mcmanusaur

So just to be clear, we're talking about a single "crafting" skill, rather than an array of crafting skills (smithing, alchemy, cooking)?

In my experience this is simply and utterly untrue. A good many of the RPGs I've played consistently give "evil" characters better rewards, at least from a materialistic standpoint, which makes sense if you consider that "evil" (a term whose ambiguity and artificiality you seem to be forgetting) is generally construed as selfishness in a Judeo-Christian worldview. Now, it's true that Nietzsche and some others may have different opinions on the nature of evil, but this is by and large the most common notion of evil and the one that most RPGs seem to channel. "Good" characters on the other hand are rewarded in less materialistic ways, which again makes decent sense because choosing this path often requires neglecting one's pocketbook to the benefit of something outside one's character. The options that most RPGs utilize seems to be that of a "senseless/gratuitous evil" option, a "self-serving/materialistic/pragmatic" option, and an "altruistic charity/self-sacrifice", and you seem to be complaining that the game doesn't take the former seriously enough. However, senseless evil is... well, senseless by definition, and you probably shouldn't play such a character expecting some deep insight into your character's motivations. If you want to play a character who has a defined set of motivations that might not always coincide with good choices, then what you should do is figure out precisely what those motivations are instead of shoehorning your way into the gratuitous evil alignment option, which mostly exists for the enjoyment of the "this is why we can't have nice things" kinds of people anyway. So, in short, my experience is such that evil characters tend to see more rewards in the short term, or their rewards are more materialistic in nature, and I don't really see how this is unsatisfactory since it makes sense (unless you want to adapt some kind of fringe moral belief system). Choosing the good path on the other hand tends to lead to a more enjoyable endgame where the sun shines brighter in the world, and that kind of thing. Ultimately, I think the real issue here is that the labels good and evil tend to work the best as a shorthand method of evaluating the consequences of a character's actions, instead of encapsulating their various motivations. To construe "morals" and "motivations" as directly competing influences is a patent misrepresentation of human psychology; the latter is what actually plays a part in decision-making, and the former is how we appropriate and justify decisions in retrospect. If you want "deeper evil" choices, then I'm afraid you're going to have to provide examples, as there's nothing that can make evil for its own sake any more complex, and "evil" for the sake of some other motivation is better construed in terms of what that motivation is. Most often it turns out to be money or material wealth, but I can imagine that there would be even more complaining if the game "punished" the player for a pursuit that people see as being central to the genre. The game should accommodate a range of possible motivations (and if this must include gratuitous evil to appease that wretched crowd then so be it), and the player should take the time to utilize this functionality instead of instantly pigeon-holing their character into the "good" or "evil" camp.

Allow me to introduce you all to my friend Mr. Venn Diagram: Depending on your inclinations there may be more or less purple or green relative to each other, but I have assumed in this image that people here feel that "classic" RPGs do more right than "modern" RPGs, which may or may not reflect my personal opinions. My second assumption is that even though there have been some good RPGs, there's still quite a bit of room for improvement in the form of ideas that haven't yet been seen in the RPG genre. The point is that although the "ideal" RPG is very subjective, neither blindly following the current trends in RPGs nor sticking to the conventions of yesteryear will likely produce the best game, unless we've already tapped most of the genre's potential. In that case, the future of the genre consists only of formulaic clones, and the RPG is arguably relegated from an art to a commodity. Personally I'm most interested in the developers' ability to separate the "orange" (genre conventions that don't actually work) from the "brown" (core elements of RPGs), and to discover the "blue" via innovation. Other people's priorities may vary, but so far I've been reasonably pleased in these regards.

One thing is for sure; it's far better than the usual black-and-white moral question crushing our skulls in with the subtlety of a tap-dancing albino giraffe.

