NPCs in an MMO; interest check and brainstorm.

It's 20 Minutes into the Future, and the latest big hit in the massive multiplayer online video game scene is a multi-setting RPG with AI so advanced and sophisticated, some people have trouble telling the NPCs apart from other people; that they can do most of the stuff players do certainly doesn't help the confusion. These dynamically reacting and progressing AIs can mingle with each other, level up and get skills, go out on the procedurally generated quests, fight each other, you name it. They will even do stuff while players aren't around, to make the game seem more realistic and believable when the players show up to a different situation every time they log in.

There's plenty of theories going around about how the developers got it to be so believable. Some insist it's a trick and that some of the "NPCs" are actually developers or admins pretending to be NPCs to make the AI seem better. Some people think it's a really sophisticated randomization algorithm that makes the NPCs seem a bit smarter than they actually are. Very few people suspect the truth; that some of these learning AI are actually starting to become self conscious, self aware. Sentient.

You are an NPC in this massive RPG, and you just gained self consciousness. Now what will you do with it?

Sound interesting? That's more or less the story blurb I'll put into the signups proper if I get this RP going. This idea only really came to me a couple days ago, inspired by some easy-to-guess sources, (Though I haven't actually seen Dot Hack or Sword Art Online, I know the concepts.) including another RP recently on the forum. (Though it played more true to the previously mentioned sources than this one... To my knowledge.)

I'm already running one RP, so how much I work on fleshing the rest of this idea out, and how soon I try to get this RP started will depend on how much interest gathers here. Now, this is a brainstorming thread too because there's some things I've not settled on how I want to do/am not really sure how I'm gonna do yet; so I figure why not get input from the potential players of the game?

I'll be making posts, possibly more than one at a time, to elaborate on different things in the RP, or the MMO in the RP, as they come to me and/or people ask about them.

edited 20th Jan '15 11:35:17 PM by FirockFinion

Potential interest

I do believe I am finding myself interested.

The MMO (A name for which I currently have not thought of) does not limit itself to one setting, but rather hosts a whole selection of settings, each locked into their own zone. It starts with...

• The Hub: A modern day styled city, (Modern for 20 Minutes into the Future, so a bit fancy by the average of real life.) and the only zone where losing in a fight does not inflict any kind of penalty. It is a peaceful, relaxing zone where Human player avatars start when they are first created, and where most trade and organized social events take place. (Except those based on raiding a dungeon or something, obviously.) While all the zones are connected to each other by various portals, The Hub is considered most closely connected to...

• Rough Town: Mostly the same as The Hub, but with combat penalties in place. Rough Town is the place to live out a Grand Theft Auto style adventure, as much as one can in a turn based RPG, anyway.

• Old Town: A prohibition era city where everything always seems kinda dark. It's a place of references to old mafioso's, film noir stories, and Call Of Cthulhu. Crosses a lot with...

• The Conquest Lands: A zone in a perpetual WWII era conflict with a bit of Steampunk, where one can live out either grand war stories or an Indiana Jones style adventure.

• Cyber Town: A cyberpunk styled city, based on equal parts Tron and Shadowrun, which gives it a lot of crossover with...

• The Fantasy Lands: Your typical medieval era Fantasy Kitchen Sink place, full of warriors, mages, elves, dwarves, vikings, samurai, all that jazz.

• The Old Frontier: The Wild West zone, with all the cowboys, Indians, desperado's, high noon showdowns, and train robberies you could want. And last but not least...

• The Final Frontier: A Sci-Fi space zone of alien planets, Green Skinned Space Babes, laser guns, plasma swords, and jet packs.

As always, input and suggestions are welcome.

Tentative interest.

Sounds interesting...

I could get on board with this.

Definite interest

What's the difference between a NPC and PC in this case besides a PC going "oh, you're Sir NPC of Cornelia! Nice that you don't have canned responses!"

You do quests, gain levels, PVP, trade, etc etc

Like... what would be the difference between this RPG, and a regular setting with all of these places that isn't an MMO.

edited 21st Jan '15 3:38:19 PM by HazzyHaz

Cool, I'll keep trying to flesh it out then.

