Improving the look and feel of NPCs:

[The Crazy Animal]

These are all little things that bothered me about MMUD and its use of NPCs. I?m sure anyone that played not just for the hack n? slash action probably has similar complaints.

When in a town there shouldn?t bee more NPCs then there are places to live in a town with the exception of guards that can have group housing and beggars that live on the streets.

NPC Guards need to function as a guard should be expected to this means they should only heavily occupy areas of significance in an area. This means guards should not over swamp a town but have strategic positions. For example, guards patrol the walls around the town. Multiple guards could be found guarding a bank. A small troop of guards patrol the main merchant street. There should be a few guards that hang around the entrance of the town. If a town has guard towers they should have a few guards in them. Lone guards might make patrols in the housing areas.

Every NPCs should not automatically be willing to tell you valuable information. Some NPCs should require actions or deeds or maybe multiple meetings before they decide they like you enough to tell you some bits of information. There should be ways of this doing including things like bribery or intimidation that allow a player to explore methods of persuasion to get information.

When emoting at a NPC the NPC should emote back. This could be done with some basic action, reply scripting. Doing the right combination of actions should be able to provoke some NPC into attacking the PC. This allows players motivation for trying things differently as well as interacting with NPCs. Take for the example by the time a good player kills a good NPC to get the golden braided belt they can?t use it.

When an NPC requests an object for a quest the rarity of the object should reflect how long it takes to obtain it. This means if they ask for a bottle of mead it shouldn?t take long to find one. Secondly, the long it takes to find a seemingly mundane object the greater the reward should be for finding it.

Nameless NPCs need to have some function. The best function that I can think of is clean-up crew. What they would do is pick items and cash up off the ground in towns on and major roads. The amount of goods that they pick up off the ground could translate to their status level. As their status level rises, they go from their starting point name and description up in ranks. Beggars become commoners, commoners become townsman or townswomen, townspeople become merchants, nobles become lords or ladies? picking up different items could have different effects on the nameless NPCs. If a beggar picks up too many bottles of mead, he could become a drunk. If a commoner picks up a quota of holy items then they could become a priest. What this would do is have town populations diversify based on the type of items and amounts of cash that are left on the ground.

Improving the feel of general NPC dialog is a big one much of this topic really needs its own post but I?ll put some basic problems in this post.

NPC need to have more than one line of dialog. They don?t have to have important stuff to say but there should be a reason for them to be there other than to occupy space. After the 50th time you greeted the same NPC they shouldn?t be still treating you as if you first met. With the exception of NPCs within the main plot, MMUD almost entirely lacked any interaction with common NPCs.

When entering a new area players should be motivated to try to talk to the local NPCs. To actually do this it means NPCs need to have a range of topics they can talk about. These topics should reflect their position, class, or race in the realm as well as the area they occupy. Not all the information needs to be valuable to the player but there should be enough good information that keeps the players wanting to interact with the NPCs in the game. Take for example the townspeople in Silvermere if you ask them about the slums they don?t even know they have a problem with cultists. If you ask them about Darkwood Forest they don?t mention Thrag or giant spiders or the problem of bandits running amuck. The townspeople of Silvermere act like they don?t actually know that if they left the town they would get attacked.

NPCs and limited items I always felt that limited items should be only limit one. I also always thought that non-mob type NPCs should miss their valued items when they don?t have them. Letting any non-mob NPC have minor quests to get their items back would open up a return item function in the game that would generate interest in PVP as well as anti-hording motivation. Reward for item return could be secondary quests, rare items, cash, secret information, and or other limited items. Secondly, it would be an interesting idea for returning items into the game if some NPC dropped limited items had ownership tags. Limited items with these tags would trigger the NPC to try to get them back if you enter the NPCs room and have the item equipped. The methods of getting it back could range from asking, offering a reward for its return, or even by attacking the PC. I think this would make more important NPCs seem more engaging to players.

If anyone has some more ideas for NPCs feel free to add them..

TCA

[DeathCow]

Good ideas...just a whole lot more development than i planned on going through.

I don't mind these concepts as an over time kinda thing though.

[The Crazy Animal]

Ya these are just meant as design concepts that would be good to work towards.

