I''ve already posted this on our little collaboration board here, but felt that I could post it here too. Firstly, the philosophy is that your main goal is not to use plot for emotional involvment. Plot is used for a higher-level version of what is going on. The goal will instead be to allow for the greatest amount of diversion by the player or otherwise with the least amount of hard-coded intervention. The idea is to let the system take care of the effects of player''s, NPC''s, etc actions without trying to if/then everything in each and every individual story. It would be thought of in terms of a strategy game such as Chess. There are certain rules and goals. Each entity (player, npcs, etc) uses those rules to attain the goals. This is like each Chess piece having rules or ways that it can affect the world. There are global rules that effect every piece and there are individual rules that affect different pieces differently. For instance there''s a global rule that says when a certain piece lands on the same square as an opponent''s that piece takes the other piece. Each piece has different individual rules to allow it to ultimately execute that global rule of taking a piece. Chess is pretty simple when you look at those rules, but look how many strategies there are to use those rules to ultimately complete the final goal (take the king). Now, imagine if you were to lay a higher-level plot on top of that chess game. Imagine that you had politics that laid on top of those underlying basic rules. Now, mind you, this plot is going to be almost meaningless unto itself, but when combined w/ the world''s mechanics as described earlier it would make the game even more interesting. It would seem as though the player is interacting with this dynamic political system or any other kind of plot you lay on top. The trick is that you have to realize that you''re not trying to make an engaging plot unto itself. Now imagine that you take this even further. Instead of one global action (taking a piece), you have a dozen or more. Now, take that even farther. Each piece doesn''t just have one action, but a dozen or more. Shuffle that up, you have an interactive, dynamic world. What you don''t have is a literary, narrative that will compete w/ a book, but if you''re okay with that fact this could be quite interesting. Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.
What a plight we who try to make a story-based game have...writers of conventional media have words, we have but binary numbers