Jmurph wrote:

Does this seem even remotely fun? I think it would appeal to many types of gamers, but I guess I am a little biased:-)

It could be, as long as fun is kept in mind and you build in some tools to make things work.

The problems with this kind of system tend to be a lack of equilibrium. Some force will tend to take over everything -- say bunnies -- and all you have is bunnies, and there are too damn many bunnies to fight with no apparent effect, so the player moves on to another game.

This can be dealt with as long as you don't take too religious an approach to the design. What kills the fun of games with dynamic environments is when the designers decide that the purity of the concept is more important than fun.

So you should have the game monitor the situation, and if one species has taken over too long you should introduce a change (like the disease you mention, or dropping some strong goblins in the game who have a chance against the bunnies or something).

The next most important thing is communicating what is happening to players. It's not fun to have a dynamic world when you have no visibility into what's happening. The designer may think it's cool that killing a rabbit here causes a goblin to die 50 miles away, but it's not cool to players at all if they have no idea what the impact of their actions is. And you shouldn't expect them to travel the game world after every action to try and perceive an event. That's boring and it's work.

So, say killing a bunny hurts the Goblin population...then when you kill a bunny you should be given a message along the lines of "The Goblins now have less food". This might intrigue players into going and checking out what's up with the Goblins.

And players should have some ability to understand what's happening with the balance of the world. If the Goblins have been wiped out by the Giants, you should have a way of letting them know (like a color-coded map showing what species control what areas). If players don't have a way of knowing other than travelling the world, that might be interesting to designers and to a few players, but for most people it means that the results of their actions will be completely invisible to them, and they will go play something else.

I like the game idea. You might want to see if you can get your hands on a copy of SimLife for inspiration; that had a similar premise, but without the RPG element. As Deadron suggests, it was very tricky to keep populations stable for any length of time.

So, say killing a bunny hurts the Goblin population...then when you kill a bunny you should be given a message along the lines of "The Goblins now have less food". This might intrigue players into going and checking out what's up with the Goblins.

That's a good idea, though personally I'd prefer a more subtle feedback mechanism. For example, the townsfolk might share rumors about the wildlife: "A trapper told me he found a starved goblin out by the Blungledunk Foothills."

Or maybe the observation would be dependant on the player's training. IE if the player was more or less a thug who lived by brute force and happened to kill some rabbits to eat, he probably would neither know nor care of the effects. A trained huntsman might observe something like "Hmm, the rabbit population is getting low. That's gonna be rough on scroungers like goblins." Likewise, characters might notice the starving goblins getting more agressive and wandering further afield, even if they aren't sure why. Of course, this might be a nightmare to track logistically.....

-James

Very good idea! Additionally this creates another way to gain resources and potential revenue. Of course a breeder of livestock would be a glaring target to would be raiders and face the threat of disease....

-James

Jmurph wrote:

In this regard, I think it's important to usually keep the numbers hidden.

I've come to the conclusion, after playing several on-line RPGs over the last few years, that hiding the numbers only hurts your more casual players, while turning it into an obsession for the people who play a lot.

If you hide the numbers, then people will set out to figure them out, and they WILL figure them out. Then the people who know the numbers are the power gamers, while the casual gamers are at a disadvantage.

And while the players work to figure out the numbers, that is the ONLY thing they will talk about.

If you don't want them to talk about numbers, then show them the numbers. But no matter what you do, the players will figure out the numbers. And if you make them arbitrarily random, then they won't want to play your game.

Dark Age of Camelot has the best system I've seen. Not only do they show the numbers, but they color code everything. So when you check a sword or a piece of armor, you immediately know if it's too high level for you, good for your level, or too low level.

This is WONDERFUL for adding to the game for non-power-gamers. I only log into DAoC once every week or two, and I immediately know what things I want to work on improving and the like, where in most games, because I'm not a power gamer and I don't pay attention to numbers, I have no idea whether that piece of armor is getting too low for me, so I have less fun playing.

Okay, after messing around with a Rogue inspired hack-n-slash "RPG", I got to thinking (always dangerous). It might be kind of neat to make a system that is more simulation based than combat based.

What I mean is that instead of there being a dungeon with monsters to fight, there are simply different types of mobs all competing for resources. Primarily food. The more successful ones live while the less successful ones tend to die off. I am not sure exactly how I would do this. Ideally, I would like a "frontier" at the borders of the total map (human settlements are located towards the center) where mobs spawn. Stronger mobs tend to dominate early and so push weaker competitors inward (towards the humans) lest the are destroyed for lack of resources.

Example: A few giants(Huge Biped Carnivores, slow reproduction, very slow maturing) spawn near a band of goblins(Small Biped Omnivores, fast reproduction, fast maturing) and rabbits(Tiny Herbivores, very fast reproduction, very fast maturing).

