[MUD-Dev] Re: Implementing god.

[Adam J. Thornton]

On Wed, Sep 09, 1998 at 08:49:19PM -0700, J C Lawrence wrote:
> I'm tending more and more to the model where NPC's are either pawns or
> targets, and don't pretend to any intelligence in their manifest or
> virtual (ie never realised but presumed present) selves.  They're
> straw men.  Cunning and even clever straw men, but expressly shallow,
> uninteresting, and overtly mechanical in nature.  Robots with a mean
> streak.  

I'm probably going to use a Phil Goetz Virtual Stupidity model, myself:
modified Eliza engine with a small list of game-world topics the NPC knows
about.  The canned Eliza responses and the topic list all presume the
following: the NPC assumes that he or she is the center of the universe,
that everyone else except a very small set of friends is hostile, and that
all these hostile figures have perfect communication between themselves.
DejaNews should have the posts, which were in rec.arts.int-fiction around
last December, I think.  The NPCs will never fool anyone into thinking they
are PCs, but they may often know interesting facts concerning game-world
plot points.  Not actually all that different from what you propose, except
that there is sometimes some point in talking to them.

> Outside of targets and pawns I can't see the need for NPC's given
> enough players (questions on how to raise a large enough player base
> are left to reader).  As such (and this is echoing Nathan's post on
> the three types of game models ("simulationist", "dramatist", and
> "gamist" (which was really worthy of good response except that after
> attempting three replies, each of several hundred lines, I found they
> all summed to, "Yeah, wot he said!")) I'm going for the simulationist
> and gamist models to the exclusion of dramatist (not too surprising
> considering my lack of RP bent).

Me, I'm letting simulationist lapse for dramatist and gamist, in that
order.  Which, I'll admit, makes me an odd duck in this crowd.

The other use for PCs is so that characters don't have to have boring
professions.  You're going to need a blacksmith, a grocer, and a tailor,
but I suspect that *most* players will not want to be such things.  So many
of them will be NPCs, so that the game world has its support population
without coercing players into lives-behind-counters.

This is actually something I've never understood about the UO model.  Say
I've been at work all day.  Am I really going to want to get home, log in,
and go to work for a few more hours?  *I'm* not.  Are there people who are?

> > You never *really* know if you've gotten away with antisocial
> > behavior or not.
> Is anti-social behaviour to an NPC something to be concerned about?

Depends.  If the NPC is presented as the representative of something
powerful in the game world, yes: if you kill the Duke's legate, he's gonna
be a bit peeved.  If you go around hacking *anyone* to pieces in the piazza
in broad daylight, yes.  That's because it's also my suspicion that players
who abuse NPCs will also tend to be those players who enjoy abusing PCs.
This is something I don't want to forbid, but that I do want to make very
risky.  Risky not just from "the other PC may win" standpoint, but from the
"yeah, you won, but the police caught you" standpoint too.  I want my world
to feel like it's got something of a real social structure.  Since I don't
plan on being able to make such a thing evolve when there's really very
little actually at stake, I intend to fake it.

Adam
--
adam at princeton.edu 
"There's a border to somewhere waiting, and a tank full of time." - J. Steinman