zeh-<click>DIG-eve <brief pause> gill-ex would be my wild stab in the dark. Hmmm, wrote fark instead, not sure what that means. Ultimately with regards to the constructed language, I think as long as the terminology doesn't go overboard (as in the old Planescape setting warning of going overboard with cant slang) so that the context is understood I'm okay. I don't worry about pronunciation that much personally (one of my first jobs involved calling people's names out - you kind of get over mispronouncing things quickly). Lol, no no no... it's pronounced exactly how it looks! Fun fact: Any human being can pronounce any syllable or word used by any other human. Even those aboridgini sounds. It takes some vocal gymnastics abnd lots of practice to get your troat and tounge to learn it. Well, fun fact for you: I made that up, so it doesn't really count as a word used by other humans... and really it's more accurate to say that every human has had the potential to pronounce any phoneme, as we can lose some of that potential as our vocal anatomy and/or brain wiring changes in early childhood. It really can be all but impossible to acquire certain new sounds. But anyway the point is that we're not contriving exotic languages for the sake of seeming difficult to pronounce. Granted, my travel has been biased towards different European and Latin American countries, but I generally find it very easy to pronounce stuff correctly even if I don't know the grammar or vocabulary of the language. Even Chinese or Japanese I could do without much difficulty, and I've really never had any contact with speakers of that language. Gaelic and Cyrillic-based languages are a fun challenge but ultimately doable. But there are some fantasy RPG con-langs for which this general ability does not translate at all, and even though this is theoretically justified by the fact that different races should have very separate languages, it's more frustrating than anything. But I guess now I'm just getting into the territory of ranting about how we must always have fantasy races if they're all inevitably modeled after humans aside from rather nominal differences (pointy ears, body hair, skin tone). I sort of don't get why we bother when the most convincing races will be those most based off humans, since we're the ones whose behavior there is historical precedent for. But now I'm horribly off-topic so I'm going to stop. But seriously, if there's anything that's based purely on convention for convention's sake, it has to be fantasy races. So I guess to bring it back on-topic, it's really not going to impress me that otherwise generic elves and dwarves are "so different" that they have a dramatically different language system. However, it sounds like that's not going to be an issue, so hooray...

I honestly don't really find linearity in the physical layout of dungeons to be too much of an issue (it's all just more "dungeon" to me), as long as there aren't artificial boundaries like unmovable furniture. But if you think about it there will always be structures that lend themselves to a "linear" design. If anything, I'd rather not have to do backtracking to clear an entire dungeon, and that's less of an issue in more linear dungeons; I'm more concerned about avoiding linearity in other respects (such as there being multiple solutions to a quest as you mention, but that doesn't necessarily require separate pathways).

I'm going to have to agree with this mostly. I'll add that a complex wounding system is utterly pointless if the primary method of healing is through nonspecific cleric spells. The only localized wounding system (which is the logical step forward for "realistic" combat) I have decent experience with is from Fallout, and I have to admit it wasn't that great; it was basically replacing a single HP meter with five more.

This, pretty much. Although in response to the OP I'm sort of opposed to connecting stamina and health; however, I have toyed around with the notion of abstracting health as two components: "trauma/injury" and "shock/pain". The former is self-explanatory, and decreases as you take "damage" in the manner of HP, with reduction to zero resulting in death; I'm undecided as to whether injury localization produces enjoyable gameplay or not. The latter fluctuates on a more short-term basis, and shock/pain exceeding the trauma/injury threshold results in unconsciousness/incapacitation. While perhaps only a bit more realistic than the standard HP scheme, this system hypothetically also makes the game more interesting by lending itself to two different schools of thought in combat. A traditional warrior might try to deal enough damage to bring a target directly to death via trauma/injury, a more subtle approach would be to saturate a target with shock/pain and thus render them unconscious, leaving them open for an easy coup de grace. The factors that influence how much shock/pain a target can endure would then be their trauma/injury level (obviously, since this sets the max), but I could see low stamina acting as a multiplier for shock/pain fluctuations. This would allow health and stamina to be mostly separate so that performing actions doesn't directly reduce your health, which is sort of nasty. Stamina could refer to both physical and mental fatigue, rather than making some kind of artificial division. While in this system medical attention and rest would directly restore health and stamina, food and hunger level would only influence stamina's rate of change over time similar to how hunger in Minecraft affects health. So there, a pretty much complete system of resources, with some improvements over the usual, theoretically without making gameplay less fun. Hopefully that makes sense, and don't laugh at me if there are games that do this kind of thing already.

Georgian Berber And my favorite, Nuxalk (Bella Coola) Probably the oldest recorded instance of trolling in the history of humanity.

