30 Jun, 2010, JohnnyStarr wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
I know there have been other discussions about dynamic descriptions, but this has to do a bit more with
creating Mob personalities.

Here's a common example of no personality:
The Lumber Yard
You have arrived to the lumber yard.

A tall lumberjack is here choping wood.
A tall lumberjack is here choping wood.
A tall lumberjack is here choping wood.
<HP 34 MP 23 MV 1>

It's this kind of cookie-cutter style that 'works', but just doesn't give any sense of reality.

The issue at hand though, is that you still have to keep things brief, otherwise you might as well be
reading the entire Wheel of Time saga with your free time. What I was thinking is, why not give mobs
characteristics other than for battle / appearance? For example, you could add duties, tasks, and most importantly
personalities. This might be delving into AI a bit, but much more simplistic. When a Mob is generated,
it could be given flags that tell us a bit more about their personality and circumstances.

The lumberjack may for instance be: tired, hungry, happy, sad, injured from a previous skirmish, strong,
weak, underpaid, confident, etc.

The idea though isn't to generate a another formulaic description: "a sad, underpaid lumberjack is here…"
We would be in the same boat with that. Rather, it would give us just what we need to generate sort of a
short bio about our mob. Using similar logic to personality tests, we could hint as to the temperment of our
mob in question. If the mob was some sort of minion or underling, perhaps you could give they are 'confident'
in their leader (mob boss), or what if they aren't? Perhaps upping the possibility that they might defect?

I'm hoping this becomes an open discussion. Mainly because I'm not yet sure about the implementation. I can
see it doing 2 things:
1) it keeps the description brief for the hack/slash folks that don't really care
2) it adds a whole new dynamic to descriptions, skirmishes, RP, quests, you name it really.
01 Jul, 2010, Kline wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
I like the idea; I already do something slightly similar with room descs (search for the tagline code in the repository). How do you envision using this, yourself? Setting a handful of flags, maybe 5 or so, and then randomly toggling them on/off on each mob load with a master flag to give a static (ie: the foreman will always have the same, similar to static descs now)? Letting them go fully random from a pool of selected possibilities I think would give the most variety, but also the most chance for things to look odd.
01 Jul, 2010, JohnnyStarr wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Right, odd may not be the desired outcome ( for most games that is )
I imagine a lot more than just 5 flags or so. I think of it more of clusters of flags in a tree like fashion.
To avoid the imbalance that would come from using a list, I would look into creating a hierarchy of possibilities:
(trustworthy)
/ \
(calm) (passionate)
/ \ / \
(orderly) (generous) (headstrong) (loyal)

Of course this is just an idea. The tree wouldn't have to be binary either. The idea is to create a logical flow so
that a mobs personality is structured to whatever extent is needed for continuity. Based on our mobs temperament,
we can assess during game-play how they might react to triggers such as their custom greeting. Or, consider what
might happen if you dropped something on the ground? If they have a trustworthy->calm->generous sort of personality, they may be more likely to pick up your item and give it back to you. Like I said from the beginning,
this shouldn't only affect descriptions, there are much more straight forward ways to do that.

What's also an idea is to build an abstract "reaction" tree that is built after their personality tree is created. This would be traversed during a trigger to go down the branches to result in a much more logical reaction than a random number to an array of hard coded messages or what have you. I guess this line of thought is due to the fact that I got a book on game-theory and trees are all over the place. Anyway, hope I'm not boring anyone, it's
just this new approach makes me excited.
01 Jul, 2010, Oliver wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
JohnnyStarr said:
Of course this is just an idea. The tree wouldn't have to be binary either. The idea is to create a logical flow so
that a mobs personality is structured to whatever extent is needed for continuity. Based on our mobs temperament,
we can assess during game-play how they might react to triggers such as their custom greeting. Or, consider what
might happen if you dropped something on the ground? If they have a trustworthy->calm->generous sort of personality, they may be more likely to pick up your item and give it back to you. Like I said from the beginning,
this shouldn't only affect descriptions, there are much more straight forward ways to do that.

What's also an idea is to build an abstract "reaction" tree that is built after their personality tree is created. This would be traversed during a trigger to go down the branches to result in a much more logical reaction than a random number to an array of hard coded messages or what have you. I guess this line of thought is due to the fact that I got a book on game-theory and trees are all over the place. Anyway, hope I'm not boring anyone, it's
just this new approach makes me excited.


It's a neat idea. Here's what I would do.

Give every MOB an archetype when being built. You could even do this with alignment.

Have a tree of personalities for each archetype. When the mob is loaded, iterate through the tree and select traits completely randomly.

When it comes time for in-game repercussions, check for single traits or combinations thereof. To use a trite and probably too-simple example, if a neutral mob has "sneaky", maybe give them sneak. If they have "sneaky" and "possessive", make them pick up objects on the ground and keep them for themselves. If they have "aggressive" and "possessive", maybe make them loot corpses. Et cetera.

That way, the combinations of traits would be less likely (but still probable) to occur. You couldn't accurately predict what a given mob would be, but you could predict that a mob among several might be X.

Edit: Typos are fun!
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