Your example is complex but it could be handled with in a way similar to what i have descrived above and by adding a more sofisticated AI with objects and rules (rules is knowledge how to solve objectives in AI).

Quote: ...if there is an adventuring party the characters are trapped together, which is good for brewing arguments and romances; if the journey is making the party run out of supplies or their boat is taking on water you could have increasing desperation and suspense about whether they will make it to their destination before they are doomed; usually the characters must endure some sort of test, which might give insight into their inner strengths and weaknesses or cause them to learn a lesson.

Heres some possible steps for your generic plot.

1. Trap party and limit resources (air, fresh water, etc).

Could be a dungeon or an enclosed place.

2. Add game events used to trigger certain plot transitions.

For example, a monster spawning, a water flood, an npc companion breaks emotionaly, etc

3. Add necessary dialogs to companions about their doubts on the current
situation and personal life dialogs, objectives for the current situation
and rules to solve their objectives.

Adding dialog that allows npcs to explain their "feelings" in the current situation, add objectives for certain npcs to share some facts of their lifes with others, etc

4. Add puzzles the player or other npcs can solve to advance in the plot.

I have no illusions about this. It will never be as good as a non-dynamic plot made by a good writer. But there are details that make dynamic plots very interesting for rpgs. Parts of a plot can be easly reused for other plots and the plot reacts better to the world. For an action-adventure game this is not a problem since the game is a one time voiage. Rpgs however, good ones, are highly non-linear. It's also necessary to feed the player with adventures so that the player may grow (character progression). So dynamic stories may be the evolution of quests, but don't replace conventional storytelling (the one time stories).

Why do you think good rpgs are highly non-linear? I've seen some excellent linear ones and some terrible non-linear ones, and well as some decent non-linear ones and some lousy linear ones. I think non-linearity has greater potential but is harder to do even halfway well.

As for your steps, they seem a bit arbitrary - where is your overall structure? If you want to create plot and character arcs you have to know how that progress works and where in the arc you're supposed to be at any given time. I'm familiar with gurps and it doesn't say anything about plot or character development - it's about gameplay generation, not story generation, that's usually left to the GM. I think that the only way to make a good non-linear RPG is to emulate a great GM's understanding of the principles of storytelling and make generation of specific quests or whatever subservient to that.

Consider the last roleplay I did. This was a diceless roleplay, so it was pure interactive storytelling. There were only two players, so each functioned as the GM and NPCs for the other. We started with a random setting (provided by the host) of a medieval capital city with royal court, and the additions of slavery and magic. Now my partner and I asked each other some questions about what we wanted to do - we wanted a romance between our two characters, with mine being a soldier enslaved as punishment for freeing an unhappy slave, and given as a captive/pet to hers, a nobleman who didn't understand love and didn't trust anyone. Then we started playing and had a great time for several weeks. How, pray tell, would you create a gameplay experience like that using any kind of quest generation? This kind of story certainly can be told in an RPG, ang I think players would really enjoy it, but it cannot be done if one's brain and game design are stuck in 'quest, dice, and foozle' mode.

It can't. Theres no computer that can simulate the mind of a creative human writer as i said above. Dynamic stories are not suposed to replace true storytelling.

But I think we can improve on the type of dynamic stories that are being done. Again the tools would be modules or pieces of stories (similar to solo pnps chapters) with associated conditions and actors whose AI could be dynamicaly updated to suit the dynamic plot needs.

I think a better question is why do we need dynamic stories if we can make everything by hand using human creativity?

"Why do you think good rpgs are highly non-linear?"

That would take a long post to answer your question properly but i will try to make it short. We usualy expect an rpg to provide skills and a chargen system of some sort where we can choose a past, specialization skills, a face, initial affiliations, initial reactions, perks and quirks and other customization options that allow us to create a character.

