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Original post by Nazrix well hopefully if you make a simulation type of environment, the context comes right from the simulation For instance, say you create a coorilation between rising crime (thievery and kidnapping for randsom)and a town's poverty. This is just an example off the top of my head but I'm just saying the "context" could come naturally from the simulation. Hopefully with all the combining agents in the simulation the contexts will be different enough? If the player and other NPCs can effect with these correlations it would have more impact. The player can see why this or that is happening.

Just because you can see a relationship between cause and effect doesn't mean that its meaningful in the context of a story. Think of which stories you've found meaningless and which stories you've found meaningful. What was the difference?

Speaking in terms of a simulation, I'd submit that all the right elements (heroes, villians, challenges) were in exactly the right place at the right time. Significant and powerful links would have existed between characters that perfectly related to their personality, motivation, situation and goals. Only those events which added meaning happened, and happened only in such a way as to conform with what you think is a good story.

Simulations are chock full of mundane non-events which stories leave on the cutting room floor. If somebody steals something in a story, it's for some larger purpose and if they succeed or fail, that's also for some larger, meaningful purpose. In a good story there's a sense of plans within plans within plans, and if its done right, you never get a sense of "oh, well, such and such just happened."

A case in point: In Morrowind, a key character gets captured by werewolves. No body is found. Soon you learn of the capture of other key characters. It turns out that the motive behind the captures is actually dark and sinister, and that all of the characters have something significant in common.

You wouldn't get this with "thief kidnaps princess" unless you put a huge amount of effort into a highly layered simulation that could somehow interrupt itself and shorten the mundane parts so that you only got the good stuff.

A scheme using needs triggers and events I think might work for endless sidequests, though. Using Morrowind again, there are a number of empty filler "go kill foobar" missions that allow you to get money and level up. In them you get the sense that you're just engaged in day-in-the-life average tasks that are average to the world. But becoming the Nerevarine (messiah), or uniting the Great Houses or challenging the corruption of the gods... that I think takes a bit more than simulation.

EDIT: Just thought of something else. In Morrowind, one of the main guild quests leads you to think that your superiors are cool people. Then you uncover collusion and corruption, and in the end, have to decide whether or not you'll let yourself be co-opted or if you'll turn on those who have helped you so much.

Now assuming free-roaming AI that can make its own alliances, in a simulation these characters could have made their alliance at any time. You could have gotten through a huge number of the guild missions with there being nothing wrong because the alliances were not yet made. Or you could have arrived after it was too late for anything at all to be done.

I would be happy to play a game like this, especially if the game designer told me up front, "Look, I'm not guaranteeing your safety or success, and I'm not guaranteeing that you'll be able to save the day." But I suspect most hardcore RPG players would cry foul, thow the game out the window, and get back to playing scripted-sequence games. Because you couldn't always save the day, some of the missions may end up decidedly noir, and if you had a bad run of luck, the whole GAME could end up noir, with characters you've developed emotional ties to dying again and again and you powerless to stop it.

Such a system would need serious clamping.

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Original post by Nazrix Wav, so you're proposing a situation where the encounters, quests, situations, etc add up to a bigger picture? They would all connect a lot more? That would be way more interesting.

Yes, this would be more interesting, and I think it's the base level necessary for even a decent story, unless you're doing a hybrid game. I came to this idea when working on the strategy plot stuff we talked about a long time ago. What derailed me ultimately was the complexity level needed to ensure a proper engaging context.

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Although, I think even if they didn't connect if it's a drastically more non-linear RPG/Sim/Strategy type game it could still be pretty interesting. Because imagine the player being able to tell an NPC 'yeah i'll save your daughter' then he joins the thieves' side.

I agree, this would be so unprecedented that I think even in a flawed form, it would garner interest. But I think that not having it backed up with "guaranteed" stories would be a big mistake. As I said, if it was for a system of sidequests or there was so much else to do in the game that you didn't care, I think it would be fantastic. I would actually avoid the main storyline just to get into the whole world sim aspect, but for those that need to have an engaging story, it would be there.

PS: Sorry I had to edit my last post a bunch, but new ideas just kept coming up.

