Question #2 - Evolving World Model

[GaioMacareg]

So I was thinking, inspired by Mankind's model, couldn't a MUD work with perpetualy online characters? So I log off, and my character stays in the world. I decided probably not, except in some very unusual worlds, certainly not anything that had combat, and especially not one that allowed PvP combat. But I was also noticing that everything that works in Mankind's offline model could work in a MUD. Here's a scenario, let me know if you think it would work, and if not, what modifications would help.

Let's begin with a simple, boring, cliche'd fantasy MUD of the kill-rest-kill style. As lame and boring as they come. Now, end all respawning of NPCs. When they die, they're dead for good.

So some hero wanders into a cave with some trolls and clears it out. That cave stays empty, monsters don't respawn. Meanwhile someone comes by playing an orc (remember, boring cliche's here) and he decides that the cave would be a great place to hide in and stash his loot as he raids some nearby farms. One day he logs in and sees two NPC orcs near him and gets the message that they're his new minions. They will obet two commands (only) stay, and follow. So he can say, follow, and then walk over to the farms and raid and they'll help. When he logs off, he can leave them guarding his stuff with the stay command. From time to time one will get killed and manybe more will show up. He starts leaving them scattered around the cave instead of all gathered in one spot. Other PC orcs show up to his cave. They learn that the minion routines give small bonuses if a number of the minion types live in the area (thus spawning an orc village really).

The hero returns with some friends, lured by the reports of orcs raiding the nearby farms, and wipes out the orc lair in the cave. He takes the money he finds and spends it at a shop near the farms. A few days later, passing back through he notices that the shop is bigger and has better stuff. He spends more money. It improves again. Not only that but a second one appeared. There seem to be more farms in the area as well. One day as he logs on he discovers a message iviting him to the newly built town square where he's been invited to be the new town's mayor. Should he succeed he gets access to a number of options. Guards (based on town population) with whom he can use the stay and follow commands. He can nominate another PC the captain of the guard (and revoke the title) transferring power over the guards to the captain. He also has a list of a few minor quests (say 1-5 go to site, get item and bring it back and/or monster attacked farm go kill it) that he can assign to various PC heroes. Activating one creates the needed item and/or critter.

If players stop spending money in the shops, or if enemies raid and pillage the town, its population drops. Possibly it becomes a ruin. Maybe the orc players start new characters and come back with a new warband and sack the town.

Anyway, that's the basic idea and largely how I thought it out. Instant problem: Player abuse. That's why there isn't an attack command. They behave exactly as a normal NPC, they won't attack people without a reason, like the player is an orc character in a human town, or has a reputation as a theif, or some such thing. If players try to only give quests to friends or to people who pay them, then players will likely stop frequenting his town and it will start to vanish. But is that enough? Should the minions be more versatile? Would this be too much haslle to code/maintain/setup?

[JCrook]

I don't see why this wouldn't work. In fact, ideally this is how it should work. The only problem is the problem I am having. When your orc is offline, where is he? Does he just disappear? Or is he asleep in the cave?

If he is asleep in the cave, then he needs to be vulnerable to those wandering heroes who come along and wipe out his lair while he is offline. He needs to be able to defend himself.

[SamW]

Originally posted by JCrook:
If he is asleep in the cave, then he needs to be vulnerable to those wandering heroes who come along and wipe out his lair while he is offline. He needs to be able to defend himself.


That's what your 'minions' are for - while the player is offline, the character needs to be safe and sound in his haven, surrounded by his faithful NPC servitors and guardians. If you give these NPCs the ability to notify any PC allies of the character that might be online, then being offline isn't as crippling as it might otherwise be.

The danger is that the first player to get gacked while offline is going to scream about the injustice of it all for days on end. Were it me (and it ain', offline in Horizon Station = not there to be messed with), I'd establish safe zones wherein logged-off characters couldn't be killed or otherwise harassed. Inns, for instance, where for the price of a few copper you can get yourself a room that is guaranteed safe for, say, 24 hours.

Once a player has enough influence (or wealth, or allies, or NPC minions) then the innkeeper won't let them camp there anymore, because of the many enemies such a powerful person could have. Then it will be the player's responsibility to see to the safety of his character when he's not online.

I have to say that I really like the idea of dynamic worlds with shifting power structures and the ability to create a completely player-driven society filled with scheming, murder, and mayhem. I'll be watching closely to see how these things work out, because my next game is built around the persistent character concept.

