The way I see it community building comes under three categories property, people, and tasks. I’ll use examples from the game idea I had which included this.

So its starts off where you have a single plot of land with the log cabin you grew up in on it. Now each plot of land can hold a single structure. So in order to expand you need to purchase more land, which in turn requires you to raise your nobility rank. Once you complete your first task for a noble you receive the lowest nobility rank which entitles you to own 4 plots of land, which you then buy from your local lord. Now you have three new plots of land. Problem is that they are covered with trees since you live in a forest, which is fine if you want to go hunting or foraging but you want to build a settlement so you need to have them cleared. In order to have the land cleared you need to either higher or recruit a lumber jack.

So while he’s busy clearing land you decided to expand your home, which of course requires you to recruit or higher a builder. Now expansions take the form of extensions or new floors, however there is only so much space on a plot so you may need a free adjacent plot to add expansions once a structure grows too large. There is a wide verity of expansion and the ones available depend on your tech level and the structure you are expanding. For the players house there are effectively two paths they can follow to expand it, headquarters or family mansion. These can be mixed and the paths really only reflect the building’s purpose and the fact that some expansions requiring prerequisite expansions. ie you need an armoury and a barracks before you can build a war room. For now you have decided that you have a man power shortage, and decided that the best course of action is to build a 6 bed dorm which allows you to recruit an additional 6 NPCs since most won’t join you if you can at least provided them a place to sleep.

Now that your land has been cleared you can start building new structures but wait what do build? Well that brings us to people.


People consist of NPC you have recruited to your cause and their families if any, they are what make up your humble little community. NPCs have their own skills, occupations, and abilities that make valuable members of the community they also tend need certain structures to be of use. Currently you’ve recruited a merchant and an alchemist, so you decided to build a shop and laboratory, and assign the two NPCs to those structures. Fast forward a bit and you now have two NPCs with places to pursue their occupations. Now normally they would start providing you with benefits but sadly, NPCs can be a grumpy sort so the first things these two do is show up at your door with a list of demands. The alchemist wants a library, a room to store his rare materials and items, and a bedroom. The bastard thinks he’s too good to sleep in the dorm with the rest of your people. The merchant on the other is complaining that he has nothing to sell and no one to sell it to, and he wants some money to go on a trade expedition.

It’s about this time you begin to wonder why you built a shop in the middle of a forest for only three people in the first place. But oh well, it might be worth it later. Since you have no reason to refuse your follower request you give them what they want. You’ve done so much construction lately you are beginning to wish you had a recruited a builder, no worries you can always go off and try and find one. Your alchemist has one final demand and that is he would like some rare ingredients that he needs to do his work which brings us to tasks.


People need rare items in order to create new opportunities or gain new abilities. The Alchemist in fact is just a trainee as such can’t actual do anything yet, unless you count turning dirt into mud. But fortunately he’s found a list of rare items in his book “The ABC’s of alchemy” which includes such rare items as newt eyes, and royal jelly. If you get him those things he can start performing alchemy and creating things for you. He also wants a copy of “Don’t touch that – an apprentice’s guide to alchemy” which will allow him to train to an apprentice alchemist. So off you go adventuring in search of fame and glory. You also can search for those things that the alchemist wants or just get away from his complaining for a while.

Well that’s about it. It’s all from the point of view of a leader but there is no reason it couldn’t be done from the point of a regular citizen.

Quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
You'd need to use interpersonal activity to take the place of the point-and-click interface of the RTS.

Agreed. At a minimum, this means imbedding permissions and requirements for building / demolishing structures into character interactions, problem solving and relationship balancing.

The next phase would have to involve gameplay related to populating the structure. If you create a thieves den, for instance, or a ranger headquarters, this needs to create an effect. It should probably have strategic options, as well. (Easier to say here than to concoct, though...)

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I'm assuming that the community will shift with or without your direct input, making decisions, building structures, and establishing policies even if you don't tell it to.

Right, but SLOWLY, so you have a chance to participate. I don't want the world being pulled out from under you otherwise you'll give up in disgust.