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Original post by Wavinator I would be happy to play a game like this, especially if the game designer told me up front, "Look, I'm not guaranteeing your safety or success, and I'm not guaranteeing that you'll be able to save the day." But I suspect most hardcore RPG players would cry foul, thow the game out the window, and get back to playing scripted-sequence games. Because you couldn't always save the day, some of the missions may end up decidedly noir, and if you had a bad run of luck, the whole GAME could end up noir, with characters you've developed emotional ties to dying again and again and you powerless to stop it. Such a system would need serious clamping.

You can't make all gamers happy. I mean, if there's people like you & I that would enjoy that sort of thing there are probably more even if it's not the majority.

Although it matters a lot whether you're trying to reach the masses or a niche.

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Original post by ztn Common Traits: --------------------------------------------- Multiple Actors (NPC, object, node, cell, etc…) Each Actor has State (current action, type, storyline, etc...) Actors Interact (Exchanging or changing each other’s State) Each Actors decides State for itself (Not the player!) Are there other traits in common to all systems mentioned here?

Actor goals and strategies for pursuing them? IOW, not just states, but desired states and means for shifting to them.

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Can we know and list all possible resulting states? (I would say yes in all cases, even genetic algorithmic cases.) Should we? -predict/determine/list all possible resulting states (From Wavinator’s idea about “letting go”, and not guaranteeing the user’s experience.) (I would say yes, it is a good idea in all cases for the game designer to know them, even if they are not all going to be “fun”.)

If anything, you may be able to cull uninteresting states. You will also need to look for deadlock conditions, which can occur in sims and strategy, where the player cannot advance nor win.

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Can we avoid listing all the states, and prove the design using only the rules of interaction? (I have no idea. See below) Is knowing all possible resulting states enough, or is emergent behavior a factor? (I would that its not enough, and that emergent behavior is a factor that must be at least considered.)

I think alot of this will depend on what clamping and control mechanisms you as designer or as player have at your disposal. Think of all the games whose combat systems and stats have been nerfed because what was on paper or even what was playtested exhaustively turned out to be too easy, too hard, too dull, etc.

You may need to end up balancing the system as best you can and still providing patches or giving player some sort of "get out of jail free" card.

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What are the methods of limiting/designing the possibilities? (Other than limiting the Interactions and variables?)

Even with a ton of variables and interactions, you can limit the volatility of the the simulation, its responsiveness to stimuli. For instance, you might have alot of factors, but it takes an avalanche of factors to finally add up to a change. This way, thresholds act as gateways and you can experiment with various threshold levels.

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Should the system be Deterministic? (This means there are no random variables, but chaotic behavior is still possible if “sensitive” enough to its initial conditions.) (?)

For testing it will be great, for replay on behalf of the player it may suck.

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Should the system be Dynamical? (I think this one is completely up to the developer and what is the intent of the system.)

I keep assuming it automatically is but that's not a given. You're right, it's up to the developer. The more dynamic, the more challenges to running the simulation constantly, responding in good time to player actions, etc.

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I think the answers to some of these could be made easier with some math and theory, especially if the last two questions are answered yes.

Admittedly I'm weak here, too, and this leaves you in the land of using logic and trial and error.

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Original post by Wavinator I would be happy to play a game like this, especially if the game designer told me up front, "Look, I'm not guaranteeing your safety or success, and I'm not guaranteeing that you'll be able to save the day." But I suspect most hardcore RPG players would cry foul, thow the game out the window, and get back to playing scripted-sequence games. Because you couldn't always save the day, some of the missions may end up decidedly noir, and if you had a bad run of luck, the whole GAME could end up noir, with characters you've developed emotional ties to dying again and again and you powerless to stop it. Such a system would need serious clamping.

Yes, that's the problem with simulations. They're waaay better than simply concatenating a bunch of story pieces, because everything is related to everything else (all is logical, there are no paradoxes...). But in the end there's no grand scheme behind everything that happens to the player. However, the classical approach of having an AI agent that generates the story for the player (I mean, it's how most "story generators" try to do it) could be really useful to make up for the simulation's faults. It doesn't even have to be a super-intelligent expert system; it could simply string together a few story atoms. And how the hell would something like this, that's been tried for so long and failed, work this time? Because it's not the AI's job to think about every single detail of the story, but just the "grand scheme of things"; the simulation will fill in the details.

