Character generation process

[Pinacolada64]

What do we want to see while the player generates the character? Are there questions which must be asked? Does user terminal type come into play? Will that be saved in the character's profile (for lack of a better term)?

[AmberFennek]

When the character is first created:

1. Upon creation, no traits, skills, or equipment is assumed. Descriptions are superficial.
2. Characters appear in Great Fog and decide which realms to explore.

In the Past, nothing else matters - it's primarily for socialization and chat.

1. Page
2. Whisper
3. Teleporting

In the NOW realms:

1. Outside of The Past, a character with no mass can only emote, say, and pose - it is a ghost that otherwise can not affect the world.
2. Any character with low health might not be able to move.
3. A character that has no description is effectively invisible.
4. If the character is hungry, it eats and gains mass. What makes a character hungry? Perhaps a spell of appetite.
5. As it gains mass, it gains health each visit until it has full health and a sustainable mass.
6. With mass and health, now it is able to get things that weigh less than itself, move things around, and undertake certain actions that require mass.
7. After undertaking some actions, it eventually can become thirsty, allowing it to drink a potion of species or gender.
8. Drinking from the fountain when thirsty will restore health.
9. Eventually traits are gained by actions and choices, and realms that require specific traits and mass/health thresholds allow entry to the developing character.

What you do:

• Please comment or provide your own input, create your own tree as a suggestion or embellish this one.
• Motivate others to participate at least with their response to these ideas.
• Different realms can have different restrictions, so some parts of the world are accessible only to characters who develop certain traits and skills, or possess certain items.

When the pseudo-coded tree is developed enough, we all will contribute code for it and thus have an effective basic character generation method in effect to further build upon. This is not going to be my effort only - you have to take some ownership.

[Pinacolada64]

This sounds great. I'd write more, but I'm quite frazzled. Math is not my strong suit.

[AmberFennek]

I think I'll make a world/rules.py that defines world-related rules so they can be localized in the code instead of being sprinkled everywhere and difficult to find when we want to change realm-rules.

Effectively, we have made rules that should not apply in the Past realm, and since there's no character generation process, characters trying to operate outside of the Past are being subjected to rules without having gone through the process of being updated with traits or being made aware of them.

We need @tricuspa input, because this deals with a character just landing in the world, and new people are coming in without having ever gone through any process. If you leave it to me to decide all these things, then you will have to explain to new players why their characters can't do things until someone properly helps them through the configuration process - and you won't know what that is because you were not part of the chargen development process.

[tricuspa]

The first realm new players would need to enter is the tutorial realm, this teaches the basic commands and how a player will be expected to set up basic things. So the basic should probably consist of setting up I would say at the most three traits. Which three though...

Ideas

• Language (in the case we set up multi-linguistics or to at least provide a warning that the place is primarily in English)
• Experience (with MU* ing) - this helps direct folks to the next portal
• Default "Say" Style

Thoughts on that?

[AmberFennek]

@tricuspa First, Rulan made a room to the west of Great Fog to begin the tutorial realm. Next, the result of discussion:

Language

Amber yaps. Do we need an official language or to have command messages returned in the language of choice?

Rulan um, "An official language? Foxish!"

Experience

Amber yaps. How do we quantify someone's experience? Do we skip lessons based on this rating, or just give people the choice to skip parts?

Rulan hmms, yaps, "Perhaps choice? Wait, we could give 'em a quiz!" Rulan rubs white paws together in glee :>

Amber yaps. If we had a working quiz system (related to polling). #11

Rulan nods.

Default say verb

Default say style, set by using say/verb could be mentioned in the tutorial.

Rulan erf?

[tricuspa]

I am just thinking what makes the most fundamental sense. Language is nice because it gives us the potential to expand the place, as I do learning bits of other languages. It also follow some classical unix/linux setup.

Quiz, what an interesting idea, they can either make a choice or take a quiz, could be a good way to make the menu options (similar to purchasing).

1. New to it All, I may have poked around once or twice, but I am here to learn.
2. Some Experience with Playing and Coding,
3. Comfortable with Text based environments (years of experience)
4. Let's get to coding right away I want to do cool stuff that will help this place

Q. Quiz me, let's see how I do!

[tricuspa]

https://github.com/Pinacolada64/NOW/projects/1#card-776731

Here is an example of a Character Sheet, this type of information will be important when determining how to do a Character Generator (Chargen)

CharSheet_ADD.txt

[AmberFennek]

I read this somewhere: "Chargen is not that hard in and of itself. You just have to figure out what skill system and the like you want/need"

[tricuspa]

NOW Character Sheet - iteration 1

Player Data

1. Species: Just about anything here
2. Gender Gauge: Male, Mostly Male, Mostly Female, Female, Neutral, Both, Other
3. Home Region: Displaced, NOW, Narnia or The Past
4. Size:
5. Apparent Age:
6. Mass:

RL Data

1. Player Age Gauge: Child, Minor, Mature, Adult, Senior
2. Contact Method:
3. Contact Method Details:

[Pinacolada64]

Okay, so I'm gaining some interest in this process again. I'm unclear on some things.

This should be run during initial character creation, but would it be proper to run the same program at any point thereafter? What about for other puppets the player can create?

Home Region: Displaced - is that talking about people from FurryMUCK? Does that automatically assign a "home" to the character?

Why Narnia? The Narnia MUCK needed (or at least asked for) explicit permission from the estate of C.S. Lewis to have character names used. I realize we're not doing this for profit, but just a cautionary tale, perhaps. I guess there are other branded MUCKs out there (Redwall, My Little Pony, I don't know what else) and they probably didn't ask the blessing of the intellectual property holders.

Contact methods change (email, phone number, IM services, postal mail?)

Probably more questions upcoming. I'm not sure how to save all the answers garnered by the creation process yet.

[tricuspa]

I've gone ahead and committed some examples of NOW Web page character design layouts. I'll see if they are doable by my PHP person but I'd like to get some input and thoughts on them.