Emergent Narrative

[darkpatriot]

I have always wanted CRPGs to become closer to what tabletop roleplaying is. The experience will never be the same of course and the two mediums have differences in the experience they offer. Tabletop will always have extreme trouble handling any sort of action based gameplay (or even extensive number crunching without slowing gameplay to a crawl) and consoles/computers will always have trouble replicating the social aspect of tabletop (although games like NWN or games with splitscreen coop have achieved some success).

The main advantage tabletop gaming has always had over CRPGs is the ability to adapt and react to the players actions through the use of a Game Master/Referee. In all my years GMing/playing that has been one of the key things that makes it enjoyable. Especially when you follow a more free form style of roleplaying that isn’t based off of set plots and adventures. I’ve always considered my pie in the sky CRPG to be one that is able to do that. One that is able to establish an emergent narrative based around the players actions and goals.

I have thought a lot about how to do make my dream CRPG over the years. My Ideas get revised a lot as I play/learn about different games. A lot of older games/indie games have had more influence on my ideas (Darklands and Dwarf Fortress in particular) than the modern AAA or AA games.

Templated individual quests plugged into templated story arcs are the way that I believe can achieve this. An Individual quest would be something simple like get an object, deliver an object, get information, persuade someone etc… Something that is very simple in its purpose and is templated in ways like who is the quest giver, what is the objective, and what opposition is there (if any). The individual quests can then be plugged into a larger story arc. For example a story arc could consist of quests to retrieve a number of objects and then to have them made into a powerful artifact.

That is a very simple example and I’m sure the idea is nothing that hasn’t been thought of before but the templated story arc gives you flexibility to respond to what the player does and even allows them to fail quests but still progress the story. Say for example all of your pieces of artifact are initially locked away deep in underground dungeon locations for safekeeping. If the player is able to investigate and get to them quickly it is simple dungeon crawling. But what if the player is dawdling and doing other things or a faction opposed to the player has caught wind of the player’s plans and recovers one of the pieces first. The quest for the recovery of the piece would then involve discovering where that faction has taken it and retrieving it from them. A magical or crafting inclined player might be able to follow an alternate quest of recreating the piece needed or jury rigging some way to make it work without that piece.

What is used to fill the templates can be based off the player’s previous actions and decisions. The opponents they face can be pulled from things the player has interacted before such as reoccurring opponents or loose ends from previous experiences. The same thing can be done for quest givers and helpers. Rewards can be made so the player has an interest in doing the quests and penalties for not doing/failing the quests can threaten things the player has a positive interest in.

You could even have story arcs plug into each other like a story arc about slaying some terrible beast that needs a specific weapon/artifact could plug our example story arc in the place of retrieving the weapon/artifact.

These templates would have to interact with game mechanics as much as possible to help provide reactivity to the player actions. A faction system is obviously a must for tracking who likes the player and who dislikes them. Who will be interested in opposing them and who will be interested in providing them quests. You can also have quite a few story arcs involving factions. Story arcs to try and destroy a faction. Story arcs to increase a factions influence. Gaining a faction’s favor being part of another story arc.

Some form of world simulation would be necessary to help provide pieces to plug into the quest/story arc templates. It would also make the world not seem like it is just waiting for the player to interact with it. I don’t think it would need to be very in depth. Just enough so that the player can see that some things are happening independently of them. You would have to be careful not to simulate too much and making the player feel like they aren’t really impacting things.

Another game mechanic that would be useful would be some sort of investigation mechanic. To help determine what kind of information you are able to get as opposed to the quest giver telling you everything you need to know. It could encompass things like research, social interaction, and spying/thieving. If it were set up as some kind of game mechanic as opposed to individual quests doing that it could provide the player more options/flexibility on how they want to handle something and fewer things that need to be specifically written.

