[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

     Alright; in my game, one of the possible PCs (named Rhea) is a werewolf. When she has transformed, she is appropriately angry and psychotic, and tends to kill people. If she sees prey (including humans), she tests her Fortitude score to see if she can avoid attacking it. If she fails, she must attack.
     There are two ways of doing this: taking control of the PC, and attacking, or informing the player that Rhea really should be attacking the person, and just trusting him to do it.
     The nice things about letting the player do it are

• I don't have to worry about coming up with an A.I. for the psychotic werewolf.
• The player doesn't have to sit there while his PC is having fun killing people.
• It's just a lot more visceral when it's the player himself, and not his computer, who's frienzedly murdering the PC's best buddy.

     The problem with just trusting him to do it himself, though, is that, well, I can't really trust him to just do it himself. He'll quite probably say "screw this" and wander off to go kill green jellies, or something, and I can't really say that I blame him.
     So, I'm curious what you all think of this. How far should one trust the player?

[Adam]

id set it up so that the pc controlls it, but thats just me

i don't think it would work well trusting the player, since on one hand you want these players to develop feeling towards these characters then you want the player to attack them.

i do think tho that having the computer take over the PC would add to the effect of the uncontrollable psycho warewolf bitty.
_________________
https://numbatlogic.com

[BigManJones]

Have the comp take over but give the player some way to interrupt the killing spree. Like for example in the Avernum games when your chars become confused there was a spell to snap them out of it (if you had learned it somewhere) other wise you had to constantly heal you party until the char 'came too'. I think it would be really annoying to have no other option than to sit there and watch.

[Nephilim]

Definitely have the computer handle it. Even when the storyline needs would prompt the player to do something he is inclined to do, there's no guarantee they'll actually do it. If it's something the player doesn't want, then you're just adding conscious reasons to the unintentional reasons why it wouldn't happen.

Besides, RPG players are often looking for ways to 'stretch' out of the storyline - testing the boundaries of what the engine will let them do. If you let them not attack the humans, they won't, just to see what happens. The end result is that you'd have to force them to do it (you can't leave the room until the three humans are dead, for instance), which kinda defeats the feeling you're going for: "Well, I've been all around this room, and there are no exits. I've tried all my items, and it just keeps telling me I am in a blood rage. Fine. I'll go over and kill the other two humans so I can get on with the story..."

I agree with Adam in that the computer taking over reinforces the feeling that the character has spun out of control.

One way to handle the "but it's boring to just sit back and watch" problem would be to handle it with your cut-scene engine rather than your standard combat engine. Then you place it in the context of story advancement, and it makes this new development more dramatic - it becomes a plot element rather than a game mechanic. You could even add dialogue in there to kick it up a notch.

Barring that, I would make sure that the combat is swift. One hit, and the human goes down. Nothing is worse than sitting through 15 rounds of combat where you can't do anything.

[Rainer Deyke]

If the character loses control, it doesn't make a lot of sense story-wise to have the player control the action. However, it may not be necessary to take away all control from the player. For example, you could restrict player actions to those that are appropriately aggressive. Alternately, you can force another fortitude check for every non-violent action that the player attempts. If it fails, the player attacks instead. That way the player can try to fight against the rage (with varying degrees of success) or choose to give in.

[Guest]

I don't think fort would be an appropreate test....perhaps will would be better

[XMark]

I think a good idea would be to make it so that when you go into people-eating mode you don't lose control, but negative stat effects start happening for every moment you are close to the person and not eating them, and some kind of bonus for eating them. So you could avoid doing it entirely but it would feel like you're "going against your nature".
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[Adam]

another way to give the player some controll would be like the end of disc one in ff7 where cloud is about to strike aries (arith or whatever she is known as in other regions). You wern't able to controll him but you had to press the buttons to keep going.
_________________
https://numbatlogic.com

[Blink (Not logged in)]

How about this?

Just have the computer move the player towards NPC's automatically. The player can fight it by pressing the opisite direction repeatatly. The difficulty of this could depend on the player's fortitude score.

For example, she starts to head right towards an NPC, so you keep hitting left to stear her away. If her fortitude score is high, this is fairly easy, but if it's low, it's very difficult.

[Nephilim]

[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

     Hmm... thanks; good ideas here.
     I guess I won't just let the player do as he likes. I rather liked the idea, but it hasn't gone over well, and it's no great loss.
     Here are the three main ideas:

• Make it a cut-scene.
  
• Handle it as per the normal game action, but discourage "bad" actions (by requiring additional Fortitude checks, or by having some deleterious effects, or whatever).
  
• Make it into some sort of mini-game.
  

     And my thoughts:

• I generally dislike cut-scenes (even when they're fancy FMV stuff; and mine certainly wouldn't be), so I'll avoid them as much as possible.
  
• My game already has a Stamina system which represents the PC's current store of mental/physical energy (or whatever), so decreasing Stamina for "bad" actions would integrate seamlessly, and be appropriate. I like it: it gives players control, but I get control too.
  
• The mini-game idea is perhaps the best, and the mini-game Nephilim describes would be perfect. It's more work, though (particularly as the game's not designed to be "real-time", so I've actually been able to ignore timers until now, and particularly as this werewolf game would only apply to one of the six PCs whom you can play).
  

     I've had some other ideas on how to implement specific mini-games into some of my other systems, so what I think I'll do is, release the game, first, with just the straight RPG engine, and in a later release, add all these cool mini-games to it (including the werewolf one).
     So thanks for all the ideas. Oh, and by the way,

[nathanmasters]

Holy cow, Nephilim. I have to give you a 10 on the creativity scale there, and two thumbs up as well. I hope you don't mind, but you've just got my juices flowing like a tropical storm and I think I might work from that. I'm sure I can use it somewhere. (And if you do mind, oh well you shouldn't have posted it :) ) My idea was similar (give the player control, but take away that control if he abuses the priviledge) but nowhere near as in depth.
_________________
... And then god said, "LET THERE BE VIDEO GAMES," and yay, there were games.

[grenideer]

The easiest (and perhaps one of the cheaper) ways of doing this would just be to have the npcs attack the player when she is a werewolf. Kind of make so that the player needs to fight or die. Of course you need a way to avoid the cowardly werewolf who just runs away from people.
_________________
Diver Down

[XMark]

Here's a novel idea: Have it so that the characters appear as enemies, but you don't know that it happened until you kill them. Then you're like "oh my god! I killed him!" that kind of thing. The key would be to not let the player know ahead of time that you're in psycho werewolf mode because one of the things about being psycho is that you don't know you're psycho :)
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[nathanmasters]

Yeah, but most people would think it was wierd if they saw an orc casually walking through town.
_________________
... And then god said, "LET THERE BE VIDEO GAMES," and yay, there were games.