As long as we don't get names like Z'dgyv-qylix, which is all but unpronounceable by individuals possessing human vocal anatomy, knowing intuitively how something is pronounced isn't very important to me. "Oh, but they're space elves" isn't sufficient compensation for the fact that I must constantly worry whether I'm omitting the third "Z" in a character's name. That said, a language where Latinate pronunciation doesn't apply neatly will likely feel very foreign to a majority of the audience, but this isn't a bad thing if that's the desired effect. But as long as there are patterns and recurring consonant clusters, I can get used to it. To me there's a difference between "Oh, I could pronounce this name but it might not be entirely correct" and "I'm not even going to try". Many fantasy settings go way over the top in creating such bizarre languages that players will end up doing their best to avoid. I'm very happy to hear the constructed languages in Project Eternity will be heavily modeled on real/historical languages.

Cool, thanks for the input. Honestly I don't really have credentials or influential contacts, so until/unless it takes off it would probably be more along the lines of people brainstorming with each other for the sake of it, and I'm sure there's a significant demographic that would find this prospect appealing enough. In my view this at least has the potential for mutual enlightenment and gradual selection and propagation of the "best" ideas, which is an improvement on the current mindset of "rely on the most established of tropes/conventions for one's expectations of a game". As far as tech goes, I have to admit that my knowledge is a bit limited (hence the fact that even putting up a slipshod forum was an achievement for me), so unless I happen to get someone more tech-savvy who wants to co-direct this project with me the tech discussion will be limited. I could definitely see discussions about the Oculus Rift and other such things, but yeah... just another reason I'll need other people to help lead the project if it is to be successful. And I suppose if I don't get any volunteers I can conclude that there isn't a "market" for such a community/space, which would make me a bit sad considering how much of a market there is for the status quo (in terms of both business practices and design) in gaming.

That's correct. There's also an emphasis on design theory (because I think often people, myself included, lose sight of the big picture) and on the "everygamer" developing their own critical analysis skills, rather than letting flashy trailers or inflated reviews decide their purchases for them. Hmmm... so by the first do you mean more emphasis on design in practice and less on theory, or that certain sections of the forums should be organized more meticulously? In regards to the second, do you simply mean that the ideas should then be a bit ambitious (I think we can have that covered with stuff like this)? Or do you mean that there should actually be a focus on cutting-edge technology? Thanks for the suggestions!

Hey guys, you might know me from the Project Eternity forums. My first few threads were a bit of good-natured trolling, but I would hope that since then I've proven that I'm very interested in discussing games on a deep and serious level. Like many of you my gaming background includes playing classic RPGs by great developers like BIS and Obsidian, and I've played more recent RPGs as well in addition to other genres of games. In an age of blockbuster titles with huge budgets, it's remarkable what Obsidian (and several other studios including inXile) has achieved via Kickstarter, and I believe that this bold and innovative move on the part of the developers has great potential to benefit gaming in general. However, I think that if progress is to be made, we can't simply rely on the production end; the consumers must make efforts as well, and there are many ways to do this, ranging from talking with one's wallet to simply creating and sharing new ideas. In fact, I think that activists, critics, designers, and theorists all have a part to play in the progress of gaming, and I want to foster these efforts by creating a common home for them. The level of discussion in the Project Eternity forums has been very inspiring to me, and I've actively participated in a lot of exciting discussions. I suppose I can only speak for myself, but in my eyes the thing that tends to happen is that, in the course of giving suggestions specific to Project Eternity, we reference other games, and then we find ourselves making theoretical statements about RPGs in general, and finally we end up dreaming up cool stuff that is probably beyond the intended scope of Project Eternity. While I'm ultimately sure such ambitious suggestions don't hurt, it's got me thinking about whether there might be a better place for some of the brainstorming. Project Eternity will be a great game, but it's obviously not going to include all of our crazy ideas. However, that doesn't mean that the ideas that are left out aren't great ideas, and I think it would be a shame for such ideas to languish, buried by tons of other Project Eternity-specific stuff. Needless to say, I'm not proposing a replacement for the Project Eternity forums, but I think all parties stand to benefit from there being a place where broader discussion can take place among like-minded individuals, and to promote other games similar to Project Eternity. To that end I've been doing some searching for a gaming community based around discussing the theory of game design and ideally also promoting more grass-roots development and consumer activism. The thing is that I have not really found anything that entirely suits these purposes. RPGnet seems to be the place to go for tabletop RPGs but it's a bit lacking in video game-related content. The Forge used to be another popular place for such things, but now it's closed. Gamasutra has some quality blogs, and there are a lot of other cool game design blogs out there, but ultimately I don't quite think blogs achieve the objective. I'd like to see a place where everyone, not just the minority who are committed enough to run their own personal blog, can share their ideas about game design and promote projects they feel are worthy. I just don't know of such a place currently, though feel free to correct me if you do. With this in mind, I was just like "what the hell, I'll give it a go". Yesterday I started messing around with creating a free forum, and I'm a complete noob at it, but I'd really like this to succeed because I think something like this could greatly improve the gaming experiences of those involved. If any of this resonates with you or you've always wanted somewhere to post your ideas about RPGs or gaming in general, I encourage you to come visit what I've got so far. As you can tell the work has only just started, and there are plenty of opportunities for anyone to help out and have their own influence on this endeavor (nothing's quite set in stone yet, especially the name). Please feel free to post in there or on this thread if you have input or suggestions, or if you feel like this is enough of a worthwhile endeavor that you'd like to assist me. -mcmanusaur