Of course the problem with templated/randomized quests as they have been used in the past is usually that they wind up feeling repetitive and/or nonsensical and disjointed. This is what I think is what would be the hardest part in implementing some kind of system like this. I think if you spend the time to make enough templated story arcs and quests that interact well with each other you can provide enough things to do that it doesn’t feel to repetitive. At least as much time as you would have spent making individual quests in a more traditional CRPG. Reducing the nonsensical and disjointedness will be a lot harder.

I think you would have to drop traditional dialogue. Trying to have some system generate specifically what everyone is saying would always seem disjointed and off. If you instead went the Darklands route of presenting a description of the scene and the choices it would feel a lot more cohesive. You could still use snippets of dialogue in the descriptions but it wouldn’t be the primary conveyer of information. Doing it that way will allow the players imagination to fill in gaps. It would still be a lot of work to make the generated descriptions not feel repetitive and disjointed but much easier than generating a dialogue.

It would also be helpful to have game mechanics in place that allow the player to dig deeper and get more information from a scene (provided they have the skills in place to do it). This should help with the repetition since it makes it more like a game mechanic and people tend to notice repetition in game mechanics less than in specific descriptions.

I’d be interested in hearing the opinions and ideas of such a prestigious group as one that resides on this forum.

 

[thesoup]

I may or may not read this wall of text later.

 

[CrustyBot]

IIRC, this is exactly what Skyrim's Majestic Radiant Story is supposed to do.

But in regards to emergent narrative, I'd personally like to see less work done on the quest generation side, but in the actual quest itself using game mechanics and triggers.

You give the player a goal, but then the gameworld provides natural challenges which vary from playthrough to playthrough. For example, the quest is Steal Item X from NPC Y.

The NPC is a nobleman and the item is stashed in the dude's house, so this presents different ways to get the item. If you had universal disposition mechanics or even faction mechanics, you could either talk your way into his house (if friendly), or you could talk to the thieves to find a secret entrance into house (if hostile/nonfriendly). Or you could simply break in while no one's around. Or you could butcher the nobleman. Because of the mechanics already in place, doing any of the above would require certain actions to have been undertaken in the past.

You could also tie law and order mechanics to this. This is outside of barebones crime mechanics. Wiping out crime in the city through a series of quests beforehand endears you to the average citizen (increasing disposition of the nobleman), but makes the thieves hate you (decreasing theirs and closing out the option to ask them for help). Aside from that, it could also dictate a series of random encounters between thieves, guards, pickpockets, NPCs, etc. Which in turn, affects disposition/fame/factional mechanics if you choose to get involved.

If you had other mechanics, such as an economic/wealth system, you could open up another option. If you use an economic system to grade the city's general wealth (which changes depending on how you resolve certain quests or interact with merchants, etc), it opens up the option to simply buy the item from the NPC, with the price being determined by your disposition levels with him and success being determined by checking a Mercantile/Barter Skill against the city's general wealth (if the city is rich, the check level is higher/harder, if poor, it's lower/easier).

Because they are global mechanics, whatever you do also connects back to them, and possibly affects quests and interactions in the future. The obvious example is if you choose to butcher the nobleman and take his item.

There's plenty more that could be done after that, too.

Granted, that's really difficult to structure and design so I won't expect that from AAA RPG developers but ideas like that (global mechanics interacting with each other to provide unique experiences) seem to work well for Grand Strategy games. So maybe that's my advice, look to the Grand Strategy genre for ideas on how to do Emergent Narrative. I can certainly tell you that no two campaigns of Total War ever feel exactly the same.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I have always wanted CRPGs to become closer to what tabletop roleplaying is.

Stopped reading there...

