Excelent Idea with the story template. There are alot of possibilities with how to implement it. You could actually have the game capture a guy and his quest would be to escape the dungon. While simultaneously the engine assigns the quest to another character to find his long long lost father... as the first character escaped and moved around the engine could drop hints for the second character. When they finally caught up with eachother there would be alot of IC story that could be told by both parties to eachother. An excelent way to facilitate social interaction.
This type of system would not be possible under current communication systems in Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games(there I typed it all out!) where everyone and anyone can talk to someone on the other side of the world by
eg. "/t bobo, hi bobo!"
wich leads me to think that part of the culperate (sp?) for lack of (in character)IC interaction is the private tells and global chat that exsist in these games. In my expirence people are more likely to talk OOC when using private tells/messages. Typically when people first meet eachother in public they say "hail!" and make poor attemts at OOC until they finally break down and
"/t highlevelcharacter, so do you have any good weapons for me or what?"
I think if people were restricted in their communications to those around them, much like real life... local communities would form, and there would be more of a venu for people to speak pubiliby In character. I realize i haven't totally flushed out this argument.. but I think you under stand what i'm trying to say.
Edited by - ironside on October 17, 2000 5:14:18 AM
