What happens if you attack someone in a town?

[monocledsardine]

I was thinking about this while playing ADOM one day, and it suddenly occurred to me that in real life, it is highly unlikely that you would be killed on the spot for simply attacking most of the townsfolk unless you were on a very rough side of town (eg. the outlaw settlement). Imagine that I attacked the dwarven shopkeeper in the CoC, and instead of all the buff dwarves coming out and chopping my head off pronto, I get caught and sent to jail until a court of law decides on my sentence - whether I would have to pay money, be banished from the settlement, or executed. Perhaps the sentence would be determined by who I attacked, whether or not I killed them, my current L/N/C rating, etc.

This alone would add a huge amount of depth to the story. Not only would this give abilities such as - let's say - Law a whole new meaning (wouldn't you like to defend yourself in court?), but you could also do more exciting things like have your companion or pet come in and break you out of prison/whisk you away just as the guillotine is coming down.

Some of this would be extremely hard to program into the game, but other parts of it, such as having a court determine your sentence rather than having people kill you, would be more simple and in themselves would add a huge amount of depth to the character interaction in the game. Also, it would allow just a little leeway for those who had trouble with the "if you die, you die" concept of ADOM (and this would be almost necessary in an even larger game like JADE).

I'm sure you can see that the options with this one are almost endless.

Any other ideas along these lines?

[Sradac]

the other thing i never liked about adom, even if me and a farmer were someplace completely out of sight of anyone else in the town, inside one of the houses in terrinyo or just out of sight, if i killed the farmer for his corpse all of a sudden every single person in the town KNEW I did it and was out for blood. then I gotta go kills elders, druids, baby dragons, and thugs which was not part of the plan. I think the only onese that should go hostile right away are those that see it. then a morale factor can be played in, if your a pathetic farmer yourself level 1 just entered the world its a good chance that whoever sees you will try to beat you down. but if you're a scary level 45 necromancer chances are whoever saw will run as fast as their legs can take them, alerting everyone they pass about what has come. then maybe the sheriff will catch wind of this and the druid, but not instantly.

the cities in jade will be huge, I could so see myself as a shady rogue sitting in alleys waiting for some innocent nobody to try and come down my alley so I can rob and possibly kill em for the hell of it. one kill shouldnt alert the whole town, but if I keep this up for a month stories will spread that a thug or even a group of thugs if i got companions are commiting highway robbery in one of the alleys. then the authorities might investigate. but i t really shouldnt happen right away.

[Evil Knievel]

I like these ideas. Especially a kind of communication between people would have to be established, or a system of information flow.

[monocledsardine]

@ EK: Just what I was thinking. And really, the more realistic interaction with NPCs, the more fun this game will be (though I doubt any of us will question its greatness once TB releases it :P)

@Sradac: Those are also some really good ideas. I especially like the one where you could create your own band of thieves that run around killing and attacking people in the dark of night.

Having a "silent kill", which only certain people know about, is another good idea. However, I think it shouldn't be overdone, otherwise you'd be able to kill shopkeepers, kings, etc. without ever having to give it a second thought. Instead, let's say that if you kill someone while you are in sight of another person, that person will generally run away immediately and try to tell the authorities (if they are not related to the person you killed - if they are, then they will probably just start attacking you). Unless you also kill the person running away, the whole town will know what you have done.

However, if you kill someone and no one else knows it, they will still find the dead body or realize that that person is missing. If they realize the person is dead, then they know he/she is killed, and they tighten the security level in the town/city. Perhaps if you dropped an item near the dead body they'd realize it and use it against you as evidence. lol maybe they'd just execute you on the spot because they suspected you in some settlements :P. Otherwise, if you managed to dispose of the corpse before they got around to finding him/her, they might just assume he had gone fishing for a few days, and wouldn't start to really investigate the problem until a little while after the kill, giving you time to escape or do something drastic.

All this would be even more complex (and cool) if you could become part of the law enforcement force in a town or city. I wouldn't mind solving a few mysteries myself ;). However, I think that might be pushing the limit a taaaaaaaaad too far... Still, it's an idea...