 

[Tigranes]

In relation to CrustyBot's suggestion, it might even work more bluntly as a points-based reputation-and-benefits system; i.e. you don't earn your way through a faction to leadership/greatness through a pre-set questline or even perform X number of quests, a la TES; you have a faction reputation value that is visible numerically or as categories (FO:NV-like) and you 'spend' reputation to get favours. E.g. imagine a BG2-like major quest to earn X amount of money, and that money is actually pretty hard to come by in the gameworld. You could expend your street cred with the thieves' guild to allow you to rob houses (get them to pay the guards to look the other way, or to leave back doors open for you, or simply to purchase maps and information). Sometimes you could do this by paying them instead, but not for bigger favours, and you'd need some cred for them to even sell to you anyway. The counterpart would be that if you were to try and rob alone, houses are locked pretty tight, guards are a lot more active than they typically are in RPGs, and you might even encounter Thieves' Guild thieves during robberies that try to kill you, etc. So you might then have to choose to do distasteful things for the guild just so you can use their resources to rob, earn $. Alternatively, you'd earn cred with other guilds that could help you, or even help the guards bring down the guild, and use that cred for other things. I imagine something like that would work best in games in the mold of Darklands or even TES, i.e. a big world full of 'empty' characters (i.e. easily substitutable one-dimensional characters that fill roles) rather than carefully crafted, smaller worlds where individual NPCs matter. It would contribute to a sandbox way of solving quests that actually have medium-term consequences - i.e. nonlinearity not only in how you solve each quest, but connections across how you solve various quests as a whole, and what sort of quest solutions that opens /closes for you in the future.

 

[Alex]

Hi Darkpatriot!

I would love to see the kind of game you propose. To me, what you seem to be getting at is picking up from where Daggerfall left off. Make good systems that manage to create interesting situations from the pieces inside of the game world itself, and make those situations so that many different skills can be used.

I don't have much to add to what you propose, except that you might want to check Chris Crawford's Storytron. He is kind of phasing out his original project into something that doesn't seem all that interesting to me, but it is still worthwhile to visit his site to see how he handled conversations and commands with an inverse parser in the old Storytron.

Also, I think the secret of making a game using these "templates" as you call them enjoyable is to make them unique. Make sure they have lots of context sensitive information. For example, if npc B wants to waylay npc A (with the player possibly coming in the behalf of either or neither), then npc B will usually spy on A. If he is able to find a good isolated spot in A's routine, he will set up the ambush there. If he isn't, he might try to trick A into going out of town, or create a commotion somewhere else in the city while he surprises A, depending on his resources. If A has bodyguards, then B's plans need to be even more complex. If B is a necromancer, then B will spy and attack A through necromancy. If B is Zerk, the trapmaster, then he will try to turn A's house into a huge, deadly puzzle. And so on.

All in all, it is probably a lot of work, but I do think it could end up a great game.

 

[zeitgeist]

But in regards to emergent narrative, I'd personally like to see less work done on the quest generation side, but in the actual quest itself using game mechanics and triggers.

And this is pretty much the key - have the game mechanics be complex enough, and the gameworld be interactive enough, and the "emergent narrative" writes itself.

 

[MonkeyLancer]

Along the ideas of what Crustybot and Tigranes was saying, I love the idea of factions taking initiative of their own and based on your standing with them (ala -10 to +10 rep maybe) the AI would decide to do a list of possible things to you like a strategy game.

 

[Skittles]

Have you ever played chess? That's the epitome of emergent narrative for me. Nothing happens in the game that doesn't have an internal logic, that doesn't serve the ultimate outcome or objective of the game. No-one has a story planned or even does things for story reasons--that would be the epitome of shitty writing and what we call LARPing here--it's all to accomplish specific objectives.

While there's a place for the conversation happening in this thread in describing games that attempt to simulate a world, don't forget that a single game of chess has the real meat of 'emergent narrative.'

 

[Davaris]

.....

I have been thinking along similar lines for a couple of years, even toying with the idea of symbolic dialogue and then discarding it. My solution if I ever implemented it, would be to create a random generator, similar to what you describe, that spits out logically correct scripts and then I'd go in and modify them to make the game meaningful.

Random generated quest games feel dead to me. However if you blend man and machine, you might be able to build something that is both huge and enjoyable.

