Re: [Adonthell-devel] Characters

[Kai Sterker]

On Sun, 5 Jan 2003 22:11:44 +0100 Alexandre Courbot wrote:

> > > All characters will be able to fight, so all of them need at least
> > > those attributes required by the combat system.
> > 
> > Aren't there many NPCs who will never get the opportunity to fight,
> > and thus don't need to be able to fight? What about NPCs in peaceful
> > areas of the game like towns? Why would they ever fight?
> 
> If they are attacked by the player, I guess they need an opportunity
> to defend themselves. That gives a bog freedom to the player, but it's
> all relative: as killing key characters would ruin the story, I
> imagine we can put sort of a milicia system in every town that the
> player can't defeat - that is, if you break the story, you die! ;) But
> in some places, killing non-important characters could just ruin your
> reputation.

Heh. That's actually a good solution to the problem :). 


> The idea is, that there is only *one* kind of character. Therefore
> they must be able to perform equally. I hate the kind of games when
> you can see that the programmers have used different classes for the
> different kind of characters/objects. In Adonthell, we want to keep
> things as logical and generic as possible - what differentiates a
> warrior from a peasan, excepted the fact the warrior know better how
> to fight and has the appropriate material? Even though 0.3 is limited,
> it already implements this idea: there is no difference between the
> player and the other characters, excepted that the player gets
> assigned a schedule that reads keyboard inputs.

Very true. Even storywise we don't want to make the player character
anything special. NPCs won't regard him as a hero. They won't come
begging for help. That may change with the players reputation, but
initially they'll treat him as equal or even inferior to themselves.

As far as the coding goes, a NPC should be able to do all the things the
player can make his character do.

Kai