Question about creating relationships

quazar1492

I want to start by thanking all the wonderful members of the community that have been posting guides and suggestions. I'm really excited about the Foundry and I have some ideas that I think will be fun. One of the things that I want to try to incorporate into several of my quests are relationships (not just boyfriend/girlfriend but gaining the trust of an NPC or befriending someone, ect). I think that this can add a lot to the role-playing experience.

I haven't had a chance to try the Foundry myself and only dabbled with it in STO but my game plan right now is to basically add 'relationship tokens' to a player's inventory. So if you do a side quest for Tom he might give you an item in your inventory 'Toms Gratitude'. If you then later do him another favor or pick the right choice in a dialog tree perhaps you replace 'Toms Gratitude' with 'Toms Friendship', ect. And if you screw him over you lose this token. Perhaps new dialog options are opened up by having the right tokens or even whole side quests or other NPCs will react to you differently, ect.

I would like your opinion if this would work or if their is a superior method of achieving this effect. I don't like the idea of taking up a player's inventory space, but as I understand it they get an overflow bag, so I'm hoping it won't actually effect them because these tokens will disappear after the quest is complete. Am I correct in my thinking? Also if I do decide to add in boyfriend/girlfriend relationships is their a way for the NPC to identity if the player is a boy or girl? I would appreciate any insight any of you might have.

apocrs1980

You can do this easily with created items and switching multiple copies of NPC's or dialogue with "if player has item" or if you reach this dialogue prompt player receives item.

tilt42

I would say "easily", as there are some pitfalls here (notably the lack of a feature