 

[Davaris]

I don't have much to add to what you propose, except that you might want to check Chris Crawford's Storytron. He is kind of phasing out his original project into something that doesn't seem all that interesting to me, but it is still worthwhile to visit his site to see how he handled conversations and commands with an inverse parser in the old Storytron.

I sent him several emails over the years, asking him to turn Storytron into a plugin that devs can use in their games anyway they see fit. As he never replies, I assume he is too much of a purist to do it.

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS IN TERMS OF CRPGS I SEE FALLOUT AND ARCANUM AS DOING THE BEST AT THIS TYPE WITH THE MAIN LIMITATION THAT SOME ACTIONS OR DIALOGISS ARE LIMITED BT CHARACTER STATS

I FEEL THAT THAT ABOVE REPRESENTS WHAT FALLOUT AND ARCANUM AND TO A LESSERT EXCTENT PST WANTED TO DO WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE NARRATIVE THEY WANTED TO EXPRESS IN THESE GAMES AGAIN EMPHASIZEING FALLOUT AND ARCANUME MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS ARE AVAIULABLE GIVEN A PLAYERS ABILTIES

SADLY THIS BRANCH OF GAMING SEEMS DEAD I THINK COMBINING THE WORLD INTERAVTIVITY OF ULTIMA AND SAY MORROWIND WITH THE CHARACTER AND DIALOGUE SKILLS OF FALLOUT OR ARCANUM WOULD BE SOMETHING BEYOND WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED IN CRPG GAMING SO FAR

I THINK DEVS SHOULD AT LEAST EQUAL BENCHMARKS OF THE PAST BEFORE WE CAME DREAM ABOUT NEWER SHIT

 

[shihonage]

I've gone into more in-depth development of such emergent systems... on paper, mostly. Tied to a specific project - my third.

It will have true emergent narrative of the kind described here. It will not be a CRPG, however, and not an RTS, and not a CRPG-RTS, but a fresh experience with a setting and interface that play well with its mechanics.

It will be heavily stat-based. It will make people think, it will make them attached to their "story", generated entirely by them, it will make them lose sleep obsessing over what they could've done differently.

And of course I'll put in co-op play from the ground up. Just two players, most likely.

 

[Stinger]

I don't know how serious Blobert is but I do think Fallout 1, Arcanum and Fallout New Vegas all do this to varying extents.

Since these games have open ended quest design and well structured but not limiting rulesets it allows for quests and story arcs to be solved in all sorts of different ways.

One Vault Dweller might get hold of the water chip and do things in the more 'classic' order while another player might dick around and accidentally open the secret door to the cathedral which would lead to a very different type of storyline.

iirc Arcanum allowed you to use a spell that resurrects the dead in actual questlines like questioning a dead man on who murdered him or killing people and bringing back their ghosts to interrogate them which was pretty crazy.

Fallout New Vegas allows the main storyline to branch fairly significantly into 4 different paths and also combines Fallout 1's open world aspect to allow the player to make their own story and unlike Bethesda games this isn't 'forging your own path' in a majestic LARPing sense but in a way that the game actually acknowledges and incorporates into the game/story.

The thing about Emergent Narrative is how much effort needs to be committed to this and whether most people really appreciate it. There's plenty of people who don't like choices because it 'cuts out' content and would rather play Skyrim because you can become the leader of all guilds and become the master of all skills and do all quests in a single run.

And do you commit to branching all your quests so that even the pacifist can do the random Kill 6 bugs quest and risk spreading your resources thin or creating a small focused group of quests and risk the game being considered short and not as huge as other games which would make many people think it 'sucks' for being too short?

 

[Giauz Ragnacock]

Ah, but my understanding of PnP is that each play session (perhaps an entire quest module) is like if you bought a different CRPG not this you can do whatever you want and the game will keep building itself business.

