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Original post by Edtharan Lets take the Christmas Carol.

Forgot a point I wanted to mention about this: I like the evolution you've proposed but I wonder about it in practical terms.

If you start out with a combat heavy game, you'll attract an audience that's both good at and wants to fight (in theory).

But if the game ends up evolving into a game heavy with socialization and diplomacy, what's how's that initial audience going to react?

I think whatever gameplay you choose it has to mostly be the same from start to finish, both in terms of development and for the sake of the audience. Even a game as diverse as Civilization has generally the same activities throughout.

I can see using that as a cRPG template, btw, in terms of what actions are allowed. The socialization and diplomacy would have to be present from the start. If there was combat, then maybe this would be a weird game where you could bribe your way out of conflict each time, but doing so at lower levels would be far more expensive than killing your way around the world.

I'm having a hard time seeing how to get the "dramatic" in there. Reading your post, I'm imagining a character that develops through a series of "episodes", or short, distinct events. You go on a white-water-rafting ride, and by the end of it you've levelled up your paddling skill, your sense of your own mortality, your ability to depend on your team to keep you safe and your reverence for natural forces. You spend a year as a researcher in a lab, and you come out with considerable knowledge of the specific field, a distaste for bureaucracy, meticulous hygiene and a crush on the new intern. You ride out with a small band of soldiers to buy time while your village evacuates. You fail, and everyone's slaughtered but you, so you survive with some cool scars, a deep sense of failure and futility, a vague craving for death and a firm belief that ruthless violence is the most powerful force available to humans.

How could any game grade these events productively? You'd have to dumb it down, reduce it to a few personality sliders or faction standing-type values and have various trigger events push them around.

And as has been said, I'd worry about a player with one avatar-character finding this very frustrating, as the character would seem to get out of control, and you might wind up with an alter ego that you just don't like.

In a party-based game, I think it would be awesome. If you keep it simple, and maybe log significant events, then each of your characters could gradually be invested, not just with a unique set of attributes and skills, but with a unique personal story that accounts for all of them.

I'm thinking now about Mount & Blade, where you can ask your hero units about their past. At first, it's all, "I was conscripted at a young age and learned the bow alongside my countrymen, but was unable to return to a life of blah, blah, blah..." but as the game goes on, they start recounting seiges that you commanded, and times you were captured and they had to go find another job while they waited for your return. It's just fluff there, except for loyalty and morale, but if that sort of thing is what defines their performance, it would be a whole new kind of leadership role.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage I'm having a hard time seeing how to get the "dramatic" in there. Reading your post, I'm imagining a character that develops through a series of "episodes", or short, distinct events.

I'm trying to decide if it has to be episodes. Would an event be dramatic because of its magnitude? I know that if it repeats too often you lose drama. But what about a slow shift? Or would that be too much like what games do now, in terms of deeds that shift you between good and evil (e.g., feed the poor, your "good" stat goes up a bit, kick a beggar, it goes down, etc.)

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You go on a white-water-rafting ride, and by the end of it you've levelled up your paddling skill, your sense of your own mortality, your ability to depend on your team to keep you safe and your reverence for natural forces. You spend a year as a researcher in a lab, and you come out with considerable knowledge of the specific field, a distaste for bureaucracy, meticulous hygiene and a crush on the new intern. You ride out with a small band of soldiers to buy time while your village evacuates. You fail, and everyone's slaughtered but you, so you survive with some cool scars, a deep sense of failure and futility, a vague craving for death and a firm belief that ruthless violence is the most powerful force available to humans.

I swear you've been leveling up your mind reading stats, man! [grin]

Your examples are exotic, but perfectly in line with the content I'd be experimenting with. I was thinking about this as two frameworks-- one as a kind of unusual take on the board game Life, and the other as a Sims minus the daily management minutiae, but both with a dramatic overlay. So yeah, you get the transformative events and the choices that go with them.

What I'm not clear on is how granular these events can be. Programming and art puts a lower limit on how minute interactions can be, so it must have a certain level of abstraction. But if it's too abstract ("Your child died and your wife left, click OK") then it really sucks.

