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Original post by Wavinator
What really appears to be necessary here is an object which exists in the game world based on many different stats. The most simple paradigm is the enemy, which persists as long as there are hit points and does a bunch of things to lower HP in the hero or his allies. The gameplay for doing this resolves into a kind of grammar involving a subject and object, and this gives you a certain amount of flexibility with combat (does that make any sense?)
This grammar expands and becomes unweildy and even contradictory in terms of gameplay or context the bigger it gets. An example of this was a cheat where you could kill an ally in Ultima and then use their body as dead weight on a floor lever, then resurrect them, simply because the grammar included dead bodies as weight but not killing of allies.
Hey, I think that's a really neat, imaginative and refreshing way to solve puzzles! [lol] More seriously though, it should have been possible to just ask the ally to do it rather than having to brutally force him to (then again I'm not familiar with the setting of this particular puzzle, so maybe there is more than meets the eye here)... Still the point here is applicable: the floor lever didn't require some specific object as dead weight, but anything with enough mass would do (I would assume from context). It is true though that such generality can lead into amusing or simply plain stupid situations, if the system is not carefully crafted. I didn't claim it would be easy to make it consistent, but if done well it would allow a lot of replayability.
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Original post by Wavinator Quote:
Do note, however, that the actual in-game wording might not be exact.
Yes, a bit of vagueness may either be refreshing or it may tempt players down the easy path. For instance, if you're walking around in Power Armor and get a choice between kidnapping and killing a guy, you may find it easy to do the latter until the former has a huge payoff (or the latter a drawback).
Well, yes, that's true, but I was thinking more along these lines: the questmonger wants you to do one thing but tells you to do another. After you are done you come back to collect your reward, but the questmonger realises that he made a mistake (which could have dramatic implications) or possibly he could claim that it was not what he asked for (he could be lying or maybe he errs again). After all, since when have people known what they really wanted? People also let their feelings affect what they say instead of relying on logic and exact communication.
If, on the other hand, you actually did what he really wanted to be done (instead of what he asked for), he might again realise his error, but in this case he would probably react in a more positive way.
How to recognize whether a questmonger is really asking for something he really wants, then? You could have a character skill (some sort of diplomacy skill or something) or you could have the questmonger described in a way that would give hints as to his real intentions (if the questmonger is displayed as furiously angry, the player could assume that instead of the stated quest ("kill the evil dude Jack de Fault, his family, burn the village he lives in etc.") the questmonger meant something else ("humiliate Jack in public"), for instance). Or a combination of these.
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Original post by Wavinator
We're in the same boat here. I want self-sustaining gameplay that allows you to ignore the plot, or even better, self-sustaining gameplay that is so hooked into the characters and environment that it IS the plot.
That would be closer to what I've always thought as what true role-playing is (in an rpg sense): not acting a role in a prewritten manuscript (which is what a fixed plot will enforce, to some degree or another), but rather telling a story. The eventual plot consists of the actions of the player's character, the choices the player made etc. The game provides an immersive, interactive world in which the player can exercise his imagination.
Of course, this does not mean you couldn't use scripted, parametrised scenarios in order to create that world, but you shouldn't enforce the player (or the PC, for that matter) to adhere to these scripts (if the player's character wakes up in a plague-ridden world with an amnesia and hears prophesies of chosen ones, the game shouldn't work so that whatever the player does, he always eventually cures the plague, regains his lost memory and claims to be the chosen one).