To me the issue is when an attribute is so fundamentally useless for any single class that every build will minimize it, there's very little point in including it for that class. Ideally most attributes would be relevant to every class, and the game would ensure that different allocations actually support different playstyles. A complete dump stat like luck is also rather pointless, and if it's already virtually decided where a character will allocate their points based on which class they're playing, why even bother making the player allocate the points? Just to filter out noobs who have no understanding of the system? There will be people who don't care about min-maxing. So for their benefit. Also, to me it just makes sense that some attributes are more usefull for certain professions. A long-distance runner will favor endurance/stamina, while a short distance one might favor agility/leg strength for as much explosive power. I find it kinda self-defeating to try to "balance" what really shouldn't be balanced. How much points a player puts in what attribute is the players decisions. "Optimal" builds depend on what you want to achieve. If you want a charismatic, smart fighter, then you wont' be putting everythnig in STR. I think it's more about trimming away dump stats than it is about disallowing people to maximize certain attributes. I can't think of any reason results-wise that someone playing a barbarian would miss being able to put points into Wisdom, other than just for the notion of being able to do so. A barbarian can still min-max by putting everything in Strength, or instead put some points into Dexterity and Constitution for a more balanced build. It makes sense to me as well that certain attributes would be more useful to specific classes, but ultimately we want every attribute to have enough use for each class such that it doesn't just become a dump stat. This is because dump stats are pointless and might as well not even be included, for the reasons above.

I'd rather have the choices that the player is confronted with contrasted on non-moral (i.e. political, economic, philosophical, social) grounds than have everything be black and white. If the consequences of such choices must manifest along some sort of binary continuum, the closest thing to morality I could endure would be "altruism vs. selfishness", rather than "good vs. evil".

Just going to mention that the level of combat focus in a game is different from the level of grinding (there is non-combat grinding), but I'd prefer less of both if possible.

To me the issue is when an attribute is so fundamentally useless for any single class that every build will minimize it, there's very little point in including it for that class. Ideally most attributes would be relevant to every class, and the game would ensure that different allocations actually support different playstyles. A complete dump stat like luck is also rather pointless, and if it's already virtually decided where a character will allocate their points based on which class they're playing, why even bother making the player allocate the points? Just to filter out noobs who have no understanding of the system?

Now that we're to the point of throwing out all our cool ideas (which we may have otherwise been keeping to ourselves in the unjustified fear that they might be stolen), my idea was that there would be a "Traits" stage during character creation during which you can select some number of such traits to apply to your PC, which correspond to both knowledge/interests (such as ornithology, politics, or viticulture) and personality traits (like hot-tempered, neurotic, or arrogant sorts of things) that each influence interactions with NPCs. Knowledge traits would allow characters to converse with NPC about subjects that might otherwise go over your character's head, and any personality similarities might affect an NPC's base liking/disliking attitude toward your character. The personality traits would be modified by Charisma (with positive traits costing points and negative traits having a negative cost), Knowledge traits would be modified by Intelligence, and Skills would then be governed by Dexterity, which would then be separated from Agility. If I had the resources and the programming know-how I would have already made this into a game.

