The most obvious use of the concept I want to discuss is present in The Sims. Characters have several states that continuously decline through the game based on different occurrences, and the player plays the game with specific intent on keeping them as high as possible in order to maintain a highly functional character. It's a rewarding goal that doesn't lose its sense of purpose when it is fulfilled, and I think that's a pretty rare thing to find. Personally, I didn't think the tasks involved with fulfilling the goal were all that great in The Sims games, but I still fell into the addictive trap of chasing after the goal. Wouldn't this concept work well in many other games? Can games which already have fun gameplay elements turn those elements into state-feeders to make them even more involving and rewarding? Role playing games essentially do this with experience, skills, and attributes. Those elements boost the motivation to play for almost exactly the same reasons. But the closer you get to the goal, the less motivating they become, until you eventually master your character and the motivation dissipates. I don't want to convert RPG skills into continuously declining states, but I'm considering how much of an impact a few other types of declining character states could make. A random example would be a "motivation" state. For a character example, a medic character could earn motivation by healing wounds, and could lose motivation over time, and/or by losing allies, and/or by having allies or oneself be attacked. The motivation state could add bonus points to the health that is restored through medical treatment, as well as temporarily boost several other skills and attributes. Any thoughts?

That's a cool idea. Don't forget about how Sims2, in addition to the state bars, also had randomized minigoals based on the character's overall goal (money, romance, family, popularity, career IIRC). One problem with states as implemented in sims and sims2 is that a lot of the interesting game content only happened if you played badly, you didn't get little bonus scenes for playing particularly well. This really ought to be reversed to be more motivating, especially in a more RPGish context.

An interesting comparison is to a high score table, gazette (like in Vagrant Story), or collectible set (Such as the Zodiac Story in FF9): these are great because the player can see what goals there are to aim for, pick one they are in the mood for at the moment (or several to pursue in the long term), and get a reward when they complete it. In an MMO setting there might be monthly, weekly, or daily repeatable goals, as well as whole-game sets to collect and skills/tech trees to develop.

A second related concept is building relationships with factions or individual NPCs, this could work well in both the positive and negative directions in that it could be fun to develop a nemesis relationship with a faction or individual, as well as gaining various plot and item rewards for building a positive relationship.

I'm in love with the idea of declining states, so I think there are good possibilities here for the RPG.

A few problems I see, though, involve situational awareness and control of the environment. In the Sims, you could see the whole play area in most cases, and positioning the widgets and your characters became a strategy game of time and space management.

An RPG environment tends to be more open, dynamic and fluid, unlike a Sims house where you can see everything and largely control exactly what goes where. However, if this was strictly kept a positive thing (no penalties for not fulfilling) and there was strategy / complexity to the actual task of healing, I could see this being a huge plus for the non-combat parts of an RPG.

Another thing is that I think you probably shouldn't align this idea with the character's main role. A healer will heal because the gameplay tends to need it. They don't really need any motivation, anymore than the monster slayer or treasure hunter.

What might be more interesting is motivating all the little bits of gameplay that usually are very hard to reward. sunandshadow's suggestion of relationship building is great-- what motivation do we normally have, other than intrinsic, to behave well in an RPG if we're not rewarded? Other example might be feeding the poor, tithing or avenging a slain family member. I think this then helps to emphasize a bit of the "role" you're supposed to be playing.

Another similar idea: i was going to post a seperate thread, but I think the two ideas kind of complement each other. Most rpgs have a tendency to be either very linear (FF) or very nonlinear (TES) and I was thinking; why has nobody made a game which has the nonlinear aspects, but also has some kind of pushing reason why you must follow the main story, ie time limits.

So, this would remove what we had in oblivion where you walked into a town and the oblivion gates there had opened that day, and then you left for a couple of weeks and nothing happened, you go back and they attack sort of thing just wouldnt happen. You would go, and the oblivion gates would have just opened - if you leave them fro more than a day or so you end up having to close the gate, then clear the town of daedra, help rebuild the walls, etc, etc.

I think the main reason this hasn't happened is the ridiculous complexity involved in actually coding it. Which is a bit of a pain, and quite sad. Imagine playing a story like final fantasy, but instead of having nothing to do instead of walk between cutscenes, you could work doing oddjobs for mercenaries or suchlike. And if you leave your position at a guild for so long, off pursuing some other quest, then your position gets usurped. It would in one fell swoop remove the TES malaise, the "well, now im level 60, head of the thieves, mages, fighters guilds, and I beat up the big baddy, now what?"

I guess a simple version of this could be implemented as the OP said - your favour with most people would decline when you did nothing for them, or didn't see them in a while. and your faction points would similarly decrease if you seem to be too involved with another faction.

I think the idea of skills increasing or decreasing with "motivation" or such could be annoying unless done very carefully, as you would get many periods in your gameplay when you would need to spend a solid chunk of time just healing random beggars to get your motiviation up, so that your skills aren't completely borked, which isn't realistic or immersing for "most" medic characters. Of course, another idea would simply be a general background count, so that your character could agonise over things which they did which were uncharacteristic - a medic leaving someone for dead, a fighter running away from a superior enemy, a thief getting caught or a mage losing a powerful tome of magic. That could really encourage people to play their videogame characters more in the style of pnp rpg, which would be nice.

And just think how difficult implementing all that would be in an rpg which supported nigh on every class you can imagine, like TES. would be awesome though...

