I'm contemplating making an interactive story flexible enough to form the basis for a massively multiplayer game. I'm thinking all the avatars would need to start in a standard situation where they could be led through tuorials on how to play the game, yet players would need to immediately have opprtunities to express their different personalities and preferences for different types of content (e.g. romance vs. heroic fighting). So I just wondered, what sort of a setting, plot, cast of NPCs, etc. would you each pick if you were trying to make a universally appealing interactive story like this?

Cannot speak for everyone but I found 'Greek Mythology' to posses of the most fascinating settings, plots, and characters. If I was to write a story, it would have notable influences and references.

hmm, How about waking up in the refugee camp/slum district of a futuristic city. You learn how to play by first gaining an understanding of your environment and thing figure out how to leave the district. There could by one exit per main character archtypes.

Merchants - Can buy a city pass
Warriors - Can fight their way through the guard drones.
Thiefs - Can sneak through the sewers
Diplomants - Can build contacts and negotiate their way to a city pass.
Hackers - Can hack the system and disable the drones.

If the story is some form of short 'welcome to the world, these are your options'-type of thing, then perhaps try to use a number of main story branches fitting the four suits or whatever other taxonomy you want to use to categorize the players. With at least a couple of opportunities to branch over between the story lines. If this is just a short introduction story there is room to make a number of interleaving stories with multiple endings - where the endings are really just different starts for the game.

As for stories further along the game I imagine it is hard to do any other way but without any interaction between story lines. I mean that the damsel in distress-quest is not affected by whether you previously helped old aunt Edna find her glasses or not, other than via any rewards or information that other quest gave you.

Hmm, taxonomy to categorize the players. I suppose the main groups we will have will be crafters, fighters, merchants, and people who do all three. Also, people who do the optional romance parts vs. people who don't.

Or, here's a better idea. Since the story is largely independant of the gameplay, I could categorize players by their taste in stories: those not interested in stories, those interested in mystery, those interested in romance, those interested in politics, those interested in fighting, and those interested in stories of sadness/anger/revenge. Hmm did I leave anyone out of this categorization?

In terms of your story-based categories, you might want to also consider a category for those who are interested in the setting and theme of your game more than the specific story being told.

While the reasons they are attracted to the theme fit roughly into the same categories as their tastes in story, I find that the means used to explore the setting background is often quite different to those used to follow a story.

Anyone remember the old text-based games where you would choose a race and some abilities (or let it choose randomly) and the game would generate your characters back-story, eg:

Quote: You are a tall dark skinned elf who has just finished his apprenticeship as a lumberjack at the young age of 63. Your parents are wealthy traders and look down upon your choice of work, however you had a happy childhood until the age of seven, when your brother died of elf-flu. You pack your trusty axe along with the rest of your possessions into a bag, and head out to make your fortune in the world.

You could do something like this, where you give the players a few options on character creation (age/race/profession/etc...), ask them some personality questions (as a poor student, would you steal a gem from your teacher, etc...), and then use these details to randomly generate a back-story/starting location/initial goals/etc...

So if someone chooses a "rough" profession that lends itself to fighting, and answers positively to some "aggressive" questions, you could start them in arena training or something. Whereas if they choose something like a merchant, they might start training by being led through a market, or a drinking den (depending on their personal answers).

I'm also into this kind of concept for my school project. I'm
quite confused at the moment.


_________________
Julius
Ford Ranger Brochure 2007 by Ford Motor Company Limited UK

I think it would be hard to make up a story for each different type of character that might enter your game. Personally, I am in the process of developing a browser based RPG (I won't say MMO, since I doubt we'll ever get more than 100 players on it) and I had some thought on how to add a sense of uniqueness to each player's character. The obvious choice is to include many items and stats into the game, but recently I've been working on adding the notion of 'choices'.

Right at the character creation page the player has to answer a number of questions about his character's personality and the outcome of these choices decide the character's... well, character. Right now those choices still only affect the player statistics and some initial options the player has, but I intend to have these choices be of larger importance. The storyline of the game hasn't really been worked out yet, but I was thinking that it would be interesting to present the 'history' of the world to the player in a biased perspective. As such, someone who has proven to be pretty violent in the answers to the initial questions will 'perceive' the history differently than someone who has chosen to become a very diplomatic person. This would of course require writing the same story quite a number of times but I'll be interested to see if it will affect the playstyle of players as they progress through the game...

I'm not much of a writer, and not at all experienced at making up good plots, but I thought it might be of some relevance...

I think it really depends mostly on what types of interactions you expect the players to have. If you are going to appeal to a variety of interests, then there must be some sort of common ground to act as a base for the world.

It seems that all of the archetypes you have mentioned focus heavily on character interaction. (Except for fighters, who interact primarily by attacking things without much question). I think for this to properly work, characters must be deep complex entities. An NPC must have a persona which can be explored in various ways by the different types of players. Such as a veteran soldier who may be able to improve a fighter's technique, or comment on the value of crafted weapons. This soldier may be an old bachelor, who after years of fighting in distant wars really wants nothing more than to settle down with some girl in his home town and raise a family. Each of these things would be found out by different players, depending on how they choose to react to the NPC. In addition, the PCs themselves would need to be encouraged to have deeper personalities than the typical roleplaying game.

Many NPCs may not interest certain players at all, and yet may be a primary interest to others, who play differently. The important thing is deciding what different tasks different player would wish to do, and the various ways those tasks might be accomplished by different players.

I think an MMO like this would benefit from having easily 'maxable' characters, and a world where there is a large array of things to experience, skills to specialize in, and ways to interact with the world, the NPCs, and other characters. Then, a single character would be forced to some small subset of those experiences, where choosing some path has the same meaning it does in real life, forgoing choosing another. Ultimately, that is where diversity comes from, the fact that no one person can do everything. As in economics, specialization and trade will benefit the community as a whole. And in my mind, it is this idea of community that must be emphasized, not any specific setting or cast of characters.

If I were to choose a setting personally, I would focus on one where multiple options are likely to exist. Such as a world where both magic and technology exist, and whose state of art are competitive with each other. The civilized world would consist of people who are divided on which is the 'future', and those who don't care as long as it benefits them. The uncivilized world would have lesser technology, and there magic would be of the innate, passionate kind as opposed to the learned type passed down in old tomes. The important and difficult thing would be balancing the different options so that the powergaming population will actually diversify in the world, rather than have 99.8% of players congregate to the perceived 'best class'.