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Old 09-29-2012, 03:18 PM   #3
camlorn
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Re: Clash of Kings: Niche vs. Niche

If you are dealing with a pc-vs-npc scene, this can be solved: the solution is not trivial and will take hours of redesigning areas, but you can theoretically design all quests to accept a "kill the guard" answer, a "bribe the guard with rare crafted object" answer, and a "dominate the guard with my supernatural hypnotic social skillz" answer.

Considering these three only as the main niches, you can theoretically design into the mechanics some sort of interaction: maybe a social player gets some sort of boost from having a friendship with a physical combat player, probably having to do with intimidation, which is supported with code. Having the social niche interact with a physical niche or crafting niche is more difficult--unless your game supports some sort of social combat system like ire games do, this is inherently difficult. If you have that, theoretically, the social player can debuff the mob through intimidation, for instance. Be warned that this probably needs some sort of supernatural explanation to make any sense.

Crafters are crafters. Those who are exclusively crafters will be able to benefit almost any niche; and if they are rare, people won't want to make enemies of them. For crafters, the power comes from being able to withhold services.

As soon as you expand the list of niches indefinitely beyond the typical combat-crafting-social triangle, you start getting the pure rp games--typically running on top of mush/moo codebases--without coded combat, stats, or anything of the sort, or some sort of secondary combat system for player-npc interaction with no reason to actually go kill the dragon and where all player-vs-player combat plays out through emotes with some sort of immortal referee for important conflicts.

There -might- be a sollution, but no one has to my knowledge done it yet. Muds are, given that there really isn't a special effects budget, able to deal with the so-called combinatorial explosion if they so wish: maybe I can light the forest on fire with a torch or a fireball, or maybe I'm going to go bang two stones together, but they all result in the forest being on fire. I imagine you can deal with this problem, and I would be interested in the solution. Btw, I think this is where we will be able to get players in the future: highly story-driven muds with clients for mobile devices that play out almost like point and click adventure games with combat. But this is what we call derailing the conversation, and I should probably start a thread.
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