[UA] CRPG

[Tim Toner]

>From: "Kevin Mowery" <kemowery at earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: ua at lists.uchicago.edu
>To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
>Subject: Re: Re: [UA] CRPG
>Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 19:33:54 -0400

>     Of course, many people can't hold a believable conversation either.  
>Of course, I suspect that only furthers the validity of the
>Turing Test.

One of the Old School dis'es in the early days of Usenet was, "I think you 
failed your Turing Test."

As far as CRPGs go, I just finished Planescape:  Torment, and have to admit 
that it was jaw-droppingly cool.  To segue into another thread, it started 
In Medias Res, with your character awakening on a slab in a Mortuary with 
instructions tatooed on his back.  As a whole, it was simply a very well 
written railroad job that gave the illusion of free choice.  What I did like 
about it was how alignment was handled.  Certain choices tweaked your 
alignment in a certain direction, and made some of the equipment you used 
useless.  Most of the time, the EEEEVIL! response is obvious, so you can 
pretty clearly keep to one side of the fence, but what I especially enjoyed 
were a few exchanges where one response would cause an alignment shift in a 
given direction, and I hated to say it, BECAUSE IT DIDN'T MATCH HOW I WAS 
PLAYING MY CHARACTER!  I mean, 99% of the time when you're playing RPGs, you 
either ignore the fact that you're trying to play a role, or you pretend in 
the back of your mind, but none of your chioces really influence the 
development of your character (except for obvious ones, such as Paladins 
wantonly killing).  In this case, though, I had to help someone out of 
slavery, but it was more indentured servitude.  Say, "Hey, that's a good 
idea," and you shift to Lawful Good (where all the kewl stuff kicks in).  
Say, "I don't know about that," and you remain Neutral Good.  I imagined my 
silly little mass of pixels would say the smart-assed thing about slavery, 
and it frustrated me that to get more out of the game, I had to live a lie 
(of sorts), and that frustration was a _good_ thing, not a bad one.

It's obvious that the Planescape people put a lot of thought into the 
decisions you can make.  What might be an interesting compromise is giving a 
set of forced responses based on some internal (hidden) score that sums up 
all the choices you've made so far.  That way, you're REALLY playing a role, 
instead of acting like God, and changing an avalanche's direction halfway 
down the hill.  The neat thing about the various Stress Meters is that they 
can provide the bare bones of a mathematical formula to handle changes in 
personality.  Pick too many fights?  Start limiting the responses that 
require patience and understanding.  While I find Greg's idea interesting, 
it isn't terribly realistic when you're thinking of how a real person would 
react to a given situation.  Unless people are trying to be overly playful, 
they don't really consider every possible response to a situation (think 
about the T-800's response tree to his Landlord's questions in The 
Terminator--in that case, only one would have sufficed in getting the guy 
out of his hair).  If you were to do the range of response idea, I'd think 
that certain responses would be disallowed, based on what a character had 
done.  That keeps players trying to balance the good with the bad.  That's 
also not terribly realistic, but that's only if they want to preserve a full 
range of possibilities.

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