Re: CF: Relations, races and gods

[David Sundqvist <>]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Mark Wedel wrote:
>  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).

True. I can well accept such a solution :).

>  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.

Indeed. The use of gods would just be to initialize the relationship
settings of a character towards a certain faction on the first meeting
(or first faction check). But it isnt really a needed feature. 
 
>  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).

This would be the best way, I think. 

As for regions, I was considering the possiblity of a region definition
file. This could specify default subrace settings for the different
common races in the region (unspecified would default to default race
settings). It would also specify things like 'region random monster
generators', which would give appropriate defaults to outdoors monster
generators, region default random scroll/book lore, and probably contain
specifications for mapmakers wanting to do work in the region. 

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

It might be possible to insert subrace specific matches by default tho,
which would be an easy way to get around it. The npc stuff needs revamping
tho, yes...

>  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.

Yep, I think this would be a good way.

/David

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