Star Knights: We're Not Jedi, Honest

_{I should make it clear that, for once, I know exactly of what I speak. I have run the Bastard Jedi game three times, and have become quite familiar with how players play it.}

For a long time, I've been thinking about how to turn my Bastard Jedi game from an insane tabletop into an insane computer game. I'm sure the guys who tried to make the first D&D computer game had a similar headache.

The biggest issue with the Bastard Jedi game (on the computer it's called "Star Knights" or, in full, "Star Knights: We're Not Jedi, Honest") is that the player's character(s) are not simply a stack of combat statistics. There needs to be a progression through a more... moral... area. That's the point, even in the very dualistic Star Wars games that exist now.

However, these dualistic games that currently exist do it pretty badly. Better than nothing? Maybe, but not as good as I would like.

The real problem is that these games offer you one choice - light side or dark side. Once you've made that choice, you'll typically choose the same way throughout the whole game, meaning that the hundreds of carefully-scripted "choices" that the game pops up aren't choices at all: one option is very dominant and the rest aren't worth thinking about.

This is made worse by their use of points as a primary reward mechanism. Light side vs dark side. You want to get as many points of your given side as possible, because they give you more power and make you look nifty. There are other rewards involved - cash, items, and flavor - but the points are very long-term and personal. It would take a gamebreaking injection of cash, items, or flavor to make you choose against a moderate number of points, so the points are obviously going to be the dominant reward mechanism. Since a specific pattern of secondary awards are usually associated with one kind of points or the other, players will tend to choose one kind of points and be wholly satisfied with both the primary AND secondary reward mechanisms (people saying "thank you" vs people dying in a fire, for example), which further unbalances the system.

It's possible to rebalance these choices such that the points you like oppose the secondary rewards you like. However, with such limited secondary rewards, it is difficult to do this very often without accidentally making the player swap his points preference. IE, he wants the light side secondary rewards, so he chooses dark side points.

There are other measures that can be taken to take care and make it interesting, but the truth is that it's a very limited mechanism and prone to becoming very muddy and not-fun if you make it too balanced.

What we really need are a whole lot more long-term rewards of a whole lot more types. And this is what my Bastard Jedi games were centered around.

Screw light side vs dark side, my Bastard Jedi had six or seven emotional axes, each of which could be considered to be light side or dark side. For example, humility vs arrogance. Having points in either direction gave you advantages if you used that axis and, in turn, using that axis made you more likely to gain another point in it. So your 2 points of humility will give you a +2 if you are humble in combat (or whenever), but it may increase to 3 points of humility.

There is no "OH YOU FELL" moment. No "oh, now you're dark side" moment, nor any "oh, you're redeemed now" moment. Not built into the rules, at any rate.

What there is is a powerful addiction that forms. The pressure of the game is enough that you really want those bonuses, and it's an easy habit to use your traits to get that edge.

Until you start to realize that you're using it all the time, and at more and more severe levels. You can't use two points of humility if your humility is at five, even if you only need two points of bonus.

At two points of humility, you're humble. That's okay. It's a Jedi trait, right? But at five points of humility, you're not humble: you've developed a serious self-worth issue and self-destructive tendencies. This is not because of the rules. This grows organically out of having to role play your use of ever higher levels of humility.

There's the catch, see? You fell without really noticing. You fell to the "light half" of the axis.

As a side note, this also tends to create unstable equilibriums, where players will start to use their less severe emotions to get smaller bonuses and attempt to keep their severe emotions under control. But that increases their less severe emotions and, before too long, you're a wreck.

And it's all done by the player, to the player. There are no rules that say, "oh, you have four emotions above (absolute value 4), you're now an emotional wreck." The rules don't have to say that. It becomes painfully clear to the player.

Quite aside from any other long-term results such as plot events, new saber crystals, and changing relationships with other player characters, these six or seven emotional axes are enough to power the whole engine on their own.

BUT...

They can't be easily translated to a computer game.

They can be, mechanically speaking. But without the social pressure to make you RP your emotion, there's no real connection between choosing one emotional axis or another. You can program in RP - make the character(s) act appropriately - but now you're taking it away from the player and making it character development by partial fiat. Furthermore, it's very, very difficult to script all the different ways that characters should express their various emotions in various situations!

Sigh...

To be honest, I think the scripting involved would probably be manageable in a AAA title, because I don't see how it could possibly be larger than the scripts for Mass Effect or Fable II. But for one hobbyist, that's a retarded level of scripting to aim for.