Now initially the rabbit population will explode (assuming they don't all get killed by the giants and goblins, which will lead to starvation of the giants), since there is only one competitor for abundant food and the rabbits have a very high birthing and mature rate.

The giants might have problems with starvation at first, but assuming they can get ahold of some goblins and rabbits, they should survive.

The goblins should do alright as well, since they can eat both plants and rabbits, but will suffer from being preyed on by giants. Over time, the population of rabbits will be dramatically different in high giant and goblin areas than in the uninhabited areas closer to humans.

The goblins will be directly competing with giants for rabbits and so be forced to steadilly move away or starve or be eaten. Of course if too many goblins and rabbits go away, the giants will begin to move or starve. But if they do, rabbits or goblins can begin repopulating the abandoned areas. So it forms a big cycle.

Players assume the role of humans (the only truly civilized species) and may work as a 1)armsman (combatant) 2)tradesman(merchant/craftsman) 3)rogue (criminal/outsider) 4)wizard. All of these represent specialized roles only availible in a society suitable advanced so that there is enough surplus food generated to allow such specialization. The game would handle the behaviour of the rest of society (IE peasant farmers and government) as well as the other critters in the world.

Prices are not fixed, but rather derive from a system that determines A) demand for the component materials B) Amount of materials used and C)skill required to put the raw materials into the finished form.
Example: Say you want to figure out the cost of a sword. Say the sword requires 40 units of iron (demand is 1.0) and requires specialized labor, which is a 3.0 modifier. The base cost would be 40*1.0*3.0 or 120. Of course merchants routinely mark up for profit. Note that this is a raw cost and doesn't mean much by itself, rather it gains meaning by comparison to other raw costs. Like say gold coins-1 unit of gold, demand=10, skill =1.0. Base cost=10 per unit. This means that sword would be worth 12 gold coins plus markup.

However, since demand is adversely affected by supply, if a lot of gold came into the market (say recovered from an ancient horde), the demand for gold would plummet- say maybe to 0.5 or even 0.1! In this case in would take up to ten times as many gold coins to buy the sword. Fortunately, demand greater or less than 1 usually stabilizes over time.

But what about human armsman who decide to say go hunt some goblins? It can have profound effects. If they overhunt goblins, the giant populations depending on them may begin to starve. Or they may expand because of the newly freed up rabbit populations. Or maybe the weaker goblins will be killed first and the stronger ones will survive to reproduce, thus making the goblins much tougher (which would affect their relationship with the giants). Maybe the lack of goblins threatening an area cause the human population to expand, which requires more food putting the humans now in competition with the giants.

Periodically, new species would spawn along the frontier to keep things lively. And disease might be an excellent way to keep growth in check.

Does this seem even remotely fun? I think it would appeal to many types of gamers, but I guess I am a little biased:-)

-James

If you don't want them to talk about numbers, then show them the numbers. But no matter what you do, the players will figure out the numbers. And if you make them arbitrarily random, then they won't want to play your game.

What makes you so sure that that's so? I mean, yeah, I know from my own experiences that a lot of big MUD fans aren't big fans of insecurity, but think of all the dice and card games out there--I could hop on over to Yahoo! games and see many, many times the number of players from all the MUDs I've ever played, combined. Sure, there's numbers and there's probabilities and they're never readily visible, and of course they've long since all been plotted out. But knowing the numbers, while useful, doesn't help too terrifically much--in the end, it all comes out to random chance, and the advantage to be gained is going to come out only in the very long term. Of course, most card games-- such as, say, poker--have very significant advantages over MUDs, and that's that they don't venture into the very long term (unless you're in an actual gambling situation, but usually not even very much then). But there's another factor reducing the importance of the numbers here, and that's the psychological one--there's no numbers being built up with steady playing that give you a raw statistical edge, but raw human skills and learning.

In a sense, then, I suppose you're right--anyone can come in and start comparing numbers, but learning the subtleties of a game can take much, much longer. Still, it doesn't seem to hurt games that work in a shorter-term scale, and I'm not entirely convinced that you couldn't do it even in a long-term online RPG, where character building and stat boosting had a very minor role. Big shiny things are still pretty powerful incentive, but for the sake of maintaining my sanity I like to imagine that there still might be people out there who would actually embark on crazy thrilling adventures simply because they were crazy and thrilling and not because there was a +5 sword waiting for them at the end--who would play an RPG for the experiences it contained instead of the XP. No, I can't expect the casual gamer to enjoy a game where they simply get randomly killed by powers beyond their control, but I don't see why they'd necessarily balk at a game where they lived or died by their sense and intuition (although I can certainly see why this might turn off some more hardcore gamers).

