Player Personality & Why I Exsist

[CrazedWeevil]

One of the things that is most important to me as a player of RPGs is that initial hook into the game's world and is often the reason I continue to play it or give up after a while. I find that the best way to achieve this is to have a character that has a reason for being in that world other than simply existing to be the player's avatar in the game. This is a problem I see happen a lot in RPGs (and a lot of other genres as well to be honest) and I am hoping you can avoid it.

 

However this leads onto another problem that I think a lot of RPGs have and that is Personality Support. I would describe this as the game having reasonably consistent dialogue so that a player can decide what sort of personality their character has and play through it using that personality as a basis for their decisions. Am I goody-two-shoes person, an anti-social type, saracastic, or maybe I simply hate one race so am very rude to members of it...

 

An important point though is that the game informs the player what sort of personalities its dialogue supports at the beginning so the player can make a choice early on and know that their efforts to Role Play their character aren't going to be wasted or frustrated (the old 'my player would never say / do something like that' problem).

 

The only game I can think of in recent times that has tried this with any degree of success was Dragon Age Origins and this is mainly because of the Origins bit. Depending on the class and starting place you are given a set of basic personality architypes you can use from the start and there did seem to be an effort to continue these lines into the main game. The best example of this that I had was the Dalish Elves start where you are given a number of options from the start on how to deal with three humans you encounter; let them go, kill one of them and let the others go or simply kill them all. Given the context of the race and their history in the game world I choose to kill them all and to my surprise I could continue to play the angry little elf girl who hated humans that I imagined when I started the character.

 

Nearly all the character origins had this approach from the start and it gave a lot of role play options early on so you knew what you could likely play and what the game would respond to. This wasn't always perfect but it made a good effort and I would love to see that sort of approach used in Project Eternity if possible.

 

Given the context we have been given so far for the start of Project Eternity (The player witnesses an extraordinary and horrific supernatural event that thrusts them into a unique and difficult circumstance. Burdened with the consequences of this event, the player has to investigate what has happened in order to free themselves from the restless forces that follow and haunt them wherever they go) is it possible to have a kind of 'origin' sequence where we look at not only how the player happened to end up seeing this event but also what sort of personalities we can play through the game depending on our race / class choice?

 

Does any of this make sense or am I just talking non-sense?

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I agree, it's nice to roleplay and be able to keep up your character throughout the game. A text based RPG makes me very excited as there is going to be lots of room for dialogue :D Perhaps Obs could do as you said and provide us with some clue as to which personality types are available through a 'background' like in Arcanum.

[HangedMan]

I agree, it's nice to roleplay and be able to keep up your character throughout the game. A text based RPG makes me very excited as there is going to be lots of room for dialogue :D Perhaps Obs could do as you said and provide us with some clue as to which personality types are available through a 'background' like in Arcanum.

I like this idea.

[Cantousent]

I think my general idea didn't get much traction from most folks, but if you follow the thread, I think it actually takes your example from DA:O and runs with it as a system for rewarding RP throughout the game. The thing to remember is that the system I'm describing isn't mean as a straight-jacket. It assumes that they won't put in fifteen different options for any particular dialogue but it can tailor dialogue to the character. With that said, I don't mean to intrude on your topic. I just had a similar thought a while back and I'd like to support what I think is your general idea.

 

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/59862-choice-and-consequence-long-winded/?do=findComment&comment=1182469

[Virgil]

Yeah I liked that part of DA:O a lot , first Dragon Age had a lot of awesome idea and moments. On the other hand we know little about Project Eternity and maybe that idea will be implemented.