[MUD-Dev] Continuity of experience in movies

[Travis Casey]

Saturday, May 11, 2002, 7:47:39 PM, eric wrote:
> From: "Valerio Santinelli" <tanis at mediacom.it>
>> From: "eric" <ericleaf at pacbell.net>

>>> And as soon as the old idea of the gamemaster/wizard/dungeon
>>> master being the active force in this is broken we may see some
>>> innovation in this regard.  Thats actually why my interest in
>>> muds was recently rekindled, working on that exact topic right
>>> now.

>> I do not see plots in MMOGs a problem per se. The real problem is
>> providing the same quests to every player without breaking your
>> world. What I mean is something that Ted L. Chen discussed in a
>> previous post. If you're going to provide a plot that is related
>> to an NPC being kidnapped, you cannot provide the same experience
>> to every user. Let's call the NPC Mr. McDonald (thanks
>> Ted!). There's only one such NPC. If he's been kidnapped, only
>> certain players will go and investigate on the case. If another
>> player wants to join in, that's fine. But you cannot repeat this
>> same quest forever. It makes no sense.

>> That's why GMs are needed to provide quests.

> Not true. Who kidnapped Mr McDonald, and why? That is, what *is* the
> story here. Was it orcs, to eat him? Or maybe King Ivris the Red to
> force to devulge the floor plans of his enemy King Bulwark the
> Blue's castle? If there is a motive, then removing the GM, and
> letting players play orcs and Kings (or kidnappers) could reproduce
> this "quest" in a dynamic way. As for the notification of said
> event, if Mr McDonald was just a hermit living in the hills, its
> likely no one would even notice the kidnapping, if its the town
> sheriff and then you as a deputy will notice when Mr McDonald
> doesn't show up for morning muster.

I've talked about this before, so I'm not going to go into a lot of
detail, but I've long liked the idea of semi-automated quest
generation.  That is:

 - A program generates ideas for plots/quests -- this could be done
   in batches.

 - A human GM looks over the generated ideas.  He/she can veto them,
   approve them as-is, modify them and approve them, or flag them for
   manual intervention.

 - The system has some ability to automatically implement
   plots/quests, once they've been approved.  This can also be used
   with the modifications given by GMs.  The automatic abilities are
   also exposed as tools, for use when a GM decides to do a manual
   implementation of a plot/quest (which would generally be when the
   GM wants to go beyond what the system can automatically do in some
   way, or tweak the output of the automatic tools).

For a bit more along these lines, check out these threads in the
archives:

"Reusable plots for quests"
  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/1997Q4/msg00030.php

"Ramblings on resets and other random things"
  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/1997Q3/msg01143.php

Also, my two Skotos columns about "Dirty Words:  Plot" don't
explicitly talk about automated quest generation, but have things
useful in that vein:

  http://www.skotos.net/articles/BSTG_16.html
  http://www.skotos.net/articles/BSTG_17.html

--
Travis Casey
efindel at earthlink.net

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