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Your character, then, as a member of the community, would be involved with these decisions depending on your station. If you're the mayor, then you have a lot of influence over what gets built, but you have to take into consideratin the SimCity-like issues of "breaking" the community with bad choices. If you're further down the chain of command, like a member of the School Board, you'll have to use political pressure to make certain needs seem more salient than others.

I see what you're saying, but it would be important to keep the micromanagement out of the picture. This is the same problem you've told me about before, in that the factors can't become so dominant that it hijacks the game.

So anything to do with balancing, management or what have you, must be character interaction problems.

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The choices you make in conversation and the topics you choose to discuss with various NPCs would be your impact on the social structure. High charisma, high intelligence, an imposing presence or a good reputation could all impact your effectiveness.

This same mechanic might serve to affect your reputation, so if you're seen as a smart politician, a shrewd businessman, or an insightful commentator, you could get a public office, a corporate chair, or a radio show, all of which could facilitate your particular style of social activism.

Would you see this as a matter of raising relationships by winning conversation tests / puzzles?

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I see this as tweaking a network, rebalancing the scales of various criteria. If you can come up with a robust, simple system (an aptitude you've demonstrated in the past), then it could work not only for the player character, but for the nemesis character(s) as well. If you see a community behaving strangely, you could perhaps identify the influence of one of your ancient enemies.

[grin] I dunno, I'm kinda flailing on this one. But thanks for the vote of confidence!

Seriously, I can imagine network balancing conceptually, but the action moment to moment doing escapes me. I can see SimCity and Starcraft, but those are distractions because they tear away the aesthetic of community / relationships and replace it with spreadsheet management and timing.

So the actual gameplay of balancing a network has to be ? (Not expecting you to answer all this, its just what I'm struggling with)

Quote:Original post by Terlenth
Basically, the idea that I had was that within a community there is a basically a leader whom has control over the land that you stake claim in. This leader can design the area to fit what he/she deems would work, all through a top down display of the area. So, overall it would be very much like an RTS.

Once something is scheduled to be built, by the leader, then the member's of the community will get a prompt stating the new job that needs to be done. Then the members of the community can work basically from the ground up on that project.

Do you see this as (or are you interested in) capturing the feel of people ("community-ness") or would you feel this is more a strategic management experience?

Quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
How about a pyramid chain of command?

If I were Oprah you'd get a new car! [lol] Nice. So you'd be dealing with the head honcho and his staff at each level. The boxes in the org chart would change, the characters in them would have differing relationships and motives, and the power scale would go up (defenses, cost to influence, etc.)

But it'd be the same repeatable experience. Perfect.

I'm wondering if a solution would be to blend a bit of what Ter'lenth and others here have proposed with this, in that you've got a couple of these chains of command in a given community, representing different interests vying for power. Each person has the power to either create, destroy, improve, or degrade a "community thing." The "community thing" could be food supplies, or electricity, or even taxes.

So maybe the interesting gameplay arises out of a figuring out who has what agenda, how close they are to completing it, and then helping their foes stop them? It's very political, so which may describe the essential soul of a community.

Quote:Original post by Symphonic
Focus is on character interaction.

I'd like to interpret this as meaning, the player's job is to facilitate the building of a primarily NPC community by having conversations with and performing actions for the NPCs.

Right.

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As has been mentioned, the structure of any given community will be goal based, they need to fulfill their needs as efficiently as possible, so begin by developing a model of their needs.

Let me challenge the idea for just a second. Some time ago I thought the answer to this might be a detailed, continuously running model. But while you need a model to determine points of interaction and to map how change happens, I think that a simulation will not scale well, and exposes to the player forms of undesirable leverage that you have to develop AI to compensate for.

Rather than a fluid system that lets the player disrupt the economy, say (very cool for one town, impossible for 50), why not focus on significant change and build the gameplay to reflect an ability to "change the town significantly in this way or that." So more event driven than simulation driven.

I like the highly modeled approach, but it's resource intensive (and I'm sure Oblivion will beat me before I can ever get anything done [rolleyes])

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
Well, if you mainly want to see RTS style city building from an RPG perspective, you simply need to incorporate the needs & advantages of building the various structures into your RPG storyline.

