[MUD-Dev] A footnote to Procedural Storytelling

[Sam Axon]

Travis Nixon wrote:
>But the scope of the fiery avenger quest as it
>exists in Everquest is of a fairly limited scope, and "quests" or, more
>broadly, "interesting things to do" of about that same complexity can, and
>should, come from some sort of dynamic, automated generation process.

Brian Green did write:
> The setup is not the part I have a problem with.  It's how the players
> interacting with the elements you've placed will act.


Agreed, but for the reason of the chaotic player interaction, the setup
(which is the core of the problem) must be changed to take the chaotic
player actions into account.
The ideal setup that takes the various player actions into account, at this
point, I believe, is this, as used in my theoretical and thus far
nonexistant "kallipolis" of games. I'll be starting out with a rant on a
dynamic world, but it'll lead into the storytelling aspect and the relation
of the simulated environment with different types of players once my first
points have been stated:

Minor quests with only a small impact on the world are randomly generated.
The most pathetically small of these is delivering a love letter from
someone in the royal city to someone in the queen's castle, whereas the
greatest might be locating a lost Gnome scout with information regarding the
location of the Insectoid camp, which leads to a minor depopulation of
Insectoids in the local sinister hive.

Major impacts (destroying the Necromancer demigod who controls the entire
army of the undead and the source of power for necromancers within 5 miles
of the village), would happen through GM monitored events. Especially in
smaller communities, this would have to be completely under GM supervision.
Take Meridian 59 server 109 and the Lich for example...the server averaged
130 people an evening one day, and then a guild slaughtered the Lich using a
bug, which resulted in the deaths of all the necromancers on the entire
server, caused many problems with all the necromancer hunters of the server
because of bugs, and decreased the average server population to 40 an
evening because of a lot of ticked off people.
If a GM had been at hand, to monitor the state of the server and the
community, and the events, then the Lich's death would have been either
prevented, or the events that would have occured because of the Lich's death
would have been toned down to what the community could take at the time.

Systems like automated and dynamic weather, quests, population, ecology, and
economy would be implimented, but there would be many openings for
modification by GMs when needed. A guild might be able to severely decrease
the population of orcs, but if the community hunting the orcs for EXP feels
this is making it unfair for them or ruining their gaming experience, the GM
can throw in a plot point resulting in a sudden growth in population (the
orcish General Kug-Lug and his army of Uruk-Hai orcs ascends from the
underworld, victorious in retrieving lost orcish warrior souls and bringing
them back into the living hoard). This brings us to the story aspect:

A *guided* dynamic environment opens doors for storytelling, automated or
not. Possilities abound of either using a directly guided story, or a story
being moved along by the computer but also being occasionally interfered
with by GMs which monitor the state of the community and gather information
on what the community would be best off in experiencing.
When a decently large automated plot point (like the goblin wars) is opened
up to be interacted with by the players, GMs monitor it and make sure that
the plot is guided along in a fair way. The entire environment, plot,
numbers, the economy, the ecology, the politics, all of it, can be
automated, and players can interfere all they want, but when you have
(hopefully wise) gamemasters administrating the situation and the community,
you can maintain a fair plot with enjoyment for all sects of players without
taking away the sense of accomplishment in being able to say: "I did that to
affect the history of this environment" that players would like to have.
Furthermore, through the dynamic and *mostly* automated (but still guided),
story, environment, ecology, economy, populatation, and political world, the
variety of plots and quests that you would have from an entirely automated
quest generating/storytelling system is maintained but controlled in such a
way that (most of) the negative side effects of it aren't experienced.

The final conclusions:
A totally automated system is impossible and impractical because of chaotic
player actions that a computer cannot understand in its decisions. However,
a totally human controlled system is not preferable because the variety in
stories and plots would be limited because the man in charge simply wouldn't
have time to create nearly as many interesting stories and quests as the
computer would be able to.
So, a guided dynamic world theoretically allows for and supports fair
storytelling and experiences for all types of players, including those that
just want to kill stuff, without taking away from the amount of stories to
get involved in, the sense of uniqueness in each story and place, or the
sense of accomplishment in affecting that story or place.

Please do, someone, point out my errors in thinking. ;)

~Sam Axon




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