So NPCs in the current version are very sort of meek and passive.
You can for instance enter a bandit camp and murder people, but most of the bandits won't react to it - with a good rep you can even recruit bandits to your party, then they help you to kill the other bandits. Like right after you decapitated their friend that they miss
You can also engage a wandering group of 50 goblins and then pick them off one by one from one end of it - since most of them will just stand around and moan about the fighting and killing and being sad, but they won't attack you to defend their buddies.
Because of the passivity You can even enter a goblin lair with an experiment character and murder goblins, get their beak dogs to be your own pet companies, and then have the beak dogs massacre like hundreds of goblins, without the goblins being aware that they're ujnder attack.
As I understand it, it's because motivations are now individual, so bandits and goblins will attack or not depending on how aggressive the particular goblin/bandit is, and before that they were set to just attack by default.
However, I think the game should aim for complex behaviour. Something that makes it feel like there's both an organized resistance plus that the individuals have individuality.
a) I think there should be some sort of group-motivation thing. So that if a group member gets attacked, all the members get a high motivation to attack. This can then be rolled against their individuality, meaning only the most fearfull/violence-opposed members will refuse to fight.
Characters now see it as like a bar fight if I attack a guy in their group. Like "Somebody is fighting over there, but I need not really to bother." IMO they need to respond as a group.
It should be sort of like when you attack an individual, and then they're aware that you're attacking them. They need that on a group level - so that if I kill a bandit and then ask the next guy to join my party, the guy should be aware that I'm hostile to the sort of person he is, to the group he belongs to, and he shouldn't be like, he thinks is has nothing to do with him that I murdered 10 people in his bandit camp.
I think it could be improved by adding group-level fights, so if I kill a bandit, then all the bandits consider me to be an agressor of their group.
Individual values/personality might make them now want to fight despite them knowing I just murdered people from their group. I think the choice of the non-fighters maybe should be marked either by a diaogue line (like "We're in a fight, but no good come from answering violence with violence!"/"I should fight to protect my fellows, but my stomach is churning!" 7"I choose to betray my group of bandits ha ha!")
b) I think for people joining in a "group fight" they need to see or hear or be told about the fight, and it shouldn't just happen by telepathy that all 50 goblins knows there is a fight if the guy in the back gets killed. So they need to either see it or have somebody tell them X is attacking us.
c) I think there should be ROLES in a group fight.
- Some will choose to run and warn everybody else we need to fight, yelling "Come to aid, X is being attacked!" Then those that get alarmed will run in to fight.*
- Some will join the fray immediately.
- Those armed wilth long range weapons will stay on the distance and fire away.
- Some will tend to wounded. (Like if they have high empathy, they'll go and comfort a wounded before they attack.)
- On top of that you have the individual values that can make some of them refuse to fight or run away by fear.
- Some might declare they don't give a shit about their group when it comes down to it and run away.
- The group of individuals who just stand around and do nothing in particular (Like comment a guy on their clothes) should be eliminated or be made rare - if it's rare the player can probably rationalize that they're paralyzed with fear or weirdos or whatever.
*This creates a cool thing where you need to try to sneak up on people and assasinate them without them having the time to run away and get help.
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Topic: Suggestions to NPC-behaviour, mostly adv mode (Read 1464 times)