“Well,” said the young man, smiling down at her, “don’t forget that if there’s to be such a monster, there’ll also be a future you, proportionately developed, to deal with him.”
—The Awkward Age, Henry James
More than one person on the official Bioware forums, where I announced this project, has noted a major difficulty in creating this mod: according to my design doc, the player's choices in conversations between Barbara's parents will determine what kind of person Barbara was/is, and this, in turn, will determine what the castle in Act III looks like. But if this mod is really as expansive as I want it to be, if the player really has this many choices, there's going to be a lot of different possible castles—dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands, each one unique and individually designed and programmed. That's an insane amount of work, far more than one person could hope to do.
But I'm not building thousands, hundreds, or even dozens of castles. In the best tradition of game designers (and creative types in general), I'm finding as many ways as possible to cut corners. In point of fact, I plan to build only four castles for Act III. How, you ask? Read on.
I plan to use the built-in Dungeons & Dragons alignment system to model Barbara's relationship with her parents. Now, if you've played D&D before and know all about the alignment system, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs. But if you've never even cracked open a D&D book and don't know the slightest thing about alignments (hi, Dad!), here's a brief intro.
Dungeons & Dragons follows in the epic fantasy mold of J.R.R. Tolkien: evil sorcerers, heroic warriors, enormous scaly dragons looming in the sky, magic swords, quests and prophecies. The epic fantasy genre tends to paint its conflicts in black and white, good and evil, with very little gray in between. However, although D&D (mostly) encourages players to play good characters, these characters aren't always going to see eye-to-eye on what 'good' means or how to achieve it: the brave and upstanding knight with the shining heart of pure gold and the slippery-fingered thief who robs the rich, heartless merchants and gives to the deserving poor are both going to say that they're on the side of good, but put them in a room together and they'll probably end up coming to blows.
The creators of D&D solved this conundrum in an interesting and innovative way. Rather than simply have one dimension of a character's alignment, they had two: Good vs. Evil, and Law vs. Chaos.
At this point I think a visual aid would be helpful.
See how it works? Going from top to bottom, you've got three possible values: Good, Neutral, and Evil. Going from left to right, you've got Law (or Lawful), Neutral, and Chaos (or Chaotic). Your character's alignment is a combination of two values from this chart. Using our example from earlier, the knight would be Lawful Good, and the rogue would be Chaotic Good. (The convention is to list your Law-Chaos value first, followed by the Good-Evil value.) Lawful means that a character subscribes to the ideals of law and order, that he or she believes that established power structures are worthwhile and should be protected; Chaotic means a character puts a high value on personal freedom, tends not to trust authority, and works outside of traditional power structures. Good and Evil are a little simpler: helping others versus being selfish, basically.
You can also have alignments like Lawful Neutral, in which a character believes in the structure of law and order but doesn't feel any particular moral stirrings either way, or Neutral Evil, where a character will either work within an established organization or strike out on his own, depending on which causes the most harm and suffering to others. You can check the Wikipedia article for more info and examples from fiction, or you can consult this chart using characters from Scrubs:
So after this incredibly long digression, you ask: what does this have to do with your video game mod, Ted? Well, since Neverwinter Nights 2 is based in the Dungeons & Dragons rulebook, all characters can have an alignment given to them. So in this mod, I can use the alignment system to model how Barbara views her relationship with her parents.
(I want to be specific about something here: I'm modeling how Barbara perceives her relationship with her parents, not what their relationship actually is. It's a very minor difference, but it's important, and I'll explain why in a later blog post.)
Take that alignment map I posted above (not the Scrubs one, the other one). Replace the words 'Good' and 'Evil' with 'Loving' and 'Not Loving', and the words 'Law' and 'Chaos' with 'Rules' and 'No Rules'. How Barbara sees her relationship with her parents will be modeled on this new map. The decisions you, the player, make as Barbara's parents will put them into one of the four corners of this map. (No 'Neutrals' on this map—I'll make the conversations such that the player has no choice but to move to one of the four extremes.) Thus, there are four possible types of relationships that Barbara has with her parents, and thus only four possible Barbaras.
Strict parents. (Lawful Good/Loving Rulebound) These are loving parents, but they may come off as overly protective of her. They're the type of parents who give Barbara a curfew, let her have a cell phone but only to make sure she can keep in touch with them, and keep a careful eye on the television and movies she watches. Barbara chafes at their level of control, but deep down knows that they actually love her. In this scenario, Barbara has created her imaginary land of Solafria out of rebellion, as a way of getting away from her parents, and doesn't want to return as a way of getting attention.
Hippie parents. (Chaotic Good/Loving No Rules) These parents love Barbara as well, but they're much more free-form. They believe firmly in Letting Your Kids Do What They Want, because Children Are Beautiful Free Spirits That Should Not Be Chained Down. They're hippies, really. They let Barbara do as she pleases. Barbara has thus created Solafria out of joy, for the sheer pleasure of creating, and has lost herself in her creation.
Brutal parents. (Lawful Evil/Not Loving Rulebound) These parents didn't love Barbara, or if they did, they didn't know how to show it. They treated her poorly, piled rules and strictures upon her and punished her severely for even the smallest transgression. She hates them deeply, and created Solafria out of that anger.
Monstrous parents. (Chaotic Evil/Not Loving No Rules) In classic Pavlovian behavioral modification, you provide a subject with a negative stimulus, they learn to associate it with a particular behavior, and thus stop that behavior. However, if you do not associate the stimulus with any particular behavior but simply cause it at random, the subject instead falls into a condition known as learned helplessness: they withdraw, become unresponsive, and show symptoms similar to clinical depression. That's what happened to Barbara in this scenario. Her parents weren't just awful to her; they were unpredictably awful. She had no idea how to react or what to do, and was forced to retreat into Solafria, which she created out of fear.
The player's actions and choices in conversation will determine which of these four Barbaras they meet in Act III. There will also be a number of other factors which will alter the scenario: one or both parents might be alcoholics, Barbara might have been adopted, she may love one parent more than the other, and so forth. Depending on these factors, certain NPCs may or may not be present, certain conversation options may or may not appear, there may be more or fewer enemies present, etc. My hope is that, even if two players make choices that send both of them to the same Act III scenario, these factors will still end up giving them unique experiences. Thus, with only four possible Barbaras, there will hopefully be thousands of possible gaming experiences.
I Really like the idea that you're developing here, but my one question is as follows: Do you need a fifth Castle?
ReplyDeleteYou've modeled the 4 castles on the possible extremes so far. I agree that it would be tiresome to create 9 different castles (one for each alignment), but what if you had some 5th, limbo-esque castle for the parents who were never able to commit to an extreme path? It would be hard to write, to be sure. But you could deal (in some fashion) with the fact that the parents never really made an impression on their child at all.
Alternatively consider this theoretical castle as a pre-castle. you could have it act as the pearly-gates; determining the final castle based on all actions up to this point, but forcing the parents to make certain decisions that would force them squarely into one of your existing archetypes.
just my first impression. I really do like the idea, though.