Hell Ramen wrote:

Well, or Nadold, I'm planning on putting a few NPCs in the starting town, just to help everybody get started. Of course, they'll have limited supplies, and once they run out, them and their store just goes poof. So if you're a new player, and the world has already been formed, you probably won't encounter any NPCs (aside from the monsters, that is).

The only NPCs in the game I'm putting are animals, and that's it.

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Another idea I had, which would remove all NPCs together is to give the player starting items based on his skills in a certain category. EX: A skilled lumberjack and painter would get a paintbrush, paint, and an axe.

All players will start off with five gameday's supply of meat.

In Nadold, there should be a king NPC ( Xealbert ) :).

Vortezz wrote:

In any open-ended game, I find that NPCs greatly detract from the experience... as I told Garthor in wizchat today, when NPCs are in the picture, it goes from "I control the economy" to "I'm following the NPC's economy."

Do you control Earth's economy? I'm pretty sure that you haven't succeeded in your takeover plans yet, Archnemesis of the North. My new Legions of Terror have been halting most of your incursions into our territory so far. ;-)

Back to a serious note, I don't like the idea of having everything in the player's hands unless the game is an MMOG like Puzzle Pirates or something like that -- or unless survival in a primitive land is the basis of the game. That's not to say that the NPCs' economy shouldn't be based on player actions at all, of course: the dialectic process always applies and a compromise between NPC economy and player economy should always exist.

If I'm selling longswords by the thousands into an economy, then NPC blacksmiths will start closing up shop and moving into deficient areas of the economy, because they can't make their profit margins any more from smithing. People will start refusing to buy a longsword for such a high price as I demand because they could just as easily give two hens to their cousin in law for their longsword (dutifully used as a backscratcher for several weeks now). The human economy has a way of balancing itself: when a commodity comes into higher supply and lower demand, people will automatically gravitate towards low-supply-high-demand products in order to continue to make a profit.

In a small server game, I've also come to the conclusion that players always need to have influence on the server, but that the players will feel excessively lonely unless there are NPCs to interact with. Imagine playing Morrowind if it only had the essential NPCs and creatures in the game, plus the occasional random monsters. It'd be completely bland and pointless (as opposed to merely being unengaging like it is now).

Hedgerow Hall was a good game, but the economy didn't make sense. Nobody knew what anything was worth except the serious players, and most of the serious players had enough wealth to simply give gifts to one another and not worry about cost. The economy had no foundation, and any attempts to back goods with a currency was doomed to fail either because of lack of interest or because of administrative hassle. =)

Ever play Fallout 1/2? It'll be similar to that. But if you haven't played it, it'll be like this:

You can pick up to two skills to tag, say I tag lumberjacking and painting. I'd be a natural at those, thus my skills in lumberjacking and painting will increase easily. The more I use it, the better I'll get at it. Let's say I try to my skills at hunting, yet I suck at it. It'll be like a trip through Hell and back to become a great hunter. But, once I become a great hunter, I will be able to supply almost everything for me, except for my axes, hoes, knives, and all that stuff. So then I learn blacksmithing, and it goes on and on.

The more you use something, the higher your skill in it.

I delight in creating NPCs. They're fun to make and they can add a lot to your game.