Just a suggestion, Wai: You're asking players to make their own character to add into the game, but you've already got 14 ready and able NPC's that could be used instead. Why not take the approach of having players assume the role of a pre-created character, like a player would in a game of Clue? Later on, yeah, having our own characters would be more fun, but for a dry run, having characters already decided for us might work out better.

You'll probably have better luck getting interested participants that way, I'm thinking, and it would be a lot faster. Plus, there wouldn't be any conflicts with characters, as every character would be designed by you and already set in place. Just my thoughts. I'm interested in playing, though, if more people come around. Asking for 13 may be a bit much, though. I think you mentioned 4 would due, but that seems too few to create the level of interactivity that you're after; maybe 6?

Between the time you posted any my last post I deleted all the posts that explain what I am doing.

Yes, please pick an existing character if you want. And I don't need 13 participants to start the simulation, I can start with any number or participants. When there are 3 participants, each participant will control about 4 characters including a wolf. I will give more details if we have 3 participants.

I want to keep it short and just get a count of interested participants first.

Another way of doing the simulation, is that I write a post, and then everyone can give suggestions on what should happen next in the story. Then I will pick the suggested event that makes the most sense to me and RP the next post. If I ask it like this, what do you want to see next logically after reading:

Once upon a time in a peaceful village...

Since every day and every night a village is eliminated, the story can be divided into 13 episodes. Day 0 are the arrivals of the travellers to the town, in night 0, the first villager will be eaten by the wolves. In order to stage false accusations, it might be good to introduce a conflict in the village on Day 0. The problem is when I start thinking this way, I am no longer Simulating to create the story, but Designing the story.

Anyway, please pick or create a character.

I will be writing a second RP post for the story very soon. It is good if there are enough people to run the game, but my purpose is not to host a game but to discuss the structure of the story. So, very soon, I will be introducing the second character (out of the 13). If you decide to play, you can still control the character that I started. So alternatively, you can just comment about their behaviors and what they should do.

My thoughts about the second character:

Since the first character (the wolf god) the LRRH met is a stranger, perhaps the second should be someone LRRH already knows. The LRRH should skip straight into the plaza where the village can be introduced. The LRRH should meet the Mayor at the plaza.

Character Stats

I was thinking about the implementation and realized that the characters have two additional properties that would affect the story and the strategy:



1) Movement Properties
This describes the limit that a character can move in a set period of time. For this property, the Little Red Riding Hood would have an above average limit. (The LRRH can walk around more compared to other characters). According to the current set of characters, Brandy the Raccoon Girl can move only a short distance during the day, but longer than normal distance at night with the additional property of being undetected (an action property). Still, no character can beat the movements of the Wolves at night.


2) Action Properties
This is the limit on actions that a character can perform in a set period of time. In general, the smarter the character is the more he can do. Most adult character would have a high limit. Just glancing though the list of characters, I would think that Vaughn has the highest limit so far (Because he is smart and he is good with his hands.)



Eventually, these properties would be translated into numbers so that a player can strategise based on not only the thought patterns of a character, but also the physical limitations of the character. In the Roleplay, these properties are more polished (e.g. a character can engage another character in some activity to tire him out so he can't do much at night although he wanted to investigate.)

Stereotypical Characters

If the LRRH walks straight to the plaza, I would have to declare more characters than just the Mayor. Since this simulation is turning out more like a tutorial to the game, perhaps it is better to make the character stereotypical so that the player can memorize the characters easily. The plot can support many subplots.

I don't know how many kinds of subplots there are. I can think of four types:

- Romance and Relations
- Action/Combat (against wolf)
- Strategy (against wolf)
- Politics (acquiring power, money, stuffs, etc...)
- Horror/Mystery
- The Detached

Each character can be involved in a few (or all) types of subplots.

The simulation is supposed to be bottom-up (starting with characters without any preference in the direction of the plot), but when I do it alone I would revert to top-down (starting with the desired overall plot structure, and design the characters to support the structure).