Anyways, even if this 'Unlimited CRPG' were in fully realized existence it would begin to feel stale eventually and people will wonder why the industry doesn't make some more games like it. That last part is the very foundation of the Codex that, "these older games are so awesome I still play them about 2-6 times a year, but why doesn't anyone make some more games like them?"

My other concern is that an 'Unlimited CRPG' would probably be a shoddily made bugfest (no matter who makes it unless computers suddenly get perfect parts that don't screw up on instrutions and programming languages become much more brief and readable for people to easily search for their screw-ups). All that aside, the game could still suck (sort of like the division of people who love Dwarf Fortress/ feel it is an unplayable mess).

 

[mondblut]

BROS IN TERMS OF CRPGS I SEE FALLOUT AND ARCANUM AS DOING THE BEST AT THIS TYPE WITH THE MAIN LIMITATION THAT SOME ACTIONS OR DIALOGISS ARE LIMITED BT CHARACTER STATS

Fallout and Arcanum are about as much "emergent" as final fantasy is. LOL @ PST.

Google "Darklands" or "Daggerfall" for some examples of what OP spoke about.

 

[sser]

Have you ever played chess? That's the epitome of emergent narrative for me. Nothing happens in the game that doesn't have an internal logic, that doesn't serve the ultimate outcome or objective of the game. No-one has a story planned or even does things for story reasons--that would be the epitome of shitty writing and what we call LARPing here--it's all to accomplish specific objectives.

While there's a place for the conversation happening in this thread in describing games that attempt to simulate a world, don't forget that a single game of chess has the real meat of 'emergent narrative.'

Isn't high-level chess is a game of memory? I've read and heard that chess has gotten more static and less creative as the computer programs allow so much training that was never there before.

 

[BLOBERT]

Fallout and Arcanum are about as much "emergent" as final fantasy is. LOL @ PST.

Google "Darklands" or "Daggerfall" for some examples of what OP spoke about.

BRO DID YOU EVEN READ THE OP WALL OF TEXT!!!1?

TOPIC SAYS EMERGENT BUT HE SEEMS TO DESCRIBE FREE FORM PROBLEM SOLVING AND DIFFERNT OUTCOMES TOQ UESTS

TRULY EMERGENT GAMING WILL RELY HEAVILY ON CHOICES AND CONSEQUENCES RATHER THAN PASS OR FAIL

 

[Captain Shrek]

Stopped reading there...

 

[mondblut]

BRO DID YOU EVEN READ THE OP WALL OF TEXT!!!1?

TOPIC SAYS EMERGENT BUT HE SEEMS TO DESCRIBE FREE FORM PROBLEM SOLVING AND DIFFERNT OUTCOMES TOQ UESTS

TRULY EMERGENT GAMING WILL RELY HEAVILY ON CHOICES AND CONSEQUENCES RATHER THAN PASS OR FAIL

First of all, he describes procedurally generated content, not scripted shit.

"I think you would have to drop traditional dialogue.", yeah, it has Fallout and PST written all over it

As for free-form problem solving and different outcomes to quests, that was around since 1985. Bash the door if you're fighter or cast knock if you're mage. Help hobgoblins against ogres or kill them both. That's kinda implied when someone spells ar-pee-gee.

 

[BLOBERT]

BRO YOU ARE A ONE TRACK BRO YEAH I GET WHAT YOU ARE SAYING BUT HE GOES BEYOND THAT POINT

YES HE GOES INTO PROCEDURE SHIT AND YES HE SAYS NO DIALOGUE

BUT

That is a very simple example and I’m sure the idea is nothing that hasn’t been thought of before but the templated story arc gives you flexibility to respond to what the player does and even allows them to fail quests but still progress the story. Say for example all of your pieces of artifact are initially locked away deep in underground dungeon locations for safekeeping. If the player is able to investigate and get to them quickly it is simple dungeon crawling. But what if the player is dawdling and doing other things or a faction opposed to the player has caught wind of the player’s plans and recovers one of the pieces first. The quest for the recovery of the piece would then involve discovering where that faction has taken it and retrieving it from them. A magical or crafting inclined player might be able to follow an alternate quest of recreating the piece needed or jury rigging some way to make it work without that piece.