Interesting stuff indeed,

SamW

[Atama]

The players can enter into a state of meditation, perhaps the "Dragon's Sleep", in which they almost seem to fade away from the world, and are invisible and invincible for that time. They can do this to restore their inner balance, realign their Yin and Yang, though it might not really have any in-game effects besides the fact you're logged off. Instead of saying someone's offline, you can say they "sleep the sleep of the Dragons," and a good IC excuse to go offline is "I feel an imbalance within, excuse me while I meditate to restore the balance". After all, I have studied RL Qigung (my Shaolin Grandmaster Dr. Yang Jwing Ming wrote an excellent book about it) and in Qigung meditation is really used to do this, though you don't actually fade away or anything.

Just a hokey suggestion for people going offline in Qigung...

[JCrook]

Originally posted by Atama:
The players can enter into a state of meditation, perhaps the "Dragon's Sleep", in which they almost seem to fade away from the world, and are invisible and invincible for that time.

Actually, this is not a bad idea. A quasi-magical state of suspended animation, or something like that. I've been playing with some ideas, in case I have to resort to a system whereby characters move out of the game's reach when the player is offline. But you are on the right track. I was trying to come up with something that ties into the theme of the cataclysm, something that has affected people's bodies and causes them to occasionally become vaporous non-entities (your example) or perhaps even turns them to stone. I was leaning toward the petrification hypothesis. That way, I could place statues everywhere and have new characters enter the game by inhabiting one of these statues. Occasionally, the person returns to the stone state, either intentionally to rest, or unintentionally. The great thing about this idea is that, if you try to use it to escape danger, you don't really. You just put it off for a time.

For example, you are about to deliver a mortal blow to your arch enemy. The player of your arch enemy suddenly logs off in a bogus attempt to avoid character death. His character turns to stone. He is fixed to the earth, so that you can't move him. But there are things you can do, if you really want to. You can surround him with deadly traps, hire thugs to assault him when he returns, chain a tiger to him, bury him under a mountain of bricks... etc.

I just prefer comp-control of offline characters.

[GaioMacareg]

Well, running with the lame cliche'd fantasy world idea (which I like using simply because everyone understands it and is familiar with ways to convert from it to something worthwhile) you've got several options: Areas that only members of certain races can enter for various reasons (hobbit holes with doors and passages only 3-feet tall, Orc warrens shielded by the power of an orc Shaman (the same idea as your invulnerable meditation scheme), and so forth. Should Skotos usemy world, I actually have a setup where there are several layers of reality overlapping and without knowledge of the area you can't necessarily get to all the same rooms as someone who does know. So in the cave, the orc would, probably stash his most important treasures, and sleep while offline in a room hidden in one of the deeper layers of reality. I'd also like a bit of computer control, but to allow the killing of offline characters. one idea is that Offline = sleeping. Offline for weeks = sick. As far as in-game description of the character anyway.

I have to say that I really like the idea of dynamic worlds with shifting power structures and the ability to create a completely player-driven society filled with scheming, murder, and mayhem. I'll be watching closely to see how these things work out, because my next game is built around the persistent character concept.

Mankind has no NPCs of any kind. Every store owner is a PC, every enemy you face is a PC, it's all player driven. Been going strong for 2 years. I played for about 8 months before I got too busy for it. It's a wonderful way to run things. For the longest time there was this war raging between about 15,000 players in three camps. A system would belong to one side and get ravaged in a single day of massive invasions. Then some newbies would move in and start building up the now vacant territory. Then pirates would come by and raid them. This would provoke a protective response from the major powers (all involved in the big war) and when their enemies found out they'd stationed troops in the sector there'd be another big battle there. Maybe it would calm down and some merchants would move it, making it essentially a safe zone. Until the pirates returned... That dynamic environment is what I want to see in more RPG worlds. It was just so much fun to participate in. Way more than any other online world I've ever experienced. Mankind is great, but it's far too much of a RTS for my taste.

[JCrook]

Originally posted by SamW:
That's what your 'minions' are for

Oh, yeah, definitely. But I'd also like a situation where, say, a ninja is hired to rub out somebody. That ninja shouldn't have to wait around while that somebody is online to accomplish his deed. In fact, the entire plot/story for that ninja might be learning about that person's habits, studying him for days or weeks, looking for weaknesses, and then through skill and luck finding his way through all the minions to reach the character while he is asleep.

Also, NPC minions and safe-house inns don't deal with the sudden disconnect. What if your minions have all been slaughtered and you are swimming a river trying to escape your foes, when suddenly you lose your connection?

