[MUD-Dev] The Best Guy on the Mud Thing

[Adam Wiggins]

On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Dundee wrote:
> PCs are so special, I'm trying now to script some bots to remember who
> they've met and talked to, and develop likes/dislikes toward pc's they
> frequently meet with.  Basically once a mob takes a dislike to you, he'd
> continue to dislike you, maybe increasing degree... Maybe to the point of,
> in the negative, refusing to speak with you any longer, insulting you,
> throwing you out of their shops... maybe contracting another player to kill
> off their "enemy"... 
> 
> Or in the positive, to start with just speaking more friendly towards you,
> moving from there to even more praise, to the point of telling other
> players what a great person you are.  Maybe cap it off at proposing
> marriage.

Very cool.  My very first mud had a whole lot of scripted NPC bots.
For example, there was Biff the DragonSlayer (whom the experienced players
referred to as Biff the NewbieKiller), who every so often would shout, 'All
who want to kill a dragon, come to me!' and would lead a group of player
characters into the Haon-dor forest to fight the green dragon.

So I got pretty used to that sort of thing, but later on I was pretty
disappointed with the general lack of NPC behavior on most muds.  It
doesn't take a lot to make them interesting, honestly, but I think this
sort of thing is considered 'fluff' and not worth the time by many
builders on (not completely social-oriented) muds.

> heh.  Anyone else done something like this?  I'm sort of thinking to go
> with a dual system - one to track familiarity (the more you see the mob,
> the more familiar it gets with you), and another to track it's like/dislike
> of you.

I coded up a thing a while back where both NPCs and PCs had memory of
the people they interacted with; this included a general like/dislike, as
well as memory of the last few actions that they had with that person.
It added a lot to have a shopkeeper say, 'So how's that sword you bought
last week working out, Bubba?'

In addition, mobs had a temper level.  This turned out to be your starting
status with them - a nice NPC will be nice to people right away, unless
you continually do bad things to them (like trying to steal or so).
A meaner critter will put up with a lot less before it starts to dislike
you.

I also extended this to include objects ('a powerful-looking shortsword'
becomes 'a powerful-looking shortsword named 'Sting'') and locations
('a grimey pub' becomes 'Joe's pub').

Might want to do an archive search for 'character memory' or perhaps
just 'memory'.  I know I've posted some pretty lengthy descriptions.

Adam





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