TCA

[Ian]

Every NPCs should not automatically be willing to tell you valuable information. Some NPCs should require actions or deeds or maybe multiple meetings before they decide they like you enough to tell you some bits of information. There should be ways of this doing including things like bribery or intimidation that allow a player to explore methods of persuasion to get information.

When emoting at a NPC the NPC should emote back. This could be done with some basic action, reply scripting. Doing the right combination of actions should be able to provoke some NPC into attacking the PC. This allows players motivation for trying things differently as well as interacting with NPCs. Take for the example by the time a good player kills a good NPC to get the golden braided belt they can?t use it.

This is very like Morrowind.  And NPCs in that were awesome.  You have a speechcraft skill, based on personality (or charm), which affects how successful you'll be at admiring, intimidating, or taunting NPCs.  They had some sort of respect meter.  When that was low enough and you kept taunting (provided you were good at it), they'd attack you.  Or you could get info out of them if they respected you enough (which you gain by either admiring (flattering) or intimidating).

Actually I think instead of respect they called it "standing".  Anyway, these are cool concepts, I'd like to see these in mud.

(brushes dust of this old post....)

[The Crazy Animal]

This is very like Morrowind.  And NPCs in that were awesome.  You have a speechcraft skill, based on personality (or charm), which affects how successful you'll be at admiring, intimidating, or taunting NPCs.  They had some sort of respect meter.  When that was low enough and you kept taunting (provided you were good at it), they'd attack you.  Or you could get info out of them if they respected you enough (which you gain by either admiring (flattering) or intimidating).

Actually I think instead of respect they called it "standing".  Anyway, these are cool concepts, I'd like to see these in mud.

(brushes dust of this old post....)

Its an old one but a good one.

Ya morrowind has one of the best NPC engine and dialog engines available.  All NPCs have full stats, Spell lists, and Inventories just like players. And it use that to populate the NPCs with dialog via inheritance and logic filters based on NPC name, Race, Class, Faction, Faction rank, NPC level, NPC ID, NPC gender, NPC Stats as well as a range of PC stats down to the value of the armour warn. It further is able to query the Players game progression by looking in the player's journal for specific entries. What it gives the game is a great amount of control over how dialog is used and increases the replay value of the content greatly.

Since the dialog is populated dynamically across a set of PC and NPC variable such as stats the dialog becomes almost fluid which increases the contents ability to draw a player into the game world. The dialog in the game is also very topic driven so you'll come across regional topics like what type of wild life is in the area or local places of interest which are accessible via any NPC in a particular area. From the coder side having it dynamically populate is ideal because each instance of dialog no longer needs to be hard coded to each individual NPC which makes development faster.

I think in all you had 10 speaker conditions and then an additional 6 logic variables to control dialog with.

OK so that was probably more background info then you needed....

The rating that tabulated how much a person like you was their Disposition. This level would auto fluctuate based on things like a players reputation (if they are good or bad, and how much of the game they have completed, what their level and faction was. As well as a number of other variables. Each NPC though had a base disposition that they are spawned with. When a NPCs disposition reached 0 you then had a chance to trigger that NPC to attack. Beyond this you could then alter it further via admiring or intimidating or taunting.

I do agree though that we should try to adopt things like secondary social skills and work on the social dynamics of NPCs a bit more. As we need to move away a little from the humble hack n slash aspect that has deteriorated mmud into a mindless scripting game.

[DeathCow]

Um, I don't have a full team of paid professionals to write dialog and storyline for NPCs.  I couldnt possibly do all of that.

[The Crazy Animal]

Um, I don't have a full team of paid professionals to write dialog and storyline for NPCs.  I couldnt possibly do all of that.

Umm well... Once you know the the 100% correct answer creating the dialog for every thing below that point is all fun and games for anyone that cares to add it in. So its more of a matter of getting the engine to be able to handle it since you will already be providing those 100% answers.

Is it really that hard to think that someone else might be able to have shannon charge you an extra turkey leg if she doesn't like you.

also this method allows for alot of canned dialog such as: "Beware those sewer rats their teeth are sharp enough to gnaw the flesh from your bones.." This is then populated across any NPC in a area range for the sewer. Rather then applying directly to each NPC.

So its more of a matter of is this type of thing liked as a concept.