The danger is that the first player to get gacked while offline is going to scream about the injustice of it all for days on end.

Ah, yes, but what about the player who was about to do the gacking of his mortal enemy, who is thwarted when said mortal enemy suddenly logs off? It is indeed a dilemma.

I think that if the environment of the game makes it explicit that such things can happen, then self-preservation would become a standard player expectation. That way, when the first offline PC gets whacked, the culture of the game will say, here are some things you can do to avoid being whacked, like hiring NPCs, hiding yourself, setting up contingency orders for the system to follow should you be attacked.

There is also this to consider. Say I am playing Horizon Station. I log off for the evening and everything is hunky dory. While I am offline, some idiot blows a seal and decompresses the entire area where I was when I logged out, or my quarters where I was sleeping. Does that mean that only those people online in that area at the time get sucked into the vacuum of space, and that the offline people are safe?

We are both creating games where the environment itself is a danger. In my own game, there are very big ugly things called titans and dragons that occasionally go on rampages and squash places like inns where offline PCs are safely snoozing.

It seems like the only real solution is to say that offline characters just disappear or something. For me, this isn't acceptable. For me, some level of offline danger has to be an accepted part of the game. The more you involve yourself with the game, the more danger you run while offline. In other words, if you play a peasant, you aren't likely to have someone sneak into your hut and kill you while you are offline. But if you are the leader of a faction trying to overthrow the current emperor, then if you don't protect yourself, don't cry when the emperor's ninjas put snakes in your bed.

Ideally, the system will be able to play any offline PC, either in a fight or a flight from danger, and possibly send you an email letting you know that your character is under attack. It ought to be able to use your character's combat ability nearly as well as you can yourself. When you log in, it ought to appraise you of the situation.

This isn't the best case scenario, I know, because it might not be in your character to fight, and there is no way the computer can roleplay you out of a situation while you are offline. But to me, this is a better solution than simply making you untouchable during those periods.

This is also something we need to know pretty soon, so that we can incorporate into our games' designs. If the only solution is character invulnerability, I am going to have to think up some kind of explanation for it, just to satisfy my own sense of justice.

[Piers]

Personally I think that the online all the time model is aesthetically pleasing, simply becasuse, as others have noted, going offline doesn't make much game sense.

BUT, and this is a big but, the actual effect on the game will be unfortunate. Everyone has been talking about ways to protect your character while offline, but that ignores the fact that it will probably still be easier to kill someone while they are offline, simply because they cannot respond in an intelligent fashion. And the result of that fact is that people will _deliberately_ wait until the player is offline in order to wack the character...and that both makes the game dull, and yanks the players out of character in much the same way that them disappearing does. Moreover, it gives the wrong impression for many games--necessarily players become involved in a siege mentality where, if they can die while offline, they spend most of their online time making sure they don't. Imagine the result of such a situation in say Castle Marrach.

In the end the primary aim of the discussion is to create a world which players become immersed in, in which the ideas of online and offline aren't present. And I would suggest that both systems cause jarring results, each from a different perspective.

If I have a solution, it's based on what I feal the Skotos system does wrong at a fundamental level. Shannon mentioned in a Trials and Trivialities a long time back how the existence of objects, particularly rare objects, created a wholly unintentional value for those objects. Similarly, I feel that the detail imbued in the setting of the world focuses the players on the presence of the setting, encouraging exploration and investigation (not necessarily bad things of course) by intimating that the world is not so big that something in it cannot be found.

By contrast, a setting that is, to some extent, abstract focuses the players on each other, the room becomes important because that is where _they_ are, thus encouraging roleplaying and interaction, and moreover making the world bigger because it becomes impossible to find people unless someone tells you where they are--just like in the real world.

[Of course this has it's own problems. In Everquest for instance, places don't matter at all except as where monsters appear. The world is scattered with inn rooms, high towers, and hidden valleys (perfect as bandit camps) which no-one ever uses, because there is no in-game purpose to them]

In a world that big, people offline can dissappear in a believeable manner without jarring the sensibilities of others. And finding people becomes a very different activity, one involving roleplaying and interaction.

Simply my opinion.