Let me illustrate my point :)
The player arrives at the game world. There's a good simulation of NPCs, populations, politics, economy, etc running all the time. This is what fills in the gaps, what makes the world feel alive. It provides distractions and small quests for the player. The AI agent looks at this and decides that it's time to spice things up ;) He creates a villain, gives him a purpose (destroy the world) and a plan. The simulation will take care of the rest. The crystal stolen from the temple, the kidnapped princess... if you have bad guys and story "drivers" making these things happen, the world will be filled with surprises. If the plan fails, well, it's time to make up some way for the villain to survive and try another plan, or create another big quest... or it's simply "game over, you won". Since it's purpose is to make things interesting, it can provide the kind of plot twists that are life-savers or make things more complicated for the player. That's what the simulation lacks but is perfectly reasonable for an AI system. Hmm... does this really solve the problem of generating stories? Comments? :)

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Original post by Wavinator I agree, this would be so unprecedented that I think even in a flawed form, it would garner interest. But I think that not having it backed up with "guaranteed" stories would be a big mistake. As I said, if it was for a system of sidequests or there was so much else to do in the game that you didn't care, I think it would be fantastic. I would actually avoid the main storyline just to get into the whole world sim aspect, but for those that need to have an engaging story, it would be there. PS: Sorry I had to edit my last post a bunch, but new ideas just kept coming up.

I am certainly not discouraging the idea of more "guaranteed" stories but I think if the whole game was designed with the simulated feel and not such a literary feel it could still work if the whole game was designed around that idea.

I would design the game more with that "ant farm" sim feel than the epic typical RPG feel.

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Original post by Jotaf That's what the simulation lacks but is perfectly reasonable for an AI system. Hmm... does this really solve the problem of generating stories? Comments? :)

Perfectly reasonable, but decidedly non-trivial to implement. Every time you allow for another type of story event to occur, the list of possible results grows exponentially. Making it all work in a logical manner is a bitch.

Richard Bartle discusses some design concepts along these lines in his Notes from the Dawn of Time series.

His articles about NPC AI and computer-generated quests are especially relevant.

http://www.skotos.net/articles/dawnof25.shtml
http://www.skotos.net/articles/dawnof26.shtml

Edit: It looks like posts break when you try to use multiple A tags. Overly greedy pattern matching, I suspect.

Thanks, I had already read Bartle's articles and that's where I got the idea of basing the random quests not on some "magic" quest generator that will only be built 50 years from now, but on interacting characters with their own agendas and plans.

It isn't as hard as it might sound at first. Assuming you have a world with interesting interactions (economy, politics...), which should be a requirement for any virtual world, and NPCs with a planning system similar to the one that Bartle suggested, the next step is to simply build this AI agent that creates interesting situations. As I said, they can be a bunch of hard-coded "if-then" clauses and the effects will still be awsome. If you code the creation of a villain every now and then, it might seem pretty bleak at first because it will still create the same sort of thing (a villain) every time. But the world will be different every time a villain is created, so his plan will be different, and the players' experience will be different too. The great thing about simulations and planning systems is how you don't have to hardwire every possible situation in the system. So there :)

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Original post by Jotaf Thanks, I had already read Bartle's articles and that's where I got the idea of basing the random quests not on some "magic" quest generator that will only be built 50 years from now, but on interacting characters with their own agendas and plans. It isn't as hard as it might sound at first. Assuming you have a world with interesting interactions (economy, politics...), which should be a requirement for any virtual world, and NPCs with a planning system similar to the one that Bartle suggested, the next step is to simply build this AI agent that creates interesting situations. As I said, they can be a bunch of hard-coded "if-then" clauses and the effects will still be awsome. If you code the creation of a villain every now and then, it might seem pretty bleak at first because it will still create the same sort of thing (a villain) every time. But the world will be different every time a villain is created, so his plan will be different, and the players' experience will be different too. The great thing about simulations and planning systems is how you don't have to hardwire every possible situation in the system. So there :)

yep my thoughts exactly...

only in my mind, I was thinking not so much of a villian being created midgame, but all NPCs being there from the beginning

If they're evil they'll make villianous plans during the game based on what they want to attain in the world