[MUD-Dev] Mob (NPC) behavior

[Freeman]

William Murdick wrote:

> The overall goal is to get a situation where a player kills a
> shopkeeper (for example). Another NPC witnesses this event and
> this then becomes a rumor which spreads throughout the city (like
> a disease of sorts).  Eventually this reaches the town guards and
> they may choose to act on it by tracing back down the list of
> witnesses to the source, at each point inquiring if each NPC has
> seen the PC and where. The goal is to simply get the feel of
> guards going about their duty trying to locate a criminal. If they
> come across that PC in the street or a room they would immediately
> try to subdue him/her and take him/her to jail to be tried (and
> probably executed). Realism, as I said before, is the goal.
 
> Aside from the obvious monumental task of getting all of these
> various parts coded and working properly, what are people's
> opinions on this idea and potential implementation?

How important is to you that all of these things actually occur (the
rumor spreads, the guards hear about it, the guards track it to
their source...)?

I think you could obtain the *appearance* of realism with a much
simpler system.  Something along the lines of:

The player kills an NPC.  A random collection of town npcs, and the
guards are immediately notified.  Guards are also given the list of
which town NPCs have been notified.  Perhaps you put in a minor
delay on the town npcs so that they don't all immediately begin
talking about the murder, but instead they wait a little while.  The
guards wait the longest, and then they travel from one NPC to the
next "asking" about the murder.

If your goal is to make things "seem real", my advice is to cheat, a
lot, with a more direct approach to creating the "end result" that
you want the players to see.  This can increase the frequency of
players seeing what you want them to see, and make the world seem
more realistic to them than if it actually *were* more realistic.

But if your goal is to have all this stuff *actually* happen (just
to satisfy your own personal desire, or whatever), then I say go for
it.  Sounds neat.  I've often wanted to put up a no-user "mud" with
nothing on it but NPCs - even in the roles traditionally reserved
for players: all running around, interacting, looking for groups,
killing mobs, selling the loot on eBay, and so on.
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