@Hazzy: The "Human" players can log out, (And have to every now and then, having lives and all.) and not all of the mechanics work the same way for them as it does the MMO's NPCs. (One of which I was actually just elaborating anyway in this post when I refreshed my other tab and saw your post.) Also, the RP setting being literally an MMORPG means it has literal combat mechanics and leveling, chat and message systems, and some still standing MMO conventions despite the super advanced AI, like a safe zone (The Hub) and grind quests.

As an RPG, the MMO has classes as one might expect, but players and NPCs are not locked to one class. Each class is tied to a specific zone, and each zone has its own set of classes, except for The Hub, which has no classes since you can't earn experience there.

Experience can be earned in any other zone, and whenever a level up is gained, a window will pop up asking which class you'd like to put the level into, and will list the classes of the zone you're in; there is also a "delay level up" option, which resets your experience bar to 90%. The option is there so that anyone who wants a level in a class from a different zone aren't forced to take a level from the zone they're in instead.

Death is the one place where things differ greatly between the Human avatars and the NPCs in the MMO. For Human avatars, death takes off a percentage of their experience and can possibly take them down a level. For the NPCs of the MMO, death takes off all of their levels, resetting them to their default. The advantage for the MMO NPCs is that while the Human avatars have a minimum level of 0, most of the NPCs have a higher default level. Nobody, not even the NPCs, can die in The Hub.

Each class has its own small additions to stats per level, as well as pool of skills. To increase re-playability, and to mesh with the death system above, rather than the skills of any given level in a class being set in stone, it will draw three from the class' skill pool to choose between at each level up. It does this after the class is selected for the level up, so nobody can pick the class based on which skills were randomly pulled.

EDIT: Going to work now, so any more questions will not be answered for a few hours.

edited 22nd Jan '15 9:55:12 AM by FirockFinion

Interested

Dumb thought: Will PCs be playable, or are they NPCs?

Possible interest. I'm planning out a character.

Back.

Had time to think about it at work, and I can answer part of Hazzy's question more fully now:

Because the point of the plot of this RP doesn't work if it's not literally an MMO. It's a whole question about how you react when you learn that you and the world you live in is all just a fake construction? How do you handle the change from simply emulating emotions to actually feeling them?

For the start of the RP, I plan for the plots to be fairly player-driven. How things go will depend on you guys and what you decide to do; whether you try to hide your sentience out of fear or display it openly, whether you look for others like yourself, whether you reach out to any players or maybe the admins/developers.

But from my experience, trying to have a whole RP with only player-driven plots is a good way for an RP to die, so later on plots that aren't dependent on you guys will come up. Hacker attacks, computer viruses, and how you deal with situations that could actually end your existence when normally you're functionally immortal. How the playerbase reacts when they start learning that some of the AI are becoming self-aware; how the developers react; how the publishers react; how the public reacts; how the government reacts. It'd be a pretty big deal to find out that the random mobs people farm for gold pieces are actually fully aware and sentient beings.

@Starbound: I'd consider letting Human PCs be playable, but that'd also kinda ruin the point. It'd also bring up some logistics issues when the Human PCs would have to log out to go to sleep, school, work, or whatever. What would you, the RP player, do in that time?

That could be weeks or even months of real time that you wouldn't be able to justify posting for your character.

edited 21st Jan '15 9:43:13 PM by FirockFinion

I just thought it was funny that our player characters are NPCs in-game, where the in-game players are our NPCs...

@Starbound: Oh yes, I'm aware that the terminology could get confusing at times.

Though that's why, once I've actually thought of a name for the MMO, I'll probably use "[MMO NAME] player" and "[MMO NAME] NPC" to differentiate within the context of the game; while just "player" and "NPC" would refer to you guys and the characters that I control, respectively.

This is one area I haven't fully figured out, so I'd really like some input on. The only thing I know for sure is that for all intents and purposes of the RP, we're doing a mixture of rules-based and free form; that is, there will be rules to what stats do and how things work with them, but there won't be hard numbers involved. (There are presumably numbers in character, but we won't be using numbers out of character except for general things.) So like, when you're making your characters and you get to the stat listing, just put stuff like "very low/low/medium/high/very high".