Usually I say that a lot of the formulas are just too simple, but I agree--even sadistically complicated formulas would be worked out sooner or later. But even if players figure out a few of the equations involved, that won't necessarily do them any good--that's like trying to predict the outcome of a fight in a MUD by comparing one single combat-relevant score (which is possible in some MUDs, but don't mind that for now). There are simply too many factors involved, some of them moderately random, and that, in short, forms the basis of what I think would be at least an effective manner of obscuring the workings of a game as any. And, of course, provided you had enough random or non-numerical factors, then the other factors wouldn't matter quite as much, especially if you took care that they didn't have a ridiculous range wherein a two-year-old character might have a stat thousands of times higher than a newbie. And if the numbers don't matter all that much, then people tend to get very irate if they are shown them, because a lot of players will assume that having high stats is a license to be invincible.

I'm not trying to argue that the numbers aren't popular with lots of players; I play plenty of numbers games. I'm just not convinced that there aren't reasonable alternatives.

Well, at various levels I think all game elements are like that. When someone does something that impacts the world, you need to find the appropriate level of feedback to tell them what they've done. Otherwise things seem arbitrary, not interesting.

Overall, subtlety is a dangerous thing in a game that must be wielded carefully, because it can really mean obscurity and murkiness. For subtle elements of your game, you must carefully consider how to leave clues to tell the player what has happened or how things work.

I agree, but still, not everything has to be spelled out specifically. If the documentation very clearly and directly states that skills gradually increase with use, and players can look around and see veterans who far surpass their own starting skills, then is it really necessary to say "Your [blank] skill increased 3 points!" If power-building is the focus of your game, then sure, there's not much point obscuring it, but if the stats are just there to add a little flavor I say just let players guess at what that little hint of taste is. And I don't consider it an unnecessary burden upon the players to expect them to know basic cause and effect; if "pulling levers moves trees" was common knowledge in real life, then the designers of Myst could have very well ommitted the big crashing noises without confusing players, because they'd know "I pulled a lever, so logically a tree must've moved around here." They wouldn't need direct feedback of anything, because they already knew the probable consequence of their action--it's still divulging information to the players, but feels a bit more subtle in my opinion.

I'm a bit divided on the number hiding issue. For me the biggest reasons to show numbers would be 1) if knowing your stats very well affects life-or-death decisions, and 2) it's just a pain in the butt to program.

I think numbers can be successfully hidden, though. Take agility, for instance. Suppose that if a player raises this through training or combat, they're not necessarily told about it. What they know about it could be that they're "clumsy" or "awkward", "agile", "very agile", "extremely agile", etc.

Here's the trick, though: In most games, the definition of "very" or "extremely" would be coded in, but we all know that our definitions of "very" tend to vary (pardon the pun) quite a bit depending on our experiences. We can only gauge their changes by making rough comparisons over time, which maybe aren't so accurate. And maybe Joe Q. Powerleveler thinks he's extremely agile after beating up on a crapload of hapless wood goblins, but then he tries battling Dagger Davy and gets the crap kicked out of himself; now he thinks, "Gee, that guy was quick. Maybe I'm not as agile as I thought."

Of course, categories like "very" and "extremely" would have to be very finely granulated for this to work well, since over time players might get a good idea how they rate. (Perhaps numbers are a good idea after all, but vague numbers like a scale of 1-10.) However, that perception would be subject to a little error; if they last thought they were "very agile" when by their own standard they'd be "extremely agile" if they noticed the difference, their stat panel should show "very agile" until the difference becomes obvious. Then maybe their visible stat would kick up a notch, still not showing the full truth. If it swung back the other way, they might not be able to tell for a good long while, or else perhaps a sudden decrease in agility (like from a wound) might be manifested as an even smaller drop in the visible stats; upon recovery they might realize they had been more agile than they thought.

I like the idea of a highly relative numerical scale. When players see their stats drop, it could mean that 1) either their stats have dropped, possibly by more than they see, or 2) they've learned someone else is way better, and their scale is undergoing some fine-tuning. After each battle, for example, their personal idea of who's the best out there, or how relatively good they are, might change. The influence of any creature on their stats should be based on the relative uniqueness of the creature, or else the stats should reflect how good the player is against such-and-such. Maybe a player knows "I think I'm about a 7 against cats, and about a 3 against big things, so against a lion I might be a 4 or maybe a 5." Or, "I thought I was pretty good against bards, because my stats were an 8, but this guy's really dangerous. Maybe I'm really about a 7." (Maybe in actuality, he's really what he would consider a 6.) The idea here is that 5 is more or less average.

Lummox JR