Originally Posted by AlanC9
Originally Posted by Sozz
This point to me has been a real Achilles' Heel of RPG characterization for a while now, the way people develop their characters is through their actions and interactions with other people, The way you act might seem pretty straightforward but the motivations behind them aren't, consider our Grove-Goblin conflict, you don't need to be good to help out the Tieflings, your motivations can be totally selfish or altruistic, but the only way for the game to know that is through explicitly having your character talk about it, either with your companions or with themselves. This causes a problem, because your companions can like or dislike you, a whole system of min-max approval/disapproval gains take over from the role playing.


It only takes over from the role playing if the player lets it.

But yeah, there is an issue in that the expressed preferences of the PC may not indicate anything more than the PC's desire to avoid some conflict with certain NPCs. CRPGs don't have enough options where we can have the PC say something which is flagged as a lie.

By that logic no interaction between me and the game needs to take place, it can all be done on my end. That isn't a dig, that's what you have to do with a lot of older games. It's perfectly valid, but it's not what I find interesting about narrative RPGs.
At the end of the day you have to come to terms with the fact that the computer DM only has a limited number of moves to make, but making a compelling and adaptive world for you play around with is what I want from these games.

dumb, pseudo-intellectual and polite homophobe