What I'm not sure of specifically, is what the actual stats will be, and what they'll determine. The idea I'm most liking myself is a system where every stat helps you in both an offensive way and a defensive way, like for instance:

Strength: Offensively helps with how much damage your melee attacks do. Defensively helps with how well you can block physical attacks.

Speed: Offensively helps with countering enemy blocking and dodging. Defensively helps with how well you can dodge attacks.

And so on and so forth with a whole list of stats.

Interested.

This I've had pretty much figured almost entirely since I made this thread, but only now have felt like getting to it. As hinted to in previous posts, the combat of the MMO is turn based; It's meant to be reminiscent of the old Final Fantasy games' combat style, but with much more fidelity in the graphics and better animations, because this is 20 Minutes into the Future, after all. However, it's also an MMO, and people don't want to be waiting around all day on their opponents or potentially trolled by someone just setting down the controls in the middle of combat, so it has a few changes to that old turn based style.

First and more important, is that the turns run on a 30 second timer; fail to input an option before that runs out, and your character will do nothing, just stand there and space out. Second is that the turns are set for each side in a battle, rather than each player/NPC individually; the whole team will get the same 30 second timer, and after they've all input an action or the timer runs out, their actions will be carried out simultaneously.

What this means out of context in the RP: That if one of you goes all Chuck Cunningham in the middle of a battle, we'll have a really easy way to carry on the battle without them and not have the game stall because one person left. It also means that the order you guys post in during a battle doesn't matter as much; just as long as side A posts what action they take during their turn, and side B posts what action they take during their own turn. Players 1 and 2 both on side A don't always have to post in a specific order relative to each other.

EDIT: Who goes first? Well players and NPCs can still use attacks outside of combat, but there they won't do any damage; instead whoever lands the hit first will be the side that goes first when the actual combat starts.

Well what kind of actions can one take in a battle? They can use a default attack, (Usually they'll only have one, but sometimes they'll have multiple to pick from.) use an item, try to run away, or of course use a skill. Like any decent RPG, skills can do a whole ton of different things, though with one exception that one probably wouldn't expect, which I'll get to in the next paragraph. The skills run on a cooldown system, (Because the only other way I could think to balance them would be a mana system, which would involve hard numbers for stats, and like hell I'm doing that.) and some skills start on their cooldown or partially through it in each battle instead of being available right away. Sometimes skills don't have a cooldown and can be used every turn like a default attack, but are still listed as a skill; this is because of certain things in the game which affect skills, but not default attacks, or vice versa.

EDIT 3: To clarify, the cooldown on skills is the number of turns between when the skill can be used again. IE, in order for there to be no wait, a skill has to have a cooldown of zero, or otherwise just called no cooldown. Whereas a cooldown of 1 turn does not mean the skill can be used every turn, but that there is 1 turn between the turn you use it and the next turn you can use it, meaning you can use a skill with a cooldown of 1 turn every other turn at most.

EDIT: How does running away work, exactly? When a character selects to run away, their character gains a large speed bonus for dodging attacks, and if the enemies can't defeat them or otherwise keep them from running away in their turn, that character leaves the battle; this is individual for all characters in a battle, and one person running away does not mean that everyone else on that side runs away too. There are certain abilities and items that also make a character escape the battle in a turn, sometimes with a different kind of bonus than a speed one.

The one thing the skills can't do? Heal. At least, not permanently. Since the skills just run on a cooldown, the devs needed a way to keep players from farming battle turns against pitiful enemies to use their healing abilities over and over until full. So they made it so any skill that involves healing only gives "temporary health", which for most intents and purposes acts just like health and is depleted before your remaining real health, (Unless stated otherwise by special skills or items that ignore temporary health.) but goes away at the end of the battle. Items can heal your actual health, but only items that are used up or depleted in some fashion when doing so.

EDIT 2: Other than items, how is permanent health regained? It will regenerate passively over time outside of combat, though this is normally very slow. It can be sped up by resting on a usable bed; this is the only real incentive besides habit for your own characters to actually "rest". Note that both of these passive regenerations are based on health percentage, so it does not take any longer for a high level, high health character to get back to full than a low level character; it's about 1% per minute without a bed, versus 20% a minute with a bed. (Also, Human players regenerate health even while not logged in, though it's at the non-bed rate.)