We also expect that our character is provided with gameplay, quests and in-game reactions adequate for our character choice. For example a thief or a dilomat is not suposed to go around solving problems by killing everything in his path. So there is also the mater of character progression. Will the character starve for quests, stories, whatever that allow him to progress maintaining his own personality and gameplay style?

Not every character is fun to play. A blind begger, for example, should not be a great choice for role-playing. The choices are usualy restricted to fighting for warriors, thieving and stealth gameplay, puzzle solving, technlogical skills and information research (detective gameplay) for scholar types, medical abilities, diplomacy and leadership for social types, magic (not necessarly combat magic) or a combination of those.

So as you can see, it's easier to make a good non-linear rpg than a linear one. You don't have to force your story or restrain your imagination in order to support every gameplay style possible in one single plot. The best solution for this seams to be non-linearity (see Oblivion for example), a mix of dynamic stories (solves the progression problem and improves replayability) and a set of non-linear plots made by creative writers that supports different game styles.

So basically you are saying you want to work within the 'quest, dice, foozle' mindset because that's what players expect and RPG to be? What about innovation, trying to give them something better than they expect? Personally I think existing mom-linear RPGs suck. As a player my opinion is that if a dynamic story isn't as good as a real linear story I'd rather have a linear story. But as a designer I believe it IS possible to create an interactive story as good as a linear story - the easy way is to have a real human author create all the pieces of the interactive story, the hard way is the story generation engine I describe in the thread I linked to above.

Personally I just don't like D&D or GURPS or any other dice-based systems with lots of stats, I'd much rather see a ren'ai (dating sim) type system where dialogue interaction is what controls how the plot branches. My own favorite rpgs are the linear Final Fantasys and Vagrant Story, and the non-linear Harvest Moons, so a combination of those is my definition of the perfect RPG, and what my Xeallure design was based on. If you want to talk MMORPGs I'd like to see one where the player choosed their character's gender and appearance but every noob starts as a child/student with no class or skills, and establishes their character's personality and clothing style through gameplay, and more deeply-developed NPCs that each player can try to establish a personal relationship with.

So, this is my vision of the ideal non-linear RPG - if your own version is very different from mine then there's not too much I can say to help you woth yours.

Sunandshadow look at it in a bigger perspective than just dices and stats. They only serve the purpose they were made for, that is role-playing.

Most ocidental rpgs these days use and abuse of stats but are not rpgs. Why? People use stats without realy understanding why they exist in the first place - what's their purpose. Skills besides combat are useless, most choices have no significant consequences on the world, what the npcs think of the player is irrelevant and won't afect the player in any significant way, reputation is usualy only an indicator and doesn't affect anything.

These tools are essential in rpgs to build your chars are biography, body and mental attributes (health, stamina, etc) , skills, advantages and disadvantages, reputation and affiliations. These can be anything you want and not just numbers rolled with dices copy-pasted from a pnp book. A advantage can be something like "will heal faster while immersed in water" or "heals faster in daylight".

They do the same that a writer does when he sketches his characters and defines the world and social balance where his stories are going to play. So if you use rpg techniques well it can help you as a writer when creating your stories.

"What about innovation, trying to give them something better than they expect?"

Then why calling it an rpg? Why is so many people willing to pay millions for a license to do a Fallout game, for example, and then getting rid of gameplay considered essential by their creators? It doesn't make any sense.

Just call it action-adventure games because thats where they fit in. Games focused in dialog and storytelling with some action and some puzzle solving, usually focused in a SINGLE adventure. In this sense we can say that action-adventure games are more developed stories because, well ... that's the purpose of making an action-adventure game.

I played the FFs and even enjoyed some but these are more action-adventure games than role-playing games. The use of stats in those games is for the tactical combat and it's most of the times irrelevant for role-playing. I only played FF7 and FF8 so don't know about the rest.