[GaioMacareg]

Similarly, I feel that the detail imbued in the setting of the world focuses the players on the presence of the setting, encouraging exploration and investigation (not necessarily bad things of course) by intimating that the world is not so big that something in it cannot be found.
Other than work involved, why not make a world so big tat something in it could not be found without assistance? Obviously you'd need to expand it in relation to the population of users. It'd be silly to have a world with 15 million rooms and only 7 players randomly dispersed around some 5 or 6 starting locations... Be worse than trying to find my Aunt in Alaska without asking for directions. http://www.skotos.net/ubb/wink.gif But why not make a world the text equivalent of 1:1 scale?

Travel gets annoying, true enough, but there can be many ways around that depending on the setting.

Any other reason to avoid a world of such scale?

My thoughts on this are motivated by the computer game Arena Daggerfall. That game had a world so large that you couldn't just wander around aimlessly and expect to accomplish anything significant to forawrding th plot. You could ignore the plot and travel around having your own adventures and living your character's life in that setting and that was pretty fun. But when it came to the plot itself, you had to follow the clues and fgure out where to go because you were not going to stumble onto the solution by accident. The world was too big.

[Atama]

Daggerfall was a fun game. The downside was that everything was canned, all the towns, people, even the quests were all repeating. That was how they handled a world that large... everything was more or less the same.

I think that's the major problem with a world that size... Having so much unique content is really hard.

[GaioMacareg]

Yeah, you do need to be careful with that. And most of fantasy and sci fi don't really help either as most worlds and settings are pretty canned. ooh look, the theives guild, and there's a weapon shop, and over there is a temple. Let's cross the world to this other nation. Ooh look a theives guild, a weapon shop and a temple... That cookie-cutter feel might be more obvious in a big world, but it's a real threat to even a small one.

The model I was looking at here, with villages sprouting spontaneously and growing on their own would encourage that cookie-cutter feel unless the routines used to generate them were very carefully done, and very complex. Kind of a problem I guess.

How important is the feel over the reality? Meaning, lets say you have two villages with exactly the same type of buildings and exactly the same stereotyped NPCs, but one is described with an arabian nights look and feel and the other with a viking look and feel. Would it really bother people that they were so similar? Assuming there weren't any really obviously out of place things like a spice merchant in the non-trade-oriented viking village, or a shield hall in the arabian town.

[murf]

Originally posted by GaioMacareg:
How important is the feel over the reality?

In a village? That depends on how important the villages will be to your game. If it's just a place to replenish supplies and meet up before tackling the dungeon, random placement of generic units would be fine. However, if you actually want players to be interested in your town, each one has to have at least one unique element. The old Ultima's, especially IV and V, did this very well. Most towns had fairly generic shops (inn, weaponsmith, healer, alchemist...) but each town also had a unique feature. Britain's weaponshop was geared toward bows. Yew had the court house. New Magincia had it's large graveyard. Each town had a unique feature so that you could always say, yeah, I remember that place! It's the one with the...

I played "Daggerfall" as well. The big towns were less random and the best had palaces for the local potentates. However, the dungeons were horrible! Every quest into a dungeon basically boiled down to going in and either killing a particular beastie or just finding a treasure. Since the dungeons were almost completely random, there was no logical method for speeding up your search. You just had to kick down every door until you found the foozle or the whats-it. Very, very annoying.

Brian

[JeffC]

Originally posted by murf:
Since the dungeons were almost completely random, there was no logical method for speeding up your search.

I hate random dungeons, and especially the concept of a creature that lurks in wait for passing adventurers, as though adventurers are so common that something 20' long and weighing 2,000 lbs could survive on a diet of them.

[Atama]

As someone who has been running tabletop games for over a decade, with many of them in the classic D&D style, I've run into the dungeon syndrome before. The way I inserted realism into it, was that I designed a dungeon the same way I made a town. See, when you design a town, you put stores, an inn, a stable, farms, a town hall, etc. Cause, people live there, and it should be able to function like a town, have everything a real town would have.

Now, when I design a dungeon with monsters, I think, "Why are they there?" So, I'll put in a stream with clean water, maybe some cave fish. Food and water, a good reason. I'll also put in some sort of large bug, maybe rats, and some lichen or fungus that they would feed off of. Maybe some iron ore in the walls that semi-intelligent creatures could use to make their crude weapons with...

Then the monsters wouldn't be lying in wait with nothing to do till adventurers show, they'll be living out their regular lives... Making clothes, hunting for food, cooking, etc. Then some dorks with weapons and funny clothes show up, invading their home on some "quest", and the monsters try to drive them out.

That's how I've always handled dungeons.