Comments?

Advanced Personality Simulation

When you're trying to create a "next generation" NPC, usually the method is to make it so that the NPC thinks about relationships in a more complicated way than "I like you X amount", and can therefore respond in a way more complicated than "I'll give you the quest".

I've discussed a lot of difficulties with this, ranging from a need for a wide variety of actions with nuance to the need for a detailed world to offer fodder for interaction. Today I'd like to assume those and talk a little bit about an easy way to do the actual personality calculations.

The problem with the majority of "advanced personality models" is that they still default to flat numbers. For example, they have a stat as to how much they like you. The urge most designers feel is to simply add more flat numbers: this is how much they like you, that's how much they trust you, that's how attracted they are too you, that's how much they respect or fear you...

I think it's more important to have fewer, deeper numbers rather than more, shallow numbers. The basics of deep gameplay are to have a few rules that produce complex situations, not to have a lot of rules that produce complex situations. The latter is inherently limited, inefficient, and flat-out inferior.

So let's say we've got only one number: how much they like you.

The way to make it more interesting and realistic is to also have the derivatives and integrals of that number. Basically, we turn that number into:

Their long-term relationship with you. (area)
How much they like you. (position)
How respectable/fun you've been recently. (velocity)
How charming you're being. (acceleration)

All of these numbers change with everything the character does, but they are all deeply intertangled. Each character can then have a personality designed to weight those factors differently.

For example, a suspicious aristocrat might have a low maximum acceleration threshold, and therefore innately distrust anyone being especially charming. This doesn't affect the end result in terms of how the acceleration changes the velocity changes the position: it just changes how they act towards you right now.

On the other hand, an honorable knight might weight almost all his interactions based on area rather than position. How charming you're being right now won't affect his decisions much.

You can also split up their actions into action and demeanor, or even into long-term, short-term, and demeanor. For example, the aristocrat will be charming right back to anyone who's being charming, but he won't believe a word of it when they say that they'll pay you back next Friday.

A knight, on the other hand, might have a demeanor based almost entirely on charm and fun (acceleration and velocity) but make his long-term decisions based entirely on area (long-term relationship). IE, "You're an ass, but you're my brother, so I'll do it."

It's not so complex. Easy, in fact. And more realistic than trying to decide on what four or five kinds of relationships a person can have. Instead, a given NPC will interpret their emotions into whatever makes sense for their personality, and the "kinds of relationships" will emerge naturally.

For extra fun, let players define their character's personality. :D

Multiplayer Emotion

Arrrrgh! This topic is too big!

I wrote an essay on interplayer emotion. It was extremely long. Here's the condensed, condensed, condensed version:

Interplayer emotion is based on shared resources. Depending on the nature of the resources, you get different player emotions. The survival resources most MMORPGs share lead to the more primitive emotions, whereas long-running LARPs frequently share storylines and politics between characters, producing a very different set of emotions.

More factors are how difficult resources are to obtain and keep. The more independent a character can be, the less emotion is likely to rise out of a situation, and the smaller the groups will tend to be. In SecondLife, the basic group size is two people. In Eve Online, it tends to be two digits. That's because in SecondLife, life is easy, and in Eve Online, life is hard. MMORPGs generally let you choose how difficult you want life to be, the only real reason I like treadmills.

Now, if you want to design a game - computer, tabletop, LARP, whatever - keep these things in mind. If you want to lock players together, give their characters some level of shared resources of whatever type is likely to cause the emotions you're looking for. Give players a jointly owned child (another player, ha!) and suddenly you have a remarkably powerful relationship popping into existence out of nothing - even if the players don't like RPing.

Think of it like this: by forcing players to share resources (either cooperatively or competitively) you can produce incentive to RP. You may have to "echo" the resources into other resources - produce a tangible "end result" of working together - but that's no problem.

Think about a MMORPG with this kind of shared resources: you can only have a home if you can find other player(s) to cohabitate with you. You can only have a child if you can find a player to be the other parent, or if a player agrees to play the child. Etc, etc, etc.

Of course, these resources need to be ongoing situations: resources need to be difficult to keep. If they have a "solution", they aren't going to be very interesting. Children always cause trouble. Politics always get you in hot water. Colonies grow and have issues. Romances aren't fire and forget.

How would you design a multiplayer game using these ideas?