I really like the idea of the players own skills being important, and that's one of the reasons I'm so excited for URR. However, I would caution against not having a skill system or, what I feel is worse, having it just dependant on base stats that leave the player possibly stuck with a character config they don't like for a whole play-through.
Hmmmm, interesting thoughts. Re: your third paragraph, I don't agree issues are quite that "inevitable" - "Sure, they might be able to find/buy more stuff to be of more use in a number of situations, but as soon as you find the 'best' armour/weapon in the game world, you automatically become the best fighter you can be. " - but why can I not extend that to be the entirety of development? Or, at least, say 50% of character development; 50% base stats, 50% items, so something very minimalist (one could reasonably argue that the Souls games do something along those lines, with few skills, no skill trees, etc). I think I could make that work: have enough variation/resolution in the best/worst items, make anything above the basics extremely rare and extremely hard to acquire, and I still think that could actually work really well! I'd actively like to experiment putting the sense of player development into primarily items, and knowledge, rather than stats (and I could go a bit extreme and make *everything* item/learning based... which I might) - I know it's crazy! But at the top of my design document is a sentence to the effect of "Don't do what everyone else has gone", and putting all player progression into items and knowledge would certainly be
different. And I think it would be good, and fresh, and WOULD yield progression-feeling!
No-magic rougelikes are more interesting. but UnReal World has rituals. URR might too have, One can learn ancient tribal rituals if one either sees someone doing it or finds a book eplaining it or he/she is simply taught it. I would be very happy that URR includes rituals. But if no rituals you shall add in URR: Do not worry. I will not be dissapointed even a slightlest bit.
Agreed re: non-magic being more interesting! There will be "rituals", but not ones which truly have an effect, if you get what I mean; rituals that propagate and continue religious belief, but not which actually HAVE physical effect in the world.
Dr. Mark, are you expecting them to generate good books? I looked up NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generator Month*), and actually, they ended up succeeding in producing loads of novel generators on out there, all of them "open source" and available on GitHub.
And, all of them equally terrible in their own special ways. The ones that make the most sense are the ones that have "templates", but they are the also the ones that require the most work to do. Other ways to generate a novel would be to scrape content from websites, write short stories and stick them so close to each other so that readers are tricked into thinking these short stories are somehow related, replace words in existing novels, use recursive patterns, and create a simulation of different characters interacting with each other and printing out the results (the CK2 approach). And there are probably more ways to write a novel out there but I don't want to get distracted looking at all these generators when I'm still trying to get my own "novel generator" functional.
Put it frankly, while it may still be possible to generate a full-fledged novel that people would want to read, it'll take a lot of effort, and you still have an actual game to ship as well! I'd recommend demoting your goal down to just generating short stories, or...quite possibly, creating a generator that produces a short story, and treat that short story as a synopsis for the novel in question, so that people can imagine the novel without you needing to come up with said novel. Think of how Tarn Adams handled poetry in Dwarf Fortress.
Interesting discussion! Re: the specific above quote, my answer is: absolutely, but books will be extremely short. That's the trade-off - I want a book, or a piece of poetry, to be only a couple of scenes/paragraphs, but to be MEANINGFUL and relevant for the player's investigation; not a full book of dross. A book that just describes the relevant parts of a battle and gives you a hint as to where it took place, or a piece of poetry that describes a symbol meaningful to a particular culture, or whatever, rather than entire novels (since who wants to read the kind of bilge that a novel generator is going to spew out in this day and age?!). A blurb, as you suggest, is an interesting idea; but I think I'll go with the Skyrim model (as little as I like emulating anything Skyrimian) where "books" are extremely short, but have them generated in serious detail.
This definitely transfers to books, so I'm sure the Dr. will be able to turn out some pretty great stuff!
Yes! I think I can connect books to the other sources of information for symbols, ideas, histories, phrases, religions, the whole nine yards; I'm working on (and will be working on the background for the next couple of releases) the basic overall system for "information -> clues", meaning that, in one sentence:
The game needs to be able to take any piece of *data* - symbol for religion, name of nation, engravings on tomb, name of NPC, pattern on a vase - and transform it into any kind of *clue* - a book, a conversation, a painting, etc...
And obviously that will yield books!