What is used to fill the templates can be based off the player’s previous actions and decisions. The opponents they face can be pulled from things the player has interacted before such as reoccurring opponents or loose ends from previous experiences. The same thing can be done for quest givers and helpers. Rewards can be made so the player has an interest in doing the quests and penalties for not doing/failing the quests can threaten things the player has a positive interest in.

THIS SHIT HAS FALLOUT AND ARCANUM WRITTEN ALL OVER IT THOUGH NOT PROCEDURALLY GENERATED

DOING SUCH INTERACTION WITH RANDOM QUESTS AND SHIT I THINK WOULD TONS AND TONS OF EFFORT

 

[ChristofferC]

Stopped reading there...

 

[Phelot]

Very nice post, Darkpatriot.


I know it isn't the sort of game you'd associate with PnP and what the OP is talking about, but I thought that Mount & Blade had the potential for some cool quests that are randomized or time sensitive.

Using the OP's scenario of assembling parts for some artifact, it'd be a pretty fun challenge trying to do so in a big sandbox like world with warring kingdoms.

Imagine Part A is on some unknowing caravan's cart and you'd have to track down where it's headed using your tracking skill and/or by interviewing merchants in the city it just left. Once you catch up to it, you can either attack it, barter for the part, or, should you fail to catch it in time, maybe it falls into the hands of a powerful foe or maybe it's sold to a merchant that knows how valuable it is and so you either need to pay extreme amounts of money for it, or complete a quest for THAT merchant.

Similar such things for the other parts. Maybe one is stuck in a besieged castle, etc.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, M&B's basic reputation system seems like an easy solution to either open up or shut off different routes to complete different quests. Pretty simple too. Attack the above mentioned caravan and the factions that hold other parts will increase security, etc etc.

 

[mondblut]

BUT

(snip)

THIS SHIT HAS FALLOUT AND ARCANUM WRITTEN ALL OVER IT

Are you on meds or something? The part you quoted retells the *maps* mechanics from Wizardry 7, nothing more, nothing less. Last time I checked, none of post-1993 RPGs featured proactive factions whose own bands of adventurers would recover quest items if the player tarried for too long. Except for Grimoire, but even there it didn't actually work in the betas. Why don't you pull Tim Cain's cock out of your mouth for a second and try to play something made before 1997 for a change?

DOING SUCH INTERACTION WITH RANDOM QUESTS AND SHIT I THINK WOULD TONS AND TONS OF EFFORT

No shit, Sherlock. That's why such a game was never made and most likely never will be.

 

[BLOBERT]

BRO LOLOLOLOL I PLAYED OLDER GAMES WHEN THEY CAME OUT

JUST BECAUSE YOUVE GOT SOME WIRED PROBLEMS WITH TIM CAIN OR HIS PENIS ISNT MY FAULT JESUS CHRIST

ANYWAYS I GET WHERE YOU ARE GOING AND I CANT THINK OF GOOD EXAMPLES FROM FALLOUT OR ARCANUM ALTHOUGH I THINK THAT STYLE OF GAME WOULD SUIT MORE EMERGENT SHIT AND IS A NATURAL EXTENSION OF IT

PERHAPS A BETTER EXAMPLE IS SPACE RANGERS 2 IN TERMS OF RANDOM CONTENT AND AN ACTIVE OPPOSING FACTION

BRO I NEVER DID GET AROUND TO DARKLANDS I PLAYED THE GOLDBOX GAMES ULTIMAS WIZARDRIES A LITTLE MIGHT AND MAGIC AND THIS TYPE OF SHIT WAS ALMOST NONEXISTANT IF I REMEMBER RIGHT