[MUD-Dev] Mob (NPC) behavior

[Sean K]

On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Valerio Santinelli wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Freeman, Jeff" <jfreeman at soe.sony.com>
>> 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.
 
> I never thought about having a MUD made up of NPCs only, but it
> sounds really intriguing.  NPCs interaction is something that is
> often forgot in MUDs and MMOGs.  Games like DAoC are making NPCs
> interact with players through scripts that keep track of what a
> player has done, but I've still not yet seen a place where NPCs
> get to know each other, remember who they met and make their own
> opinions of people.  It would really be cool to have NPCs that
> behave like real life people.

This is a lot like what I've been waiting for Neverwinter Nights to
experiment with -- modelling a realistic NPC community.  The big
project is to be a rumor system... ideally all the NPCs will "talk"
to one another when they get close enough, and they will be able to
convey what they've learned to players.  What I'd really like to do
is work in some sort of grapevine effect, so the story changes a bit
with each telling, but that gets into the sticky world of language
processing, and in a scripting language no less.  Beyond that
perhaps messengers, assassins, travelling merchants, etc.  I wonder
if the game will make it possible to model a trade system.

In any case I agree.  The area in which RPGs are most lacking is
nonessential entities.  The population is generally distilled to
consist only of Useful People, and things seem empty and plastic as
a result.  MMORPGs tend to make this fact even more obvious because
of the stark contrast between players and NPCs.  The only notable
exception are BioWare's RPGs and a few of the Ultimas, and those
aren't really multiplayer.

Sean

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