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Original post by Mathmo Another similar idea: i was going to post a seperate thread, but I think the two ideas kind of complement each other. Most rpgs have a tendency to be either very linear (FF) or very nonlinear (TES) and I was thinking; why has nobody made a game which has the nonlinear aspects, but also has some kind of pushing reason why you must follow the main story, ie time limits. So, this would remove what we had in oblivion where you walked into a town and the oblivion gates there had opened that day, and then you left for a couple of weeks and nothing happened, you go back and they attack sort of thing just wouldnt happen. You would go, and the oblivion gates would have just opened - if you leave them fro more than a day or so you end up having to close the gate, then clear the town of daedra, help rebuild the walls, etc, etc.

Maybe I have misinterpreted you, however, what you describe in the second paragraph, surely that is a move towards an even less linear game type. Personally, I find things like radiant AI, the game evolving without the player etc. fascinating, but that would be leaning away FF rather than towards it. I think you original point, of a middle ground, is something like Fable. The game is very story driven, but there isn't one way to go about it (the good path or the EVIL path, hopefully Fable 2 will expand on this)

My apologies if I have misinterpreted you.

you have certainly misinterpreted what i intended to say... but perhaps not what I said.

In most (i hesitate to say all) rpgs, there is a main story or plot - oftne involving saving the world, deposing an evil monarch etc. In FF style games, the game is basically a movie that you watch, in that you play throuhg the story that was written. In TES style games, you decde what story you feel like playing at the time, and do your thing. I see what you mean exactly, that my suggestions lead exactly to an obvious extension of TES style AI.

What I meant, but forgot to mention except in passing, that there would be a BIG story in the background, which will happen REGARDLESS of player action.
think the next TES game, you have been ignoring the main quest because it is pretty dull, or it seemed so, and besides, you can just be a mage, right. But, a few months down the line, there is a distinct shortage of mages guilds due to towns being trashed, and in fact the imperial city is practically the only bastion left free. GAME OVER :-p. Or, the industrious player listens to the first few folk telling him of the troubles, (or has played the game before) and almost before the real troubles have begun, after some serious power-levelling, he goes and deals with the "boss character". Returns to his fighters guild quests, chills out... a few months later - the same situation - he didn't deal with the second in command, who quickly took control. It would mean a game world where the player could never quite be sure he had dealt with the root cause, whether that old evil might some day come back. Or, of course, maybe the player just straight off follows the main quest and then worries about other stuff - but you could have other plot event chains working in a similar way, a few slave revolts, maybe an uprising. severe bandits maybe cutting off weapons supplies or transit routes. It would require real care to make it all feel natural though.

adding - I haven't played fable, but i want to at somee point. I was hoping for even more than just a good and evil - mybe each guild could have its own ways to solve the problem, maybe even more depending on which guildmasters you talk to. I mean, a game in which you discuss these things, and have to come up with a real plan yourself.

Time limits and timed meters work ok in the sims because you can pause the game, or revert to last save, or use cheat codes to turn off character aging, etc. In an mmo you clearly can't do any of this. MMOs already put tremendous unhealthy pressure on players to play several hours a day, it would be even worse if taking a day or a week off from the game would make you lose ground on an absolute scale rather than just compared to other players. And it would be incredibly annoying if you had to schedule your play time to make sure you did enough of each kind of maintenance activity. The idea of mmos is to enable players to live out their fantasies and spontaneously pursue their moods and whims, not make them do chores they have to do enough of in real life. :P

And others may disagree but IMHO stories that happen not based on player action are inherently boring and inferior to stories that do happen based on player action. (Insert speech here about the unique strength of games as a storytelling medium being interactivity, while in almost every other area it is inferior to a movie or novel.)

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Original post by Mathmo I think the idea of skills increasing or decreasing with "motivation" or such could be annoying unless done very carefully, as you would get many periods in your gameplay when you would need to spend a solid chunk of time just healing random beggars to get your motiviation up, so that your skills aren't completely borked, which isn't realistic or immersing for "most" medic characters.

As the designer, you're in full control. To implement the concept I'm referring to correctly, you would need to limit the state feeders to actions that are meaningful to the game and enjoyable for players. If healing random beggers is neither, then that action should not increase the motivation state. It's as simple as that. Well, usually. One always needs to be mindful of avoiding the accidental implementation of rewarding tedious action. At the heart of it, that's what game design is all about.

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Original post by Kest A random example would be a "motivation" state. For a character example, a medic character could earn motivation by healing wounds, and could lose motivation over time, and/or by losing allies, and/or by having allies or oneself be attacked.

The biggest problem I see is that a player thats gets a medic is most likely already going to want heal allies and avoid getting killed so either the motivation stat will be redundant or just another form of grinding, such as the already mentioned nonsensical stat farming by healing random npc's.

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Original post by Kaze Quote: Original post by Kest A random example would be a "motivation" state. For a character example, a medic character could earn motivation by healing wounds, and could lose motivation over time, and/or by losing allies, and/or by having allies or oneself be attacked. The biggest problem I see is that a player thats gets a medic is most likely already going to want heal allies and avoid getting killed so either the motivation stat will be redundant or just another form of grinding, such as the already mentioned nonsensical stat farming by healing random npc's.

Grinding implies that the action is not enjoyable for the player, so that's out of the question. Don't reward anything that isn't designed to be enjoyable. There's no such thing as redundant motivation when it is applied to fun. If there were, nearly every feature applied to gaming would be redundant motivation to have fun.