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[NW_Kohaku]

Spoiler: EEK! Text! Give me a TL;DR version (click to show/hide)

For those who want a more concise version:

When talking to others, you should be able to select a Alpha Protocol/Mass Effect-style "conversation stance" that makes you aggressive and intimidating or consoling and accomidating or some other attitude when trying to get information out of or manipulate villagers and villains.

Adventurers should have personality scores just like dwarves in Fortress Mode do, but it should be based upon how the Adventurer acts, and built up like a "karma meter" for how angry/immodest/trusting/etc. your character is.  This is built up by your conversation stances.

When talking to characters, your personality should matter, and there should be personality clashes.

With the jump to 0.34.0x, I've recently taken to exploring Adventure Mode seriously for the first time.  I enjoyed the new cities and some of the new features, but the game still felt extremely hollow and lifeless.  There are bugs partly to blame and a huge list of features-to-be-implemented to blame for that, of course, but a recurring problem I found kept nagging at me, as well, and it is one that I don't think is going to be addressed with what is being planned.

Spoiler: The First Problem I wish to solve (click to show/hide)

That is, my character feels like a hollow cardboard cutout prop placed down to serve as my personal sockpuppet, and not a character in a story with their own background and motivations.  The background part might be filled in by the later additions of historical characterness, but the motivations don't seem like they ever will. 

This is an idea I've actually brought up on the boards of several different sandbox RPGs with "hollow" main characters, as well.  To take up The Elder Scrolls for example, many players report that they gradually start to realize that they aren't so much marching around their own personal customized heroic character in a fantasy as much as a suit of armor who completes quests for more loot. 

In TES, you see complaints on the boards about how there are basically two, maybe three choices, at most - complete a quest just for the money, maybe with a choice between doing it the "good" or "EEEEEEEEVIL" way, or mostly, your other option is simply to not do the quest at all.  Offered a quest to murder someone for pay?  Your options are either to say yes or no, not to be indignant or call the guard and report the hitman-hirer because you believe in law-and-order.  It's just, do you want money? 

The idea behind this suggestion is to give player characters a personality and motivation based not upon some random historical context that might be a straight-jacket for players (although that would not be too bad as a starting point), but by judging players upon their actual actions.

Spoiler: The second Problem I wish to solve (click to show/hide)

There is another major concern I want to address with this suggestion:  That much of the non-combat aspects of Adventurer Mode will be... boring.  As in, they'll be something you will be capable of doing by macro, and there will be no reason not to do them by macro.

I'm thinking more along the lines of something like setting up your own farm, or shop, or being a merchant, who tries to take advantage of the expansiveness of the game's mechanics to try playing some sort of "Adventurer" who doesn't kill things.

The problem I foresee is that, in the absence of some sort of "minigame" that most games put into such non-combat situations, the game will basically make all the skills that come in from Fortress Mode as they are brought in be nothing more than the way that butchery works - you press a button when you have the materials in your hands, and stuff is spit out.

While quick and functional, it's also dead boring.  It's great and all to make a game have the ability to let you live your life as a peaceful carpenter instead of a grand adventurer, but if there is no meat to the system, then there isn't much point, and there isn't much to be proud of in such a system.

I know that having a slew of mini-games is not exactly the sort of game DF is really made for, however, there should be ways to put at least some sort of player skill and thought into relatively mundane actions that don't include pure tedium.  Puzzle Pirates is the sort of game that really is made for nothing but mini-games, which DF probably shouldn't even try to reach (where raising sails is a Dr. Mario style of game, and bilge pumping is Bejeweled), but there is something to be learned from how they make each individual thing, including the likes of brewing or blacksmithing into their own game so that they can be fun to play, even just for their own sake, even as they provide some useful function towards achieving longer-term goals.

This suggestion tries to lay down some groundwork for those more tricky and difficult-to-make-interesting jobs by creating a "mini-game" of sorts out of conversations. 

Of course, unlike Puzzle Pirates, where the mood is cartoonish to begin with, Dwarf Fortress needs to maintain its relatively gritty, life is cheap, yet over-the-top, an-elephant-just-ate-my-leg-so-I'm-learning-to-swordfight-on-crutches atmosphere.

