Re: CF: Relations, races and gods

[Mark Wedel <>]

David Sundqvist wrote:

> Well, the primary use for monsters relation to gods would be to decide
> their attitude towards players primarily. It currently would not make much
> difference, but if we advance the game with politics and such, gods would
> be one way to differentiate actions of townspeople in one city versus
> townspeople of another city. A player worshipping Gaea would not be very
> welcome in a city where Devourers is the primary worshipped god. This
> could also be caused by differentiating the races of the different town,
> if they're both human, but people of the same race having the same racial
> attributes also has uses.

 I would prefer to do this via actual race/class relation.  Some of the current
player choices are already other races (dwarf, halfling, fireborn, etc), and
some other are pseudo races (barbarian) or have a much more obvious attribute
than god (for example, a race may hate spell casting classes, so priests and
mages may be in trouble).

 In terms of town, in real life, it would probably be more realistic to base
relations on familiarity - a character that has never been to a town before is
not likely to be all that well liked no matter what his god.  But that is a bit
harder to do.

> 
> For some atmosphere things it's also necessary to have a more detailed
> distinction. For example, to make it possible to create more of a
> permanent nastiness if you go around killing townspeople, each town or
> region with some towns would have the same faction. So if you kill a
> couple of decent upstanding citizens you'll get attacked by the guards and
> some other townspeople. However, that should not result in a player being
> unable to visit any town, so while they have the same race (which is part
> of controlling initial faction attitude towards the player), they would
> have to have separate factions.

 Something like the above should probably be handle some other way.  With the
limited number of gods, I could see some other town far away worshipping the
same god and not like that above character, even though they have no idea what
the character did.

 Now it may be more realistic to define regions that the players reputation has
hold in.  For example, a player killing a lot of goblins around navar city is
going to get a bad reputation with all goblins in that area - word will have
gotten out, and no matter what the other goblins religion, they are certainly
not going to be very trustful.  But the goblins around scorn are likely to not
have that information, and thus be neutral for a while.

 This could be done by prevalant gods in various reasons, or some other
mechanism.  One method would be to have a subrace parameter (ethnic?), so the
race could be goblin, subrace scorn, navar city, whatever.  This might work out
even better, as you could have global subrace settings without messing with god
at all (depending how regions are actually done, all subraces could be set there
and only need to be set if you want to explicity override for some reason
(subrace navar_city_good for a goblin of good alignment in that area).



> Well, true, so it shouldnt affect it too much. On the other hand, a good
> priest would know that his god takes a liking to certain creatures. This
> could very well be part of easily accessible temple lore. Religion would
> perhaps not have too much to do with the setting of initializing faction
> regard of a player, but both religion and class as well as race would be
> useful for plotlines and world development. For example, in current Navar
> city, the guards state they do not like necromancy, thus they would not
> view a Devourers priest in full attire with favour.

 Note that for players, how their character relates to others is really up to
them.  So that good priest may know what monsters to like/dislike, but it is up
to the player to actually decide to play that.  So what we are really talking
about is how npcs/monsters react to players.  So an npc priest should react a
certain way, and using a god for a default on that may work.

> 
> Another thing is that hints (that would also improve atmosphere) could be
> placed in both god and NPC behaviour. The player may get a message about
> feeling uneasy about killing that orc, and NPC's could get added info in
> conversation so they say a bit more by default and hint about how they
> feel about the player.

 I think both those are far in future ideas - the entire npc scripting language
would need to be revamped before the later can happen.


 I think we both agree that relations are a good idea.  I think what it is
coming down to now is how to best implement it.  In summary, I think we have:

 1) A players relation with a race will adjust according to various actions the
player does.
 2) creatures will be favorable towards some races, unfavorable towards other,
and neutral towards yet others.  This relation will affect various actions.

 I think the sticking points will really be the implementation of those - both
efficiency, and ease of use.  I can see doing #2 using race as the method, or
just extending the object structure to have a like/disklike field containing the
information - the later is probably better as you can go beyond the god
definitions of the race relations.  Probably one thing that has been learned
over time in crossfire is that while inheriting values from other areas can make
useful defaults, there almost always comes a time when someone wants further
refinement and wants to be able to set the values explicitly vs getting the
inherited values.
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