[adom-admin]

Let me explain my general approach to such things in JADE:

I try to create "local" effects (e.g. no large coordinated effects) because they are much simpler to program.
I try to chain local effects to simulate global effects.This seems to be a pretty viable approach to simulate a kind of intelligence or society (a little bit like swarm intelligence). What does this mean for the point you raised:

Whenever you attack someone in a stettlement JADE will check if there are observers.
Observers will decide between a defensive and offensive strategy. The particular strategy would depend on the alignment of the settlement, e.g. in a lawful town a defensive strategy would be to run away and yell for help, an offensive strategy would be to attack and yell for help. In a chaotic town the defensive strategy would be simply to run away and only sometimes yell for help (there is no law, s why bother), an offensive strategy would be to atack. A neutral town might switch between one of those.
The atacked most likely will yell for help (except if feeling much superior).
Yelling for help increases the "observation radius" for the deed and in turn might activate more observers. In this way the information about the misdeed might spread through the settlement if there any interested observers in range and lead to more consequences.
Killing someone will increase the crime level of the settlement after a while (because the person is missed). The reaction again depends on the alignment of the settlement.
Lawful towns might increase guard activities (e.g. more guards), chaotic towns might increase the toughness of the guard (to simulating quenching the riots). Neutral towns again might alter between those strategies.
Being observed also alters your reputation which in turn might lead to bounties, being barred from other cities, etc.All these things seem to be rather easy to code as local events and I currently hope that the interaction of these local events will nicely simulate a global social context.
What do you think?

[Grey]

That's just the sort of thing I like to hear. The only problem is potential buggy behaviour, in particular that which might be exploited. Still, it's the sort of realistic building up from small detail that works best. I especially like the general response within the town - guards building up etc. It means there are hidden consequences to your actions, even if nothing immediately bad happens. Other consequences might be increased shop prices and higher hostility from townspeople (showing a greater distrust of outsiders). It's also flexible to work with other crimes like theft. Perhaps one might even bring down a city by encouraging lawlessness through repeated criminal behaviour, all stemming from simple code with knock-on effects.

[Sradac]

sounds great TB, grey does bring up a point with bugginess though. I can see it know, you accidently bump into someone and instead of them saying hey watch it guards swarm you. say, will being outlawed in one town affect anything else? Say theres a large plain or valley someplace with 3 or 4 lawful towns in it. It would make sense getting banned from one might just get you banned from the others or at least get them apprehensive to you as they would most likely trade with each other and word would travel.
"Hey, watch out for that wandering wizard sradac, he fried two small children last night with magic!"

This could lead to alot of cool events in game. becomming known as a scoundrel in the lawful towns might attract the attention of the chaotic ones, maybe they got some jobs for you. kinda like how hotzenplotz wanted you to get rid of the sheriff only on a much larger scale. "We want that town of melhelm up north to us! But dem guards up there got too nice o spears to keep us out! Do something bout it!!!" You could destroy or raid their armory or something then bandits raid the town, turning it chaotic as well.

[monocledsardine]

1. I try to create "local" effects (e.g. no large coordinated effects) because they are much simpler to program.
2. I try to chain local effects to simulate global effects.

That's good thinking, it maximizes the quality of the game per amount of programming required. However, I personally would appreciate it greatly if there were just a few carefully-placed "large coordinated effects" in Jade (perhaps directly dependent on class or race) - I guess this is because of my love of a dynamic storyline (and when I say storyline, I mean the type you might read in a book, rather than just "so-and-so attacked the shopkeeper, his pet died but he ran away, he got banned from the town, he received a new quest from an outlaw settlement") in games like ADOM. Adding this type of effect is, as I see it, the only way to completely obliterate the potential redundancy in such games. Not that I am calling the idea of Jade redundant in any way - it's epic and that's all that can be said about it :cool:.

Oh, and one more note - when I say "large coordinated effects", I am not referring to the progression of the game at the global level (eg. "Charlie the gnomish wizard was hated by the citizens of Terinyo, and so he was locked up in the underground caverns of despair (lol guess where I got that one from) for eternity... but 224 years later, who should show up at his cell but Squeaky, his pet ElDeR ChAoS GoD..."), but rather just some sort of coherent story that might occur at any particular moment in the game ("Suddenly you hear calls coming from the other room. It is the Sheriff of Terinyo, who has long respected your love of that which is lawful. It appears that he is about to die (note: of natural causes, so it doesn't just happen if you do a certain set of things, it happens somewhat randomly after time, possibly even due to events caused by NPCs). 'Charlie,' he says, 'I want to give you this before I die...'. He gives you a ring... 'Please watch over Blup for me'..." etc.). ADOM already incorporates this sort of stuff a little bit, and it shouldn't be all that hard to program (at least, from my work experiences), but having just a touch of this here and there would add a lot.


Killing someone will increase the crime level of the settlement after a while (because the person is missed). The reaction again depends on the alignment of the settlement.

That list you gave of the progression when you attack someone in a town is great, but what do you mean when you say "crime level"? Is there some quantitative value for how much crime occurs in any given place? (I haven't studied up as much as I could have on Jade, so please forgive me if I missed this).

Oh, and since this is my first time directly addressing the great Creator, thanks a bunch for the vast amount of entertainment you have provided with ADOM (and anticipation with JADE) - expect a postcard from Kuwait sometime soon ;).