The following are the most relevant already-planned aspects of the game:

Most relevantly, the Personality And Needs Rewrite, as part of "release 8" would be the foundational model for this suggestion.

Spoiler: Old Devpages (click to show/hide)

Bloat201, CONVERSATION UTTERANCE BUILDERS, (Future): When asking specific questions or making statements, much like wrestling, you could set specific parameters. You could set a topic and a question word or your topic and intention and a tone.

Bloat202, CONVERSATION PLEASANTRIES, (Future): Have random pleasantries with random responses.

Bloat374, CONVERSATION SKILLS IN ADVENTURE MODE, (Future): With the proper skills, you should be able to judge the mood of people you are talking to in finer and finer degrees. You should also be able to exercise the various conversation skills that can be used in dwarf mode.

Bloat375, PRIVACY AND ADVENTURE MODE CONVERSATIONS, (Future): Depending on personality scores, people you come up to on the street might not want to talk to you about personal matters when they don't know you.

The Proposed Solution:

Spoiler: Conversation Stances and Adventurer Personality (click to show/hide)

The first thing I would like to see done is taking that "Utterance Builder" concept taken and expanded upon.

That is, in a style somewhat similar to Alpha Protocol or Mass Effect, every response to any given situation should involve a "conversation stance", where you apply some sort of body language, tone, or sheer personal "aura" of some mood or another to influence characters when you talk to them.  This combines with the eventual Personality Rewrites for NPCs and the player character judgment of NPC personalities to make specific types of personalities react better or worse to different types of conversation stances. 

Hence, you might get far intimidating slightly nervous people, but extremely shy people might just clam up in a total panic if you are too intimidating.  You might be able to flatter proud people into saying too much or feeling more comfortable around you. 

How you go about doing this, however, can lead to a sort of player "karma" for how they have acted.

In most RPGs, you are typically judged along only one or two axis of morality or personality.  There is one series of RPGs (Growlanzer) I remember playing, however, that had a much more complex system, where they gave you a flood of multiple choice responses to virtually every situation your character found himself in.  You step out of a cave, and a monster knocks a boulder down, and it's rolling towards you and your party - do you (A) Scream "AAAAH! BOULDER! AAAAH" (B) Order "Everyone to the sides!" or (C) Just dodge it silently?  Nothing in the plot actually changes for the decision you make at that point, but what you pick changes different aspects of your personality karma.  You are judged as being either "Hotheaded" vs. "Cold", as well as "Optimistic" vs. "Pessimistic", "Sarcastic" vs. "Forthright", "Cautious" vs. "Reckless", and even has a gauge for whether you have been a ladies man and one for if you've been showing some "flamboyant" tendencies (and there are ending pairings for male characters, if you choose to go that route...)

Putting this sort of karma system into DF, however, could be as easy as simply using the personality traits that are present in all the dwarves already, and modifying them for use with Adventurers themselves.  (Although some additional personality traits or invisible karma gauges might be worth adding in.)  Player characters who use aggressive tactics and frequently bully the peasants into doing what they want, and act with general rashness tick their ANGER personality trait upwards in-play as they act. 

The game should probably use a more sophisticated "experience" counter for ticking these personality traits upwards and downwards, however, as a single point up or down per time you act aggressively will wind up with all players quickly having extreme personalities.   

If conversation stances are more nuanced than a simply "be aggressive" stance, for example, by letting you set some sort of slider or "only be 40% aggressive" meter, then this would also prevent players from going to too much of extremes.  Players that leave themselves on 40% aggressive sliders will only go up to 70 on the anger meter.

PCs who flip between neutral and extreme aggressive stances or between aggressive and passive stances frequently should take more and more "experience" in being aggressive to reach the higher levels of aggression, so that your personality becomes more "fixed" over time as you play.  That way, running into a few people whom aggression is particularly effective against and using it on them a few times in a row won't make a mess of a personality trend you've already clearly established. 