Unfortunately, the storyline stretches too far for this to make sense (god's playing with the destiny of mortals over lifetimes to escape death, essentially).

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Is this game going to be in 1st/3rd perspective? If so I would also incorporate interiors for the buildings that players can explore, or possibly even decorate etc.

Yes, I think that when you put the buildings down, you should be able to interact with them from a RPG perspective. Customizing the interiors should be possible to some degree, though that depends on how easy technologically it is to come up with a framework for mixing and matching interior level props.

Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
Now that your land has been cleared you can start building new structures but wait what do build? Well that brings us to people.

Okay, as interesting as the building is, let's zoom in on this element. People and their needs. What if the needs didn't arise solely from the buildings / environment, but more arose from suggested interactions with one another.

I think all the stuff about different people in different jobs needing different things is cool, but just feel that it drags things more into micromanagment (which I'm not opposed to, it just doesn't capture the feeling of "community.")

What, for instance, if the alchemist thinks the merchant is a warlock and begins agitating against him?

What if the merchant sold the alchemist bad potion ingredients that blew up in his face, and now the merchant wants revenge?

I think I'm getting closer to a possible goal here: Strictly speaking, communities aren't defined by their buildings, they're defined by the relationships of the groups. The buildings may act as modifiers, but it's how the people interact that gives a community a certain soul (think Salem during witch trials versus a Greek city state during Plato's time).

If you were to mix your idea of needs based on buildings & job function with these little conflict interactions, I think THAT might be a sweet way of capturing the feeling of community.

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People need rare items in order to create new opportunities or gain new abilities.

Okay, this inspired something else. What if people needed certain things to create EVENTS in the game world? Your gameplay would be more about generating events and switching states than micromanagement.


(btw, I like your idea, it just goes away from the essence I'm trying to capture)

Quote:Original post by ops
apologies to wavinator, detesting dungeons nd dragons the closest we evr got to the RPG was a pen nd paper effort calld AD2300.

we misread your post as seeking ways of getting playr characters to interact in the actual building of a town. like a multiplayer sim city.

the othr posters here seem well up to the task of considering believable NPC based event generators.

No problem, appreciated anyway!

[Edited by - Wavinator on July 1, 2005 2:11:52 AM]

Summarizing & Refocusing This A Bit

If you want to keep the focus on people, I'm starting to think community / town altering MUST center on affecting different people who are in the process of trying to create an event. The rising event can literally be anything, and can range from little stories that flesh out the world to changes that affect the player.



Simulation vs. Event Driven
Simulations are very cool, but tie the system to results which can be disrupted by the player. They're also resource intensive to design AND run.

If you have many, many towns, rising events might serve better. When the player leaves a town on the other side of the world, you stop firing events, save them, then extrapolate when they return.

Events could be categorized by area of effect and dependencies. Dependencies could be things like "enough iron ore" or "his majesty's permission", as in "to build this hall, we need enough iron ore and his majesty's permission." What's good about this is that it doesn't expose to the player exactly how much iron ore there is.

You now are spared the difficulty of a town that would depend on an ecosystem that could get out of whack.



Tiny Stories
"I think the merchant is trying to poison me" or "we need to drive out all of these communists" both could be rising events.

Each would only be a matter of time, not dependencies. But if the event did have dependencies ("I need to get a scanner to see if the merchant is trying to poison me"), I'd say that should be the event itself. That way, it can separately vett itself.



What's The Gameplay?
Still working this out, but I'm seeing standard RPG faire that ties into strengthening or weakening the event. Talk to people, gather items / evidence, get resources, etc.

The downside of this idea is because it's not a system, it's deterministic (like a fixed quest). This is bad because two similar events can't be solved with the same inputs.

So maybe events should be hooked into very simple dependencies, such that changing some world state (killing a character, increasing some resource) always impacts the event? This could mean softening it, or making it worse, but never removing it.

Example: "The loss of the west bridge to mutants has cut off our food supply!" Solution is either bring in enough food for X people every Y days, or take out the mutants.

Thoughts?