[silvarilon]

Yep, the interesting thing about this is it takes the gameplay away from "entering commands" and more towards "describing what your character is doing"

Obviously, there are still commands to interact with the game world "ask fishomonger for swordfish" etc.

It leads to exactly what you described. If you stab Pete stealthily, or stab Pete obviously, the system doesn't much care. It just assumes you're stabbing Pete, and gives Pete an injury based on the combat system. The other players, however, do get to see that message and (since the game is RP enforced) for the most part they do respond appropriately. Stabbing Pete stealthily might lead to a scene where the other PCs run up to Pete to check what's wrong and why he collapsed, while stabbing him obviously might lead to them drawing their weapons. In both cases the end result might be the same (or it might not...) - but the social roleplay would be different.

(It also means we have future options. At any point we could add a "stealth attack" option, where if you stab silently/secretly/stealthily/hiddenly/etc. the system might roll to see how stealthy you are, and not describe the attack to any witnesses if you rolled well enough. Because the players are already using commands like this, we wouldn't even have to announce the new system or give a list of commands, the players that are roleplaying would just discover it.)

Precisely. It also helps in more normal communication. You can use actions to "speak for you"
Instead of saying "Go away! I don't like you" you might: threateningly loom, "I think you should leave" or shrilly scream, "Go away!" or nervously stutter, "Go away! I don't like you" - all giving the same answer, but giving a lot more information about the sort of character you're playing.

Giving the players easy tools to use when expressing their character helps make the game a lot richer. Staff created content is never going to be as rich as the social interactions that you can have with real human-controlled characters - so we should do what we can to make those social interactions as interesting as possible.

I didn't.

When I was new to MUDs, I stumbled across a webpage about a game world, and was kind of intrigued. I found out that there is this "text game thing called a mud" - found mud connector, and tried out about twenty muds. I was pretty overwhelmed by them all, characters coming and going, combat systems, NPCs that walk in and attack you, giant cities to get lost in. It was too much for a raw newbie.

Then I came across Castle Marrach at Skotos - which had this interface. I found it much more intuitive, instead of worrying about learning commands I could "type what I wanted my character to do" and most of the time that worked. I also loved being able to type things like "run my hand through my hair" and see something appear on the screen ("You run your hands through your untidy brown hair") - Castle Marrach had a small world, with lots of players, and no creatures to kill... which means everyone I ran into was ready to roleplay rather than distracted killing orcs - and since it was social, I didn't have to worry as much about learning commands.

I'm not saying that Castle Marrach was a better or worse game than the others that I tried out - but for me, I'd come from a tabletop roleplaying background, so I wanted a story, not a combat simulator. Marrach was simple enough to let me get my foot in the door.

When building Ironclaw Online, I wanted to focus heavily on social interactions - I wanted to make a political game - so this same game engine seemed like the right choice to me. I know it's on an LPC base, but I'm not sure how much Skotos has customized it, or if that's how it behaves "out of the box."

So long ramble that basically comes down to "I copied it from a MUD I played"

Exactly.
This isn't too hard to code in, most games have a specific command that says "I'm attacking you now" which the NPCs could react to.

What is more interesting to me, and much harder, is for the NPCs to spot that a fight is *going* to break out, and react to that. Maybe their idle chatter dies down, they start watching the PCs more carefully. One might tell the PCs to calm down, or suggest they count to ten. Another might go to summon the guards in anticipation.

Having said all that, Ironclaw Online doesn't actually have NPCs that react to fights in the street. (Yes, I know, I'm all talk about how we can do this, but haven't done it yet.... ) - mostly that's because we've just upgraded our combat system, and I haven't gotten around to writing this yet.

In our case, I'm probably just going to keep things simple, if you have a fight in the streets, there is a percentage chance that the NPCs report the crime. Depending where you fight, the percentage chance is different. The reason for that is because we have a crime system already, where the players can investigate, gather evidence, gather testimonies from other characters, and all that. So I wouldn't want the NPCs to take over too much from that. Being able to question the NPCs and get information like "Peter hit first" or "John used a weapon, while Peter didn't" would certainly contribute to the player's abilities to investigate the crimes, though.

(And add a social aspect. Do you use a weapon in a fight, or just your fists? In a non-social situation, you'd "play the game" and use the most effective weapon, but in a social situation, the guards might react differently to you if you pulled a deadly weapon in a brawl)

I probably *will* add NPCs that react to fights, but only ones directed by other players. For example, a guild might be able to hire NPC guards, and give those guards orders like "break up all fights" or "don't let anyone through this door" - and those guards would react to fights by defending guild members, or similar. But I want that to be something that someone in-game has gone to effort to put a guard there. A blacksmith walking past in the street shouldn't do more than run off and report the crime at most. That way events in the game are more directly the results of the player's actions, rather than the "simulated environment" - in a more solo, or combat-related game, NPCs leaping into the fight would make more sense.

Indeed.
This gets tricky, though... how much information are you going to store? Every player is doing multiple "actions" while roleplaying, since every sentence is basically an action.

So it's not hard for the characters to react to things that are happening - for example, for every aggressive-looking action they could become slightly more concerned, while every calm action could make them less concerned - we only have to process and record how concerned the NPC is. To question them, we need them to remember a history of everything that was done. A much bigger task, but certainly possible, especially if they watch for specific things, like they only remember aggressive actions. Or only remember physical actions. They they could say things like "Peter yelled at John" and "John pushed Peter" without having to remember things like "Peter wiped his nose with his hand"

You can't find an engine already written? Spend your effort in building the game rather than reinventing a wheel?
(Of course, if you invent a *new* type of wheel, then that's worthwhile...)