I think it should be dependant on the choices you made, not free distributable. Maybe my bow explanation was too vague and abstract. All of these factors in firing a bow are also possibilities where skills could be embedded to enhance the performance of firing a bow. Every class has other approaches and craftsmanship how to deal with their world. A mage could also shoot arrows with a bow (Yay, we're not in D&D ^^) but he will not have the interest to refine the skills with it (although he could shoot exploding fire arrows!) This variety of approaches in every class should be able to break though the pattern you mentioned. What I like in my attribute system is that it isn't a system which only refers to battle roles ( as dps, tank, etc. ) but depicts rather a personality of the character with its traits: directness, calmness, flexebility and wariness. Or his aim: control/result, reliability, innovation/adaption, low risk/caution. At least you could see them also as 12 attributes... wich would automatically be confusing Right, I sort of understand what you mean with the bow thing now, but I guess the question then becomes whether at some point there ceases to be a point in changing a char's attributes. Power might affect damage per attack, perception might affect chance for an attack to hit, and finesse might affect speed of attacks, but ultimately if we measure characters' performance in damage per second, there's not a lot of point in switching a point in power for one in finesse. That is unless we want to optimize our build for certain battle situations in which quicker but weaker attacks might be more effective than slower but stronger attacks, or vice versa. But I suppose the alternative is min-maxing and pointless dump stats, and I guess this is an issue with the abstraction of allocating points to attributes in general.

Yeah, I've thought about this approach before. Not to detract from the importance of quality dialogue writing, or to suggest that this system would work for NPCs with significance to the game's core narrative, but hypothetically with a long enough list of traits you could generate a nearly endless list of NPCs given the almost infinite number of combinations. While this probably isn't meant for Project Eternity, I think that an RPG that uses this system to dynamically generate unique minor NPCs (paving the way for NPCs to age and procreate) would be really interesting. Well, we can dream at least, can't we?

Actually, imo an attribute that affects casting speed would be quite cool. Even though it might make things much harder to balance. I don't know any game that implemented something like that. I think the original Guild Wars had something like this for the Mesmer class; possibly other MMO's have done so as well. On a general note, I see the appeal of the generalized attribute system described above (what I predicted we'll see, and which Morgulon has discussed), in that there aren't any pointless dump stats for different classes, but I still think you sort of lose some definition with the level of abstraction required to merge physical and mental strength into a single power attribute, and so on. It may be a slippery slope before it becomes something like this for every class, especially given the build variety PE is aiming for: [attribute you should max for a dps build] [attribute you should max for a tank build] [attribute you should max for a utility/skills build] [attribute you should max for a crowd control build] Where this pattern applies to every class... sure it's very direct, but to me it would be a very boring game.

Okay, that's sort of a valid point, but really what does recognition of one's character as an established hero add to the players' experience besides having the NPCs automatically fawn over one's character rather than having to actually earn it? Are we really at the point where this "reward" makes us feel good? It just reeks so strongly of stroking players' ego for the sake of it, almost fanservice... You know what? Alright, keeping an open mind toward the roleplaying possibilities of this, is it really necessary that your character starts off at level 20? I could see something like "celebrity status" or "noble lineage" that I mentioned in my first response, which really only affects cosmetics of dialogue rather than mechanics, but even then it's a bit hard to justify withholding that from the player until they've completed a playthrough simply because many gamers don't have the requisite attention span or attention to roleplaying to not choose this option on their first playthrough... Bleh. Well, it's not super important to me honestly, so good luck with your idea/suggestion. I just think it says some sad things about the state of roleplaying in these games...