It has to be a series of choices and steps. One angle I've been exploring is movement about an abstract map (of say a city) with levels loaded or popups at key interactions. Maybe, for instance, you're traveling somewhere and you get indication that there's a sick man slumped in a nearby alley. That becomes an optional entry point to what might be a dramatic situation/storyline involving helping the poor, discovering why they're poor and what's behind it all.

(I'm having real trouble with the tone of events at the moment. I'm at odds with how many mundane events to include, or whether or not to just keep them all far fetched and fantastical. Can human nature themes survive being squeezed into a video game framework?)

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How could any game grade these events productively? You'd have to dumb it down, reduce it to a few personality sliders or faction standing-type values and have various trigger events push them around.

Yeah, aside from the writing which conveys these events I've been asking whether or not framing everything in a transactional system of points does damage to the very idea.

For instance, what if I modeled "personality point" values for events you experience and introduced a cost structure for certain actions. Let's take something like forgiveness. In real life forgiveness costs something, but that something is nebulous and hard to define and very individual.

Because of this, I was actually thinking of a very simplified token system (for now think of it as a representation of self or "soul/spirit.") If life kicks the crap out of someone, it's sometimes said in literature to "fill them" with something. That could be hate, sorrow, vengeance, whatever.

Okay, so at the HUGE risk of trivializing it, what if these were tokens of a sort that gave you abilities and powers. You'd have opportunities to acquire more based on what events you steered your character to plus responses to semi-random events. Some events might rob you of them, while others would give you ethical/moral choices that changed them. Maybe you become very successful using them in certain situations and in turn gain so many that you're "filled up" with whatever it is.

So now the act of forgiveness is an act of deleveling. Hate/sorrow/vengeance/etc. gives you immunities or perhaps inhuman drive or focus, but interactions where you have the opportunity to be humane or kind simply "cost" too much. Unburdening yourself would be an act of losing these tokens (or however it should be depicted). So if you want to change (because your world/situation has changed, forcing you to adapt) you can't just go anywhere to do that. You need certain relationships or defining moments, which you can search for but are not guaranteed to get.

Now I readily admit that my biggest worry with something like this is that it would be ham-handed. But I'm wondering if with well done writing it can't be a kind of Life strategy game where the squares are dramatic moments of character definition.

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And as has been said, I'd worry about a player with one avatar-character finding this very frustrating, as the character would seem to get out of control, and you might wind up with an alter ego that you just don't like.

Aye, yes. This is another problem. I think we can accept "not enough mana" but "not enough bravery" is something else.

I want to say that to influence player action you've got to go after what it is that they can do. As an extreme example, a character with 10 hit points in combat isn't going to be as brave as someone with 1,000. Yet on the flip side of that is pure frustration.

A party might work better, but what if they all ended up screwed up? Maybe it's my job to limit that and disallow it, or to make an ever reliable lead that can't be transformed in some negative fashion if everyone else already is.

(btw, apologies for the avalanche of text but this is a tricky one)

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Original post by Wavinator Forgot a point I wanted to mention about this: I like the evolution you've proposed but I wonder about it in practical terms. If you start out with a combat heavy game, you'll attract an audience that's both good at and wants to fight (in theory). But if the game ends up evolving into a game heavy with socialization and diplomacy, what's how's that initial audience going to react?

True. If I was going to make a game out of this idea, then I would definitely put more effort into writing a better plot line so as to keep the same audience.

But, this was only for explanation purposes.

I've always quite liked a bit of both (dramatic and progressive). For example, in Dawn of War 2, your units level up and get better at shooting for example, but every so often you unlock a special ability that is instantly noticeable. I like this because it makes the experience system much more rewarding.

I think, as you've said, the flip side is the challenge of making enough interesting life changing events. Perhaps, if your game follows a story and then the player goes through 3 or 4 major events. Their choices effect how they level up (and also maybe the conclusion, but that depends on the game).

Then, there could be much smaller events with smaller consequences that happen more frequently. These could be generated from a list of pre-sets. You would have to be careful not to have "You saved the...RABIT... from the TRAP" and then five minutes later "You saved the...DOG...from the BEAR". Alternatively, if this is always happening, ditch the events and go for traditional levelling, making the major events even more significant.

With the major events, I think you would need to tie them heavily in with the story so they would act as turning points for both your characters development and also the story development.