This personality profile your character generates should be judged by the characters you meet, who will also be judging you by your actions (trying to judge your character, themselves), as well as by your reputation (if you have been building relationships with people in their village or faction, or are famous). 

A cold, rational type who keeps their emotions veiled might be inherently distrusted by the warm, gregarious types, because they will suspect anyone whose emotions they can't see as being someone with something to hide.  That same cold, rational type, however, might simply look down upon and disdain those who are "overly emotional" in their eyes.

Spoiler: Personality/Stance Limits (click to show/hide)

One other feature of Growlanser worth emulating is that many of the multiple choice options actually had personality pre-requisites to select.  That is, if you were usually a taciturn, brusque, or even shy sort of person, you are simply unable to select the flowery, emotional speech types of options. 

If we are attaching stances to personality traits, and making a "slider" or "percentage" type of stance set, then adventurers might not be able to be, say, more than 30% more or less aggressive than their own ANGER stat is.  Hence, an adventurer with more than 80% ANGER personality traits would always be at least a little angry.

Some personality traits or skills, like being a smooth liar or better conversationalist or the sort, might give you greater leeway.

In this way, personality profiles can be somewhat binding, and players can't completely abandon their previous choices like water under the bridge, but something that they have to gradually work back down to neutral areas.

Spoiler: Overall Karma (click to show/hide)

This "what you say" karma can be combined with a "what you do" karma, so that the game might profile your player character on whether they are primarily hunting down the night beasts, or going into goblin camps and slaugthering every man, woman, and child, you have pillaged and destroyed even towns of sentients of your own species, whether you have lived a relatively peaceful life as a farmer, or if you just randomly murder every random critter in the countryside that comes within reach.

The game should try to profile what adventurer roles you've been taking up, and add that to your personality profiling in order to get a better sense of what sort of character you are, and the more famous you become, the more this idea of what sort of person you are travels with you (although you might try to purposefully disguise exactly what sort of person you are in the tales...)

Spoiler: The value in the game reacting to player choice (click to show/hide)

A major deal-breaker in the verisimilitude that the game has strived so hard to create is that the player feels so far removed from the game around them, and that they don't feel as if their character is actually a part of the world, more of an alien visiting and abusing the physics of the world. 

One of the things I remember feeling in the world was that I was actually a little sad when I found and killed an unusual vampire in a hamlet.  It was because I had walked through several dozen hamlets before this that had absolutely nothing interesting in them.  There was a vampire in this one.  That made it unique and special.  That was a unique character compared to the endless sea of dreariness and emotionless gray goop from a procedural generator.  Then I killed that person, and there was no more island in the sea. 

One of the problems with making a world where you can only interact with the notable characters by killing them is that it winds up where you have an entropic decay where your objective is to find the only interesting things in the world... and then remove them from the world.  Your character is only as interesting as the things they have killed.  Not interesting for themselves, but only for the interesting things they have removed from the world.

It's... rather bleak and depressing.

To make the game react to the player, and specifically react to the player because of the personality they have chosen to adopt will work far more to bring the player down into the game as an average citizen of the world who is part of that larger story, rather than some interloper merely here to wreck that story by killing the people in it.

Sure, some people can live off of making up their own story, but that doesn't mean that the game has to be entirely devoid of emotion, itself.  We might as well just play pretend with legos if we wanted to entirely live in our imagination.  Giving the game some meaningful feedback on the types of people our characters chose to be gives the game a far greater depth of life.

Spoiler: Relationship Types (click to show/hide)

As a quick run-down, there are different types of relationship values that the game should check for this sort of system to work.

First, there should be an overall degree of personality meshing or conflict, which becomes more important the more known that two people become to one another.  Some personalities just don't mesh well, and this is already at least partially implemented, although it needs to be expanded upon, so that players can better understand why people don't like them.  (What traits, specifically, are in conflict.)

Trust - Secondly, most villages have an innate distrust of strangers (especially when strangers might be vampires), so a "trust" meter should be in play, raised the more that a player can leave a good impression upon the people in question.