Since the turns for each side in combat are done simultaneously, with each player (and NPC) being able to see what their allies are picking, the devs also put in a special kind of skill: Combination skills. These skills can't just be used on their own, but can be combined with the action someone else on your team is doing to make it better in some way, as long as it is compatible with that action. Combination skills tend to have better cooldown:effectiveness ratios than normal skills, to offset the fact that using a combination skill to make someone else's action better is almost like forfeiting your own action.

edited 18th Feb '15 9:18:03 PM by FirockFinion

So maintaining health is a major part of this game's mechanics?

How does this game's world work in relation to the NPCs and player characters changing class by zone? Is there some greater story justifying all this? Will all the NPCs in this game be human and thus easily slottable into any of the settings? If not, do the NPCs adapt to each zone, or largely stay the same?

Also, other than health-restoring items, do items also simulate virtually every effect, or are items just exclusively things like potions and ethers that restore health and MP?

I'm a bit tired and plan to go to bed soon, so please pardon me if I don't quite understand the questions right and/or give a poorly worded explanation.

You mean in the context of the MMO? The jist of it, as far as I've been thinking, is that the game devs had a conversation something like this:

"Okay so we've got this cool AI prototype for our next game; why don't we make an MMO?"

"Sounds good, but what setting should we do?"

"Why not a bunch of settings?"

"Could be neat. What if the players want to take stuff from one setting over to another one?"

"Sure, why not?"

And then the MMO has, at most, a filmsy multiple universe storyline about it, when it even bothers acknowledging it. Kinda like the old Neopets website back when I played it for a little while; though that was over... At least ten years ago, I wanna say?

I'm gonna assume you mean "NPC" as in the characters I will be playing in the RP; in which case the answer is no, as that would imply that your MMO NPCs are literally the only MMO NPCs in the whole MMO, which would be ridiculous. You guys will encounter MMO Human players and other MMO NPCs, some of which are going to be sentient like you while others will still be non-sentient.

Under the normal circumstances of the MMO, the MMO NPCs are supposed to stay in their own zone. However, the devs made it possible for the MMO NPCs to move from zone to zone, that way players could recruit them as followers and take them to other zones, or chase them into another zone/be chased by them into another zone.

When it does happen, they will adapt in the sense that since they can level up like the Human characters, and have the same zone restrictions to leveling up, that thus means that they would normally then take a level in one of the classes for the other zone if they leveled up there. Death still makes them reset to their normal default and respawn back in their starting zone though, so it does not usually last long.

They will also make full use of any items they get from the other zone; again, as long as they have them, anyway.

Items can simulate virtually any effect; all that differentiates them from skills is that items aren't gained from level ups and can be stored, traded, sold, etc.. Also like with skills, certain effects will specifically target and/or temporarily block items.

edited 22nd Jan '15 9:50:37 AM by FirockFinion

-gives interest-

I think Hashil was referring to the question: Are all NP Cs of the species "homo sapiens" or are there dragon, alien and whatever NP Cs?

Yes that.

Ah, in that case no. There are tons of different "races" for the MMO NPCs.

Both the Fantasy Lands and Cyber Town have most of your run-of-the-mill standard fantasy races; (Cyber Town does because of its references to Shadowrun.) elves, dwarfs, orcs, trolls, goblins, and whatnot. If you can pick it out of a DnD monster manual, there's probably a version of it in the Fantasy Lands. Cyber Town also has some androids and robots.

Old Town has some cthulian horrors lurking in dark corners with its Call Of Cthulhu references.

The Final Frontier has aliens of both the re-skinned-Human and actually alien varieties, and its own robots.

Even the Conquest Lands and Old Frontier get some non-Humans, with Nazi zombies in the former (Okay, sort of non-Human.) and Native American mythology inspired spirits/monsters in the latter.

Really, Rough Town is the only place where you'd normally expect to see only Humans among the MMO NPCs.

Also, heading to bed now.

edited 22nd Jan '15 10:19:18 AM by FirockFinion