[murf]

Way back in the dark mists of time (a few years before AD&D 2nd edition was released), I stumbled across a section of my AD&D DM’s Guide entitled "Monsters and Organization". While it didn’t directly address the questions of dungeon ecology, it did point out that monsters who had been attacked are highly unlikely to just sit around in their respective rooms, waiting for the PCs to return and continue their carnage. At the time, I was very new to DMing and not yet very good at it. What I read rocked my world and initiated a huge leap forward in my skills as a game master. It’s also one reason I have a large problem with how creatures are spawned and how monster AI works in most games. A pack of wolves, a tribe of orcs, and (especially) a colony of ants should work together as a unit. Individual critters that fight to the death are simply unbelievable. Individual critters who fight to the death and spend their entire lives guarding a trapped chest in a 10’ x 10’ room are almost comedic. And don’t even get me started on static spawns a la EverQuest…

Changing the subject of this thread for a moment, might it be possible to treat such organized groups as a single entity for the purposes of AI development? Or is there a better way to recreate the organized resistance players now expect from good table-top GMs?

Brian

[GaioMacareg]

I know that Asheron's Call has monsters with very complicated behavior. There are some that are ravening, thoughtless brutes that charge anything they see. There are others that will size you up and if they don't think they can take you, they'll follow you, just at the edge of visual range until more and more have gathered and they think they have enough as a whole. And even EverQuest did invent those glorious Gnoll trains. I was watching one day when a friend of mine lead a train of over 100 gnolls into a rest area and they slaughtered over 30 players.

[murf]

Steps in the right direction. How far can we reasonably take it? Since bandwidth and CPU cycles are not being devoted to graphics, players are going to expect the extra resources to be spent on game play. Can we make our gnoll train send faster members through adjoinging rooms to flank our resting players and cut off retreat? Can we arrange it so that this gang of gnolls, once they have surrounded the PCs, will accept bribes to let the characters go unharmed?

Ok, maybe I'm asking for the sun, the moon, and the stars here. But as I said, Skotos games won't be dazzling the players with motion-captured dancing avatars and other such whiz-bangery. We've still got some impressive computing power. What value for the gamer can be squeezed out of it?

Brian

[GaioMacareg]

The little I understand from the storybuilder pages is that if you can script it, it will happen. I'm lead to believe that someone should be able to throw in some clean, well-worded if-then statements into various monster AI routines, things like morale breaking, AI monsters that dislike each other so that you don't get weird situations like a giant beetle attacking you side-by-side with a giant spider (happened to me in Icewind Dale, for example). 'Course things like that should be ruled out by proper world design anyway... Still, I think that it should be possible.

A really fun one would be to have the intelligent monsters talk out loud from time to time.

[murf]

Ok, but can we take this a step further. Do we have to fight the foozles? Or, a better question, how come the only thing we can do with the foozles is fight them? Why can't we drop some beef jerky and distract the giant beetle? Why can't we simply buy safe passage through the orc tribes tunnels? Can we help create a lasting peace between the lizard men who live in the swamp and the human fishing village nearby?

Yeah, my brain starts to hurt just thinking about the kind of coding this sort of stuff would require. Still, I think this kind of choice, the ability of the players to decide how they want to interact with each other and the NPCs, the option of many different styles of "conflict resolution", is the sort of thing that could propel Skotos to the top of the heap.

Ever hopeful,
Brian

[JeffC]

Originally posted by murf:
Ok, but can we take this a step further. Do we have to fight the foozles? Or, a better question, how come the only thing we can do with the foozles is fight them? Why can't we drop some beef jerky and distract the giant beetle?

This could be done with a simple random reaction check, with modifiers for certain 'offer' actions. A random reaction wouldn't be the best thing, but it would be better than a scripted reaction.

Why can't we simply buy safe passage through the orc tribes tunnels? Can we help create a lasting peace between the lizard men who live in the swamp and the human fishing village nearby?

These are scenarios that would either require some good AI properties of the game, or someone running the leader of the orc tribe, the lizard men, and the fishing village. The orc tribe thing could probably be done with a random reaction, with modifiers for certain 'offers', but I don't see how the fishing village scenario could be done without GM/Storyteller direction. A GM could do it better in any case.
[/B][/QUOTE]

[GaioMacareg]

In terms of making the lasting peace, I think that if you look at my model with the respawning monsters limited to minions of PCs, making a lasting peace would come down to convincing the players of the lizard men from the swamp to be at peace with the players of the foozles of the plains. Should that happen, storybuilder just codes it so, but even before then, the players will stop raiding each other so the hostility will drop way off even without admin intervention.