Sorry, I missunderstood what you ment by "text phraser"...I understand a bit more about what you ment now...but I still think it would need to interpret the context of a conversation inorder to be of any real value...a character who is afraid of bugs may hear "scorpion" in conversation...but would that word alone make him/her more frightened comeing from another player trying to "scare him", or from a another player describeing his new tatoo, or purhapse in meeting yet another player who's name is "John Scorpion"...well, you get the point.

quote:
If your idea is that the PCs are purely "metagame entities" and that they have no "existence" within the gameworld, then that is a different sort of game entirely. The NPCs then become more like "roles" and the PCs like "actors" who hop into and ad-lib the role.

Um...lets not get into this...all it does is bring up arguments over "what the true meening of RPG really is"...we all know that these types of discussions lead nowhere, and are pretty pointless...



I am a "design" first type of person. I like for both the gameworld and game design to be so tightly tied together that they cannot be seperated without breaking the overall game...to that end, to my mind, the gameworld is mainly in support of the gamedesign...I chose to use the word 'ghost' in describeing the OOC player because of what it represents...not because OOC players will actually be some form of ghost (with associated powers, abilities, and gifts/curses)...typicaly I design first then build the gameworld around those design decisions...In my experience this doesn't create weird or strange games as long as a constant design goal is maintained and worked toword...as such I typicaly value gameplay innovation much more then trying to fit different gameworlds into established gameplay designs...I'm stubbern like that, and sorry if this seems to be frustraiting even agrivateing to many of you...



I like the "drama" concept and think it could work fairly well with the game I described (which is more of a RPG "toybox" then established RPG)..





[edited by - MSW on October 13, 2002 10:49:54 PM]

Hase,

... oh, how to explain this?

Here's how I envision the emotion system working.

- At character creation, the player has the option to create "attachments" for his character. The attachments can be in any of the six emotional directions, of which three are positive and three are negative. They can also be in a range of degrees. Negative emotional attachments add resources to the character creation pool, while positive attachments remove resources. These resources are those also used to buy basic stats.

- Whenever a character engages in an action related to one of his attachments, his emotions are influenced in a direction determined by the nature of the attachment to a degree determined by the degree of the attachment and the degree of the stimulus.

(Can we agree that even if specific actions are broad in scope, it's possible to classify them fairly rigorously into groups?)

- Whenever a character hears a word related to an attachment, his emotions are influenced in a direction determined by the nature of the attachment to a degree which is a tiny fraction of the degree of the attachment. This could even be considered a subcase of the above where the degree of the stimulus is very small. A slightly larger influence could occur when the character himself says a word related to the attachment. Both of these stimuli become ineffective for a fairly lengthy period after they are triggered.

- Here's where the social part comes in. A character with high social abilities can manually label a statement as an attempt to influence another's emotions while conversing with them. It might work like this: "(threat) I'll tear your lungs out!" The (threat) flags the statement as a deliberate intentional threat rather than a joke, and the engine responds by influencing the target's emotions (in this case Fear) to a degree determined by the actor's influence and the target's resistance to influence. Of course, you could just type in "(threat) Rabbits are cute."... but where's the fun in that? The targeted player would still know he was being threatened, so it wouldn't work as a disguise. You might as well get creative.

- And here's where the two factors combine. A manual attempt to influence emotion becomes much more effective if a word related to an attachment is used in the body of the statement. For example, in the above, if the target Fears Violence, then the word "tear" in the statement "(threat) I'll tear your lungs out!" adds to the power of the threat statement, by a degree based on the target's degree of attachment. This gives another reason to be creative with threats: by doing so, you may happen on one of your target's attachments by chance! Of course, it could be possible to create a "threat" which is just a list of all the "loaded" words. To prevent this, perhaps only one word in a threat could be checked for attachment, by attaching some sort of stressor flag to it: "(threat) I'll TEAR your lungs out!"

Does this make sense to you?

---------------------------------------------------
-SpittingTrashcan

You can't have "civilization" without "civil".

[edited by - SpittingTrashcan on October 13, 2002 11:02:02 PM]

I like that ...it allows you to be intimidateing, without really being threatening...imagine your boss at work...you know you could take him in a fight...but why is he so intimidateing? He could say "good morning" to you in just a certain way, and you just know it''s going to be a bad day...ack! tomorrow is Monday!

I totally think you''re onto something with the flagging system. Most people now a days understand the concept of that thanks to the widespread use of html and a similar system used on forums. perhaps even set it up as irc like commands. these kind of simple command/flagging systems are ingrained into computer culture enough for people to be able to grasp them in a game environment.

*snickers*

Where do you think I stole them from?

Actually, I was inspired by an AIM-based RPG a friend of mine was involved in. I figured that people like AIM even if they don''t like games, because they like talking with their friends. Since my goal was and is to make a game which is accessible even to people who "don''t play computer games", I figured an AIM-like conversation mode was probably a good idea. The zero-sum action-based advancement scheme would make the chatters very good at chatting, and the emotion system would in turn make that ability quite useful and powerful. Basically, the socially adept would wield power in the game the same way they do in real life: by rewarding their lackeys with praise and encouragement and viciously crushing the hearts of those they dislike.

Yes, grinding their pathetic ambitions into the dust with our elegantly crafted designer footwear... *snickers again*

In p&p rpgs, an character isn''t allowed to do whatever he wants, the narrator/master will give him an warning or even ignore his said actions, for the sake of the story line/guide/logic*. If we bring that approach to pc''s MMORPG''s, an engine that restrains a little of the characters actions isn''t THAT BAD. Of course, if the objective of the mmorpg is only to be an digital rpg, wich was true back in the end, but there was lack of technology to achieve that(or it was/is too expensive for gaming). But, well,
there is this new stream of people defending mmorpg to be something unique, diferent of rpgs. Any approach you take, will have its goods points or bad points. the question is, do you want the mmorpgs to be an ''digital rpg''?
I think that most of mmorpg are mmo adventure/fantasy game, with some rpg elements, rather than ''digital rpg'' wich *I THINK* should be the right definition of mmorpg, and that is still very subjective(in others manners).

*Or he can actually allow the action that appears to be nonsense to happen, just for the sake of the funny. Wich might frustate the others player, actually interested in the story. It can become really hard to deal with nonsense action, when you are playing with 8 people, imagine 2000.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

if (ansi c++ && windows.h)
whooraay!!
else
ok, lets do those cheats.

*sigh*

You''re right, guitarplayer. It is necessary to deal with "nuisance players" who are simply annoying for the hell of it. I have developed a system which I think should handle nonsense players well. It''s called the Karma system, it''s based on the Slashdot system, and I''ve already brought it up before. It''s discussed at length in this thread.

One of these days I really need to put a design doc together which places my disparate ideas in a coherent framework, because they often don''t stand as well on their own as they do when seen in the context of the whole. I''m not trying to be disparaging, pompous, or sarcastic here... I do build ideas as a coherent whole which really are more than the sum of their parts.