"Personality Levels" / idea feedback.

[Blindga 144]

It's been a little while, so I think it is time I take a short break from my constant drawing and do a bit of idea creation. Here is one I ran across earlier today. I kind of have a few doubts about whether or not the idea is interesting or trite.

 

In summary, the protagonist of my project is sort of undead in a way. She is alive now, but the reconstruction of her soul has had some consequences on her. Its not a perfect procedure to bring someone back from death.  Her memory is gone, and her personality has fractured into pieces. Five twisted personalities have emerged from within her; each a suppressed dark side that is trying to come out to take control of the heroine's fragile mind. Its up to her to determine which voices to trust; if any.

 

When a normal character levels they gain stats in a linear path based on their class. But when the main character levels, she gets to make one of six choices; representing the five dark sides, plus one light choice. Each choice has its own preference for stat growth, and in time will also develop unique skills.

 

But, in addition to that, they also upgrade that personality.

 

In normal dialogue the player is frequently given dialogue choices. At first, they are mostly normal. But soon the dark sides appear in the protagonist's mind. Sometimes their dialogue choices will appear as options in addition to normal choices, and the player can choose to let that side dominate the conversation; resulting in different dialogue, story paths and rewards from time to time as well as consequences occasionally. Leveling in favor of one of the personalities upgrades their dialogue, meaning they will be able to speak more often, and the player/protagonist can rely on them to solve problems or even help in combat.

 

The six options are:

 

The Traitor: Favors the speed stat and survival traits. The Traitor is greedy and tricky, and is good at lying. Leveling with The Traitor increases the protagonists' ability to lie, trick, and steal from others.

 

The Noble: Favors the defense stat and defensive traits. The Noble is extremely arrogant, but very persuasive. Leveling with The Noble increases the heroine's ability to seem powerful and command or persuade others with words.

 

The Mistress: Favors the special defense stat and manipulative traits. The Mistress is a lustful seducer who hungers for power and attention. Leveling this increase the heroine's ability to seduce and charm people.

 

The Illusionist: Favors the special attack stat and magic traits. The Illusionist is a mind-reader and mentalist who wants to be left alone. This increases the player's ability to magically persuade or confuse people via hypnotism.

 

The Wraith: Favors the attack stat and attack traits. The Wraith is a savage who craves battle seeks destruction. Leveling like this increases the player's ability to inspire fear or intimidate.

 

Humanity: Favors the humanity stat, and balanced traits. Resisting the voices has less of an obvious effect other than balanced stats, but sometimes it allows for the protagonist character to act kindly and humanely in situations where stress or fear would otherwise prevent it.

 

Each time you level the main character, you can choose between one of these six traits to improve. Each has its own stat bonuses, but also comes with upgrades to dialogue options. This lets the player have a little more control over our neutral protagonist, but not so much that it warps story progression. It provides the interesting choice: does this girl stay true to herself, or does she break and become someone else? The player can have a little fun with the story this way, so they feel less shackled to the main character's personality and feel a little more involved without playing as a piece of cardboard.

 

The personality (or personalities) are there to make a character, but the player shapes up that character using six greatly varied templates. Its something I hope the player would find fun.

 

Or is it needless?

 

What do you think of this idea?

[Shi-an 39]

The idea is definitely interesting. The biggest problem I forsee is how much extra time and effort is required to implement it. Many games have moral choices etc. but for the most part they are something relatively simple like a sliding scale of good and evil, that may just decide the way a few of the events go, or what ending you get. But according to what you've written you plan on having the dialogue and gameplay adapt to six different pathways.

 

It depends on how long your game is, how much dialogue there is etc. But having to do events six different ways seems like a lot of work.

 

I think a solution would be to lump the personalities together. The traitor, mistress and illusionist are quite similar, especially the traitor and mistress I think could be combined into one. Alternatively if you want to keep all six, you could still divide it up so that say the dialogue is divided based on whether you're a traitor/mistress/illusionist or a noble/wraith or a humanity, and from there a few minor dialogue pieces and consequences/items etc. change.

 

If you're willing to take the time and effort to do all 6 then go ahead though! It might be worth just taking a scene you've already written out or plan on writing out and make the dialogue for all 6 pathways and see how you go.

[TheHarmp 155]

This sounds pretty interesting for sure, but like Shi-an said, It'll be very timeconsuming to implement it the way you described it.

Lately I've been fiddling with some Title Scripts (not the title screen, but titles for your characters) and that may well work with this idea.

Say you have the 6 personality traits you mentioned as titles, and having one of those titles 'equipped' will increase the traits/stats that go with that title when you level up.

That way you don't get to choose what to increase when you level up, but you kinda can beforehand, by equipping the title corresponding with the stats you want increased.

There are a few different title scripts that all work a little differently, but it may be worth checking out.

 

and you could even have dialogue changed according to the equipped title on a certain character, if that's what you initially wanted to go for.

writing all that different dialogue for different situations will cost A LOT of time and creativity, but if you're up for that, it could turn out very cool.

[Tsarmina 2,612]

Blindga always comes up with great ideas for features. ^^ I really love this idea, and I was thinking of trying something like this myself. But as mentioned...well, unless you have the time to write all of it and make all those events and choices, etc, it'll be time-consuming (but well worth the effort, I'm sure!) I'd probably say this is something more suited to a VN than a regular RPG, just because all the choices might be overwhelming, but if you can work this into anything, I'll be glad to see it!~

[Spectre 829]

Your current scenario puts you in a rather precarious position; especially considering that your protagonist, as it were, has fragments of personality that you can choose to follow.

Yet, you don't want it to alter the plot too much.

If you're going to implement larger scale features like this, you may also want to involve plot elements. Not to the extent where you'll be on a whole different level of gameplay; just with new options available to advance the story - either by killing an official or seducing his wife. Likewise you may also want to have consequences to different paths taken.

 

I also like that you identified six different archetypes, but as Shi-an aptly suggested, at least two are fundamentally the same thing. Consider differentiating them on a greater degree - the Traitor is largely cowardly yet cunning, and prefers to work in the dark, whereas the Mistress would bare her body to seduce a single individual, and the Illusionist can use her get up to distract entire crowds, but not "persuade" them, per se.

[Blindga 144]

For simplicity I may reduce the number of personalities. Time would definitely be a problem as far as this idea goes.

Thanks for all the positive feedback. I'll definitely consider this.

As for what I meant by not involving the plot, I'm mostly referring to major plot details. If I used an idea like this I wouldn't want to turn my story into an open sandbox because of that. There would have to be certain limits on what the player could do, and how many branching story paths their would be.

 

But thank you for noting that.

[MoonEnder 1]

i plan to do somting similar but more subtle, by using the visual novel choices script, choices would have different background color but similar text

i.e. village is about to be destroyed by monsters by due to a man's actions

show him mercy - break his leg. if he manages to escape in time he survives.

show him mercy - kill him quickly

show him mercy - let him leave but break his hand as a warning

show him mercy - just let him leave

 

 

an easy way to explain this is through some simple npc conversations that have no significance between the options during the early game.

with your personalites you can implement something like this showing that the corruption twists the very meaning of his words

Edited March 31, 2014 by MoonEnder