[Hajo]

Hi,

I'd like to let the player feel a bit of the role that they are playing. E.g. is a player choses to play a cyborg, I'd like to give him the feels of being a cyborg, not just controlling one.

Yet I have no idea how to do that. (I'm asking this question with a general scope, not narrowed to the cyborg example. I'd like to know how to communicate the role to the player so that he feels like being in that role, regardless of the specific role.)

Can anyone help?

[Terry]

I'm not sure I can offer specific advice to achieve this for your type of game, but I can think of an example where this was done particularly well.

In Baldur's Gate II, you generate your character at the start of the game by choosing from a list of races and skill sets. It then made this choice matter by offering entire quests scenarios based on your choice.

For example, if you created a ranger, a small town outside Amn would send messengers from time to time to seek your help when problems came up in their town. If you played as a Warrior, you could become the landlord of a large castle estate, and you were expected to intervene in problems that arose there. My favorite quests involved playing as a bard, which resulted in the main character staging a play!

It also allowed you to court other characters on your party, which certainly helped make you feel more male or female.

The game also went out of its way to make subtle dialog changes depending on your race. For example, you were more welcome in Suldanesselar if you played as an elf. Also, Several of the romance conversations also changed depending on your race (all the female romances were part elf).
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[Mandrake]

Fallout did an excellent job of this, where based upon the character you created (and the actions in the game). For example, characters with low IQ would get these choices for conversation:
"Mongo like."
"Mongo smash."
"Me MONGO!"

and all of the characters would respond with a very high vocabulary. OTOH, if you had a high IQ, all the NPC's talked like mongo smash, etc, and you talked with a very high vocabulary. Other things of note- if you joined a gang, NPC's treated you differently, etc etc.

Another way of doing this is to have things specific to that race/class change the way the game *handles*. Elves are faster, so they move faster, and are more apt with a bow. But, give an elf a warhammer and their speed falters and it becomes clunky and hard to weild. Of course, my examples for combat and speed work well with real time games because it gives players force feedback, or accurately timed feedback on the screen.
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[Hajo]

I understand:The feeling of a role is created by the response of the environment?

Is there an inner factor, too, something that is independant from the envioronment and could be determined by the PC behaviour all alone?

I had a mad idea of a cyborg-like spaceship, controlled by a human brain, but how to let the player feel like being a spaceship, with guns and remote controled droids instead of arms, fists and hads, power plants instead of heart, engines instead of muscles?

To go even farther make the ship departable, able to send parts on separate missions - are they children or are they splintes of yourself?

It works if someone writes a novel. The writer can tell the reader how it feels. The readers fantasy will add the missing and adjust the written to fit. But it works very well overall.

I'm not sure if a game can do that, too?

[Nephilim]

[Hajo]

This user interface idea is very nice. I think it really will influence the way the player gets immersed, and therefore will strengthen the idea of the role.

A game has several channels of communication

- text (reading)
- graphics (viewing)
- sound/music (listening)
- force feedback (feeling)

No we've covered the first two, dialogs = text, interface is text and/or graphics. What about music? I think it influences the feelings of the player most directly, although a lot of players turn in-game musik off and play their own records while playing.

A problem that I see is the huge amount of work, to create fitting music, if the game offers several roles toplay?

Force feedback is probably no option for a RPG, is it?`

[Nephilim]

[Mandrake]

I meant force feedback in the game's virtual world- not in the physical world. Things responding differently based on different circumstances. It could be handled in an RPG that used real time rather than turn based combat.
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[bay]