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Old 03-21-2006, 04:31 PM   #16
Valg
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Home MUD: Carrion Fields
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Yup, but you have to be tracking something that a machine is good at tracking. Speech, freeform emotes, canned emotes ("socials" like a "nod" command), etc. It's safe to assume you aren't tracking the quality of what is typed, so you're left with things like:

1) Quantity. Tally various RP commands. Maybe only reward people who use a reasonable diversity of commands.
2) Duration. The code makes an attempt to identify when a player is "RPing" based on their command input, and rewards you for the time spent until you "stop RPing".

Both of these are beaten with primitive scripts. If you require the presence of a second person, it's beaten by collaborating players with primitive scripts. If you require more than one other person, you're shutting out a lot of interactions that really should fall under "roleplaying".

As the_disciple alluded, if you make the system too obscure, it loses its incentive. If I gain 0 XP after an hour-long conversation with another character, I'm going to assume the system is flawed or broken and just RP when I want to RP, and hack up ogres when I want XP.

You want a carrot there, and the problem is that it seems like any carrot opens up exploits unless you build in human supervision (at which point you should stick with a system where the humans just hand out the XP).
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