In this case, I want the Mayor to be a younger Mayor. He is rooted to the village, perhaps sometimes even feel a bit imprisoned because he feels like that it is his responsibility to stay. He likes a woman who travels a lot. The Mayor is calm and reserved, and the woman is wild. The woman is the Weather Witch, who travels from town to town to give weather forecast (everytime she comes, she gives the forecast for the whole season).

When the LRRH arrives at the plaza, she would see the Mayor there, and the Weather Woman would arrive.


[Edited by - Wai on May 22, 2007 3:55:07 PM]

Quote: Original post by Wai...
The simulation is supposed to be bottom-up (starting with characters without any preference in the direction of the plot), but when I do it alone I would revert to top-down (starting with the desired overall plot structure, and design the characters to support the structure).

I don't think there is really any purpose in trying this alone. It seems to me that having a plot in mind during writing completely counteracts any benefits that might be gained from this activity. What you really need is people who are willing to write from a character's perspective, rather than a storytellers. If the original plan comes together, I'd be willing to role play 2-3 characters. I'm very interested in the idea of an emergent story, where the only 'goal' as a writer is to role play various characters in a setting where their actions will have impact on other characters.

The only problem I foresee in doing this with few people is that it is easy to use a writer's multiple characters to achieve some purpose or goal beyond the individual characters. (For example, not voting one's character out because you know it is a wolf, and secretly you want the wolves to 'win', especially if the voting character has reason to vote for said other character). I don't think it will be possible to avoid this kind of behavior (though it may be more subtle, and have less of an influence).

Re:

I agree, I would rather stall and wait for more interested people than to write the story myself. Please bring a character that you are interested in.

While we are waiting, we can talk about character design, world building and other topics. There are some difficulties in creating the characters, because these aren't the typical deep RPG characters. They are supposed to be somewhat stereotypical. The characters should be easy to identify and understand. The main source of attraction is the dynamic they form when they are put together.

I like analogies. The analogy here is chess pieces on a chess board. Each chess piece have simple properties that quite meaningless without other pieces on the board. When the board is populated with pieces, and a game goal is declared, tactics and strategies emerge.

In some stories, characters are designed with layers of mysteries. These aren't the characters I need. I need characters like chess pieces, with distinctive properties (by the nature of tactics is hard to tell whether a property is a 'weakness' or a 'strength', it depends on how the property is used.)

Initially it may not be easy to know what characters have interesting properties. Simulation would tell us what properties are distinctive to play.



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Further expositions about the game world:

The game world is a cartoony village where characters just end up there. There isn't much explanation about the why the characters are there. People have tried to make sense out of it, but it tends to become boring or restrictive. The content can be mature, but with no gore or anything explicit (i.e. the characters can hook up, cheat, gamble, drink, smoke, ...)


Characters I have:

The Little Red Riding Hood
Curious but guillable. I like this character because she is associated with the theme of wolves. And her simple mind is easily seen and accepted.

The Greedy Mayor
Political, Agreeable, Authoritative. I think that it just doesn't work well if the Mayor is an overall good guy. Some characters has got to have some personal agenda.

The Weather Witch (Aina)
Popular, spontaneous, expressive, smart, a center of attention. It think she is an idol figure.

The White Knight (Knight Benedict)
Powerful, arrogant, demands attention, fictitiously popular. He is powerful, he knows it and he knows that the people need him.

The Drunk Girl (Brandy)
Switches between carefree or depressive. The common girl that never have much attraction or get any serious attention.

I now put the character profiles in a database. I will also be putting the story nodes into a database.

Character List

This thread would involve some discussion on the layout. This could be discussed in the Game Design Section, Web Development Section, or the Writing Section. If possible I would like to discuss and get feedback on that in this section because I want mostly feedbacks from the participants or writers.

I have coded a simple interface for posting the branching plot elements when the game starts.

Branching Story "Engine"

I am still coding more functions to it, but I would like some feedbacks on its layout and style. The basic function is to add a new branch. You can do so by clicking on "add" at the bottom right. By default you cannot use any "edit" option because there is no login yet.


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List of potential participants:

- Wai
- sunandshadow
- Sensei Maku
- Omega147 (?)

I would love to join, is there a sign up list anywhere ?

Sanoma