Have you considered that RPG actually stands for Role Playing Game, and that the essence of one is, presumably, role playing? A role playing game ought to be about playing a role, being another person in another world for a while, whether that person is a character created by an author or an avatar which the player imbues with an idealized version of themself. From this perspective stats _ought_ to be irrelevant to the roleplaying part of the game and are only useful if you want to add combat and/or economic simulations to the basic social simulation. The core purpose of the RPG is to help the player escape into a fantasy world where they can be the hero; allow the player to enter an interactive version of their favorite novel or movie.

Linear RPGs stick close to these roots while non-linear RPGs are an attempt to make the game world more interactive, closer to a virtual reality and therefore more satisfying to play within. But the modern RPG in which the world has grown but the story has withered is a degenerate case which evolved because combat and economic simulations are easy to program while social simulation is difficult and too subtle to appeal to the core gaming population of 14 year old boys. Modern occidental RPGs are like wax apples: pretty graphics and flashy action may make the gameworld look shiny and tempting to live in but without giving the player the feeling of being within a society, interacting with other 'people', and truly living a fantasy life the gameworld feels hollow and unsatisfying.

If you look at the term action-adventure on the other hand, adventure implies problem/puzzle solving, which hopefully most RPGS have, while action implies that something is happening in real-time, which most RPGs _don't_ have. With the exception of a timed battle here and there the final fantasy's are entirely turn-based and there is nothing action-ful about them. If you want to call them something other than RPG, let's at least call them something accurate like NarrativeTBC (TBC=turn based combat). The Harvest Moons are often labled RPsims, so we could call them Narrative Social/Domestic Simulations (as opposed to something like SIMS2 which would be a Non-Narrative Domestic Simulation). But really, it doesn't matter what you call them - I personally am a writer first and foremost. My interest in games is based on the desire to be able to enter a story interactively, so I am only interested in playing or making games with strong stories.

"The core purpose of the RPG is to help the player escape into a fantasy world where they can be the hero; allow the player to enter an interactive version of their favorite novel or movie."

I supose that is the core of every computer game. If possible doing it in a way that is different from watching a movie or reading a book by including some gameplay. However i wouldn't call a FPS with a story and some character interaction an RPG. There are some features that are essential for us to, at least, call a game a Western RPG and that is the possibility of choosing a role ourselves and not having a role choosen for us to fit a certain story.

This article gives a nice idea about what an rpg stands for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Role_Playing_Game

"If you look at the term action-adventure on the other hand, adventure implies problem/puzzle solving, which hopefully most RPGS have, while action implies that something is happening in real-time, which most RPGs _don't_ have."

Look at this list and you will see there is a strong storytelling and character interaction component. Those games would not be any good without this component.

http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,186

These are adventure games. Action-adventure games replace puzzle solving or mix it with action combat and retain the storytelling and character interaction. RPGs have the extra option of allowing you to create your own character face, skills, attributes and name him.

I think the main difference between RPGs and action-adventure games is that RPGs are more about the world and action-adventures are more about specific individuals and their adventures. If the combat is real-time or turn-base thats only a detail. Turn-base favors role-playing but having different ways to solve problems is much better.

Actually, the game I'm working on is a bizarre text-based attempt to fuse a ren'ai and a Dragon Quest-like combat/levelling engine with the additional "idea" that battles should never occur unless they're part of the plot. It goes slowly, since I'm lazy and work split-shift six days a week, but I think that the basic concept is far truer to tabletop roleplaying than any of the RPGs I've played are. The idea here is to try to bring my experience as a DM and a writer into as true a single-player gaming experience as possible.

In my admittedly biased opinion, it would be criminal to call it an adventure game merely because the computerized-RPG genre has become dominated by MEGs (Munchkin Engine Games).

The literal meanings of the terms role playing game, adventure game, etc. aren't very useful. In almost every game other than simulated board and card games you will be playing the role of a character that isn't yourself, in these same games you will be going on adventures.
For better or worse, if you put RPG on the front of your box, people will be expecting statistics, and they'll be chomping at the bit for the opportunity to make those numbers get bigger.