Evil Knievel
11-28-2009, 09:18 AM
Drinking coffee and pushing really urgent work a little, I decided to write a stupid jade post first:
imagine a huge overworld, there might be non-stationary NPCs that are relevant. The player can try to find them (he needs the famous wizards advice or the traveling healer's help or its about tracking down a thief or a kidnapped person or just kill someone who you had a crossword with before) by tracking them. They'd have to leave some clues of their passing through, and with a certain skill, one could for example identify footprints and their age and follow them. Also persons on the way might have a chance of giving you clues about where and when someone was heading. If you are looking for a murderer, it is not necessary to ask for someone around, just notice a murder and ask the people around.
In the background, the stories of these NPC's seem to become frame-rate killingly complex, but it is not necessarily so. It is probably enough to store some very few positions and times and maybe something happening there (he's been wounded, a blood trace appearing and a corpse of a fellow he left behind - maybe some orcish spears lying around) and the details would only be filled in as soon as the player starts looking for them (like the exact path of footprints between a and b).
Tracks of course can be interrupted by wading through snow, rain and rivers, and tracking through busy cities requires an extremely high skill or other means (asking, magical exploration in various ways springs to mind).
And then, these traces can be used against yourself by someone hunting you...
imagine a huge overworld, there might be non-stationary NPCs that are relevant. The player can try to find them (he needs the famous wizards advice or the traveling healer's help or its about tracking down a thief or a kidnapped person or just kill someone who you had a crossword with before) by tracking them. They'd have to leave some clues of their passing through, and with a certain skill, one could for example identify footprints and their age and follow them. Also persons on the way might have a chance of giving you clues about where and when someone was heading. If you are looking for a murderer, it is not necessary to ask for someone around, just notice a murder and ask the people around.
In the background, the stories of these NPC's seem to become frame-rate killingly complex, but it is not necessarily so. It is probably enough to store some very few positions and times and maybe something happening there (he's been wounded, a blood trace appearing and a corpse of a fellow he left behind - maybe some orcish spears lying around) and the details would only be filled in as soon as the player starts looking for them (like the exact path of footprints between a and b).
Tracks of course can be interrupted by wading through snow, rain and rivers, and tracking through busy cities requires an extremely high skill or other means (asking, magical exploration in various ways springs to mind).
And then, these traces can be used against yourself by someone hunting you...