The way I see it, utimately you're either playing an easy mode for people who become too attached to individual characters and who refuse to play a variety of classes (if there's no level scaling for new game+), or you're playing pretty much the same exact game with a couple zero's added to every number, whether it be character statistics, monster levels, or enchanted loot (if there is level scaling). What's the point of having leveled characters or advanced loot from the beginning? How can your character progress during the second playthrough unless the developers spend their time putting in even more powerful stuff for you to obtain? Doesn't that all become a bit superficial at some point? This is probably more oriented toward "roll-playing" than roleplaying, but isn't this mentality a bit shallow? Is "plz withhold game features so they can be prize later" really the message we want to be sending to developers as consumers? Why would you want yourself restricted in your first playthrough? Why would you want to play the game again with the same character, rather than play a different character? Why should there be a metagame of trying to unlock things via multiple playthroughs? These questions have yet to be answered. We'll probably see additional campaigns, most of which likely allowing you to import old character like the old IE games, that start at high levels anyway, so what's the point of doing this with the main campaign that is balanced for characters starting at level one? Endgame =/= replaying the game. I for one very much wish that there is some sort of endgame, in that continuing to play the game doesn't become pointless as soon as you beat the final boss or whatever, but that's completely different from wanting to replay the same game over again with the same character. You want a different experience? Play a different class, or even a different build. You want harder gameplay? Up the difficulty or play one of the gamemodes designed for this. You want to continue your party's adventure? Why not wait for additional campaigns/expansions which will probably let you import your old party so that you actually have new quests to complete? What can an RPG possibly gain by sacrificing "playability" for replayability, which is what withholding features entails? The only possible benefit this might have to the roleplay is that some people can't possibly seem to limit themselves within the role of their character, and this allows them to have more to do after doing "everything" the first time around. But really, shouldn't the focus be on teaching such people to actually roleplay, rather than satiating their unhealthy hunger for unlockables? Gah, now I'm just ranting without any sense of direction. I quit.

That's saying "if they had unlimited amounts of time, money and manpower". If they did, I'd be fine with the feature being there, still wouldn't use it, but I wouldn't mind it either. But they don't have unlimited resources. 4 million budget is not even 40 million. There'll be lots of questions to the tune of "this would be a kind of a neat feature, but is it worth the effort?" Stuff will be cut no matter what. Beliewe me adding an option to play you character onec again is not that expencieve. New quests/events/endings etc whoud probably cos more becouse of "writhing" part. Still i don't get this obsession about reasorces ... the first goal to create the game was 1 million .. we have 4 times more .. so by their calculations they shoud be able to create 4 games with the basic content. So the game will be 4 times bigger then at the begininng. the 40 milion games are those like Starcraft2, Dragon age orgins(with DLCs) or mass effencts .. im not preaty sure about witcher 2 ... And the most of the "money" went on marketing, graphics/animation cutscenes, voice acting ... we know in PE none of these will be as "important". Secondly, im starting to think that you guys are more concern of "recorces" then devs .. with is weird ... The dragon age or mass effect where so expencive becouse those game was almost non-stop cutscenes ... witch PE will be not .. But talking with you guys about recources is just waste of time .. becouse even talking about "adding" new type of weapon you will see as possible dangerous situation ... sigh ... Okay, so your turn... why would you like this feature? What would New Game+ add to the game that it doesn't have already? How do you justify wanting to play through the game twice with the same character? Are you really that opposed to playing other classes, or at a different difficulty? I'm assuming the reason you want to do everything twice with the same character isn't because you prioritize roleplay? I'm just trying to see the other point of view here, since your OP was more about what New Game+ might entail than about why you want it in Project: Eternity. In regards to resources, it's a bit pointless to ask whether people support an optional feature assuming that the developers have infinite resources, because hypothetically there is no reason to oppose it, and thus the result is meaningless. In practice, however, it always comes down to the tradeoff between adding new features and improving existing ones, and if people feel they wouldn't get any use out of New Game+, they are perfectly entitled to oppose it on the grounds that it's not worth the effort. This is the same issue that will keep people from wanting things like I'd want such as purchasable property or tradeskills and the like in Project: Eternity.

Personally, while I agree with pretty much everything else mentioned here, I'm a bit hesitant on the liking/disliking vs. respect distinction. To me, it seems like one small step away from Fable II's retarded system of having like three bars to worry about for every NPC (I can't even remember what the third variable was), and since liking/disliking is already a vague enough abstraction I'm not sure how adding another abstraction contributes to the game. In my view, a single bar does a good enough job of describing how an NPC feels toward my character, and any further nuances can arise from either my character's reputation (one NPC automatically respects characters with certain levels of fame, and another dislikes all evil characters) or the NPC's personality (even when a certain NPC "likes" you the most you get is consistently their begrudging respect, or maybe a different NPC consistently acts respectfully to those who he or she dislikes). But for the relationship between my character and that NPC, one variable does the trick for the most part (if I had to choose a worthwhile second variable it would probably be platonic vs. romantic interest, and meh...). Psychologically, it's true enough that you tend to respect and trust the people who you like, so I'm honestly not sure why it needs to be more complicated than that; maybe I'm too busy roleplaying my own character to try to micromanage other characters' emotions.