Impression/Mood - A short-term "happiness" meter for a given meeting or conversation, which can improve the given mood of a character in general, and is required to create bonds of friendship, provided they are known well enough to start being trusted.

Friendship (or Hate if negative/low) - The major reason why friendship and mood should be separate is that it prevents the problems in games like Oblivion, where you can do something someone will really hate (like, say, killing their brother), then using the small-talk chatting to up their favor right back up to max, as if it was all water under the bridge.  If friendship is easy to shatter with betrayal, but harder to build up with small talk, this becomes a less abusable system.

Respect - Especially when you start to become more of a leader and famous figure, or if you just want the children to stop throwing mud at you and laughing as you walk by.  This is more to exist for a "he's/she's a good guy, even though I don't know him personally" type of situation, as well as being important if you own a farm, and want to give orders to your farmhands or the like.

Fear - For the real brutes, there is a difference between being respected or feared.  As Machiavelli says, it's better to be loved than to be feared, but you can't always have both, and the love of average Joes might not be enough to stop them from shivving you in the back if they fear someone else more than they fear you.  So long as you are feared more than you are hated, you should be safe. 

Debt - As in, they "feel in debt to you".  There can be problems if you try to make friends with someone by just constantly throwing gifts at them, or your only way of interacting with them is saving their daughter from the goblins 17 billion times.  Some games make building relationships entirely a matter of just tossing the "like" items at the character every single day until their happiness meter hits max, but Debt should prevent a relationship based entirely upon giving things by making such actions less effective as the characters feel too embarrassed to accept so many gifts.

Romance - Obviously, for the "get married and have kids" types of deals.

Familial - For bonds of blood or kinship that go beyond the norm (so that you can have "sworn brothers" of Romance of the Three Kingdom style)

Loyalty - As in, "who will you fight for if you are loyal to two different things that are fighting".  See the next section.

Spoiler: Loyalty Dilemmas (click to show/hide)

Part of the problem with "Loyalty Cascades" is that creatures in this game do not prioritize their loyalties.

Consider if Character A has a relationship with the player character, and the PC goes and kills someone from Character A's hometown.  Character A is suddenly split in their loyalty to the PC and their hometown, and must decide who to side with.  If Character A is, say, the PC's spouse, and they never liked victim B, anyway, maybe they'll side with their spouse over their hometown's justice system. 

But maybe it shouldn't be as simple as a direct comparison of just two "pools" of characters in contrast, and personality should come more into play.  For example, if Character A has a very strong sense of justice, they may feel that their loyalty to justice outweighs their love and loyalty for the PC.

There is further complication to this, however, if you add in the concepts of whether a character is loyal to "the person", "the organization", or "the mission" when they are loyal to a group, however.  Someone might be loyal to their country, but hate their leaders, for example.  Someone might be loyal to their country's stated values, but feel conflicted when their country does not abide by them, and have to face a challenge to what, exactly, it is they are loyal to when they have to decide if they are going to stand up against their country on the basis of values their country no longer abides by.

For example, if Character A values justice, but their spouse, the PC, killed a person from her homeland because that person was a slave-trader, and they are firmly against slavery, even as they are a believer in order and justice, then suddenly, you have a whole host of loyalties colliding with one another in their mind.

Making loyalty complications clear to the player will give a great depth to the characters that the player interacts with in Adventurer mode.

Spoiler: Changing Gears (click to show/hide)

In any system where there is a reward for simply picking the sort of choices that the NPC in question reacts most favorably to, there will be an implicit encouragement to simply be whatever person they think will most please the people they are talking to right at the moment.  "Changing gears", in poker terms, lets you keep opponents on their toes and yourself from committing to any predictable path, and that flexibility means you aren't tied down to any one position.  (A "flip-flopper" in political terms.)  The game should seek to record this sort of behavior, itself.  (Probably in the STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS trait, where the less you change your stances in the face of different personalities, the more straightforward you are.)

Gear-changers should be distrusted by others, although some more than others, so as to prevent some "silver-tongued devils" from always having their way.  ("TRUST" is a good place to look for who is first to distrust the Gear-changers.)

Gear-changing should have its own innate reward (the ability to get anyone you can convince to trust you to like you), as well as its innate difficulty (the innate distrust of someone who sees you are a different person in a different crowd, especially if they are straightforward and firm in their beliefs, themselves, or distrusting by nature), but there is also other reason to give Gear-Changers some benefits and penalties just for having gear-changer karma...

Spoiler: On "Karma Rewards" (click to show/hide)

The exact opposite of the problem with gear-changing, in any system where you reward specific types of karma (such as "fully good karma" or "fully evil karma") you produce the problem of making any player essentially only pick one type of karma that they are going to run with for the entire rest of the game right at the start, essentially making the notion that there is a choice in the matter a lie.  If you tie all of a player's cool power-ups to having just one maxed-out karma meter, then ever picking an "evil" option when you have a "good" character is never a temptation, since it means losing a huge amount of power and effort to get your karma meter maxed out in the first place. 

That isn't to say that having "karma rewards" isn't possible, however.  In that same Growlanzer game that judged you on how hotheaded or coolheaded you are in your decisions, highly hotheaded characters gained a special skill that was basically a powerful smash attack, usable a certain number of times per battle.  Coolheaded characters, however, gained a skill that would give them back a couple uses of some other skill.  No single pair of contradictory personality traits had a major impact on the game, and you could functionally customize some of your skill loadout based upon the personality of the character in question. 

When the game gets into making specific professions more suited to specific personality types, and starts to include different martial arts types to learn, tailoring specific types of martial arts to specific types of personalities (as well as suitability to specific professions), provided no single types of personalities make for "best" loadouts, and they are subtle enough in effect that players don't feel forced into only deciding conversation stances based upon their "class", giving players certain perks for the way in which they have developed their personalities can be an interesting additional system to add to the game, that makes it feel more like their choices in character growth have mattered.

... and I thought this was going to be a short one...

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm going to post in this spot, just in case I need an extra post for room to edit things in.  (I frequently do.)

[Patchy]

Not much of an adventure mode player here, heck it is almost untouched by me. I play df mainly for the fortress mode. Though the growlanser series you cited looks really interesting, and is now one I'm gonna have to try out eventually.

As far as your suggestion goes, it does sound nice. And jus maybe I'd have to give adventure mode an honest try if it is implemented. I've always seen it as a pretty boring kill everything you can until it kills you mode, as there isn't much else to do. Guess you could explore forts you made in it, but you likely already know the layout of them. And judging from your post not much has really changed in that aspect of adventure mode. Anyways, maybe if this does add some meaningful things to do in adventure mode, it'd definately be a plus. I just dunno how hard all this would be to do with the way df is currently setup.

Well good suggestion and maybe some others will have some good thoughts on it as well.

[JasonMel]

If you like games where your character's personality and background are integrated into the story, you'd probably really like interactive fiction. Try games like Spider and Web, Varicella, Photopia, or Savoir Faire. There are hundreds and hundreds more you can play, but those works have some of the less everyman-like player characters. There's a school of thought that says interactive fiction is a better computer-based heir of pen and paper RPG play than actual computer RPGs.

There's a learning curve, but compared to that of DF, it's a speed bump. However, there are games intended for new players, such as Dreamhold, Floatpoint, or Aotearoa.

[NW_Kohaku]

If you like games where your character's personality and background are integrated into the story, you'd probably really like interactive fiction. Try games like Spider and Web, Varicella, Photopia, or Savoir Faire. There are hundreds and hundreds more you can play, but those works have some of the less everyman-like player characters. There's a school of thought that says interactive fiction is a better computer-based heir of pen and paper RPG play than actual computer RPGs.

There's a learning curve, but compared to that of DF, it's a speed bump. However, there are games intended for new players, such as Dreamhold, Floatpoint, or Aotearoa.

I haven't seen something like this since way back in the old text adventure days, and I enjoy few things more than novel new forms of game.  Thanks for sharing.

[Detoxicated]

Edit:
Wrong place to post.