• Wheri
  • Da Vincian
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  • Registered: 2006-10-04
  • Posts: 258

Topic: Roleplaying certain game mechanics elements ane measures

There are some game mechanics elements that must be roleplayed, because they're used pretty often and should be shared between Homins. An example of these elements would be hitpoints ("I'm hit!"), stamina ("Gotta catch my breath!"), focus ("My eyes are tired") and sap ("I must use 30 drops of sap on my spell, and I have only 25 left!").

Another pretty important thing is material source modes. Those define how a material source behaves when being extracted. When there's only one Homin working on it, it's not a problem. But if there's an extractor and a careplanner, the later must be informed of what mode the source has, and only the extractor can see it. As an added difficulty, the mode can change during extraction. Thus, we must devise a way to quickly let the partner know the mode number, in character. How do we do it? I can offer 3 options:
1. Go with mode numbers. I. e. "It's the 1st type! Keep it safe!". Maybe the Homins learnt this way of naming things from the Karavan, or came to it themselves (They're pretty advanced, from what I read)
2. Think of names for every of the modes. "It's a faller! Don't let it collapse!". The problem would be the names, of course. And not making them cheesy.
3. Do not call modes, using just the "Keep it stable", "Keep it safe" and "Safe 'n' steady" shouts to designate what types of care are needed. The problem is a possibility of mis-interpretation.

By the way, I think the abovementioned HP, stamina, focus and sap are worth of a discussion themselves, as well as measures of in-game time and distance (Homins seem to use a metric system. Did the Karavan bring it?).

RP in MMOG's looks like this when trying to base it on in-game activities:
"Let's go <activity>!"
"Yay, <activity>!"
"<motivation>!"
  • Registered: 2006-10-01
  • Posts: 912

Re: Roleplaying certain game mechanics elements ane measures

I don't think it's necessary to have rules/agreements on how to roleplay each and every gameplay element. I'd rather trust our imagination and just make the details up on the fly, rather than try to memorize a ridig set of rules. Apart from the harvesting problem, which I know nothing about, most of those mechanics/roleplay translations are pretty straightforward.

Nevertheless, here's my input on the topic:

Hit points: quite simply, they measure how close your character is to death. Usually the lack of hitpoints means wounds, sometimes another kind of health hazard (like goo damage). If we want to really go deep here, I'd say that only the wound that knocks you out is truly serious. After all, you can go on normally if your health is at 1 and it naturally regenerates all the way back to full.

Stamina: physical exhaustion from a long hectic battle or whatever best suits the situation.

Focus: a little trickier, but I suppose it measures your ability to focus intensely on your task. When it runs out you get disoriented, because your mind just needs a break from all the thinking/looking for open spots in your enemy's tactics/whatever. Whatever you were doing, you lose focus of that.

Sap: not sure if it's explained differently somewhere, but I'd see this not as actual physical sap slowly dripping from a treeside. (If it were, how would you regenerate such sap during battle, and why would you have a maximum based on your mental stats?) Rather, I see it as a mythical life force, the blood of the planet that flows within us all and can be drawn on to perform extraordinary deeds (and it just happens to be called "sap" instead of, say, "mana").

Remember that this kind of set of four numbers to describe the state of a human being, is always an abstraction, and the same mechanical situation can be roleplayed in countless equally valid ways.

As for the metric system, it would seem likely the Karavan kept that system around when the rest of the world went medieval.

Last edited by Kryigerof (2006-10-09 19:44:58)