied (i.e., teammates have distinct roles), you now make interpersonal conflict, an essential pillar of storytelling, a fundamentally integrated part of the game.

To give this the full punch it would need, you could even have results where:

• Two teammates refuse to help each other, heal each other and fight when in proximity
  
• One teammate can shift like or hatred against another teammate
  
• A teammate can abandon another teammate or the party anywhere
  
• A teammate can be coerced, bribed or otherwise persuaded to stay with the party
  

Final thought: Erase the player. Use a multiplayer network programming paradigm and make no distinction between an AI or human controlled agent. All of this applies to everybody, and everybody can do it. Then, create game design failsafes for certain situations, such as the whole team killing each other (or not, depending on how raw an experience the player is up for... you could have a Treasure of the Sierra Madre experience, where everybody sets out to get the gold... then there's backstabbing left & right).

Obviously, you need much more texture in the interactions between teammates, but I think the idea of causing the situational dynamics to limit the player's strategic options is the start of figuring out how to make the player and team interdependent enough that the player actually has reason to care.

Quote:Original post by Trapper Zoid
Do you mean treat the game as more of a character simulation than a player-character-orientated RPG? It would work as a game, but I think it would differ quite a bit from the traditional player story base that most RPGs revolve around.

What makes you a hero, and what makes the approach hero-centric versus character simulation?

I don't necessarily think that you have to be the hero. For 20 years games have been edging away from making the Entire World and Fate of Mankind(TM) depend on us. But that doesn't stop you from being the only one who can wear the ring, or slay the evil AI god, or rescue the princess.

The major question depends on what you believe you should be doing in an RPG. If you don't feel that you should, for instance, be struggling with finding a traitor in your party, or figuring out how to make peace between the elves and the dwarves in the form of your archer and axeman, then this won't work. If, OTOH, you take Lord of the Rings or Indiana Jones or a lot of other movies as your template, then the character interaction should lose the distasteful connotation that simulation implies. (Uh, I think... really struggling with this one, as this seems to keep coming up, as it did in the first thread when people seemed to be freaking out about The Sims)

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One potential problem with the autonomous intelligent AI agent approach to NPCs is that the randomness in behaviour modelling can lead to frustrating situations.

This is possible, but only in the bounds of the AI interactions you allow. The hostage taker panicking had to be bad AI, a mistake in trigger thresholds at design time. That doesn't necessarily mean that the approach as a whole is flawed, but perhaps rather that setting up a non-scripted group of agents will require experimentation and balancing of behavior triggers.