[MUD-Dev] Mob (NPC) behavior

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 14:28:52 -0600 
William Murdick <osiris at arkansas.net> wrote:

> I was hoping to get people's opinions on an idea that myself and a
> friend hit on for putting into our mud. We're designing it from
> the ground up and the main thing we're going for is realism and
> flavor.

Ouch.  Typically what you actually want is a level of "reasonable"
internal logical consistency, not realism.  Medieval life was
brutal, short, and usually painful.  Small example: average life
expectancy was not much over 20 years with death usually being
caused by a vicious combination of malnutrition, disease, and
inimical living conditions.  A staggeringly large percentage of
those that did survive into their upper twenties did so with gross
disfigurements; the result of poor genetics, disease, malnutrition,
and minimal health care.

Adding magic to the mix doesn't make it much prettier.

> 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).  

You might like to search the list archives for rumour systems.
There's been a fair bit of discussion for various models, both
explicitly vectored via NPCs and players, and inferentially vectored
thru a non-instantiated assumed population (the great mass of
population that are never made into NPCs).

> 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.

And the guard can instantly recognise the PC despite time, third
hand descriptions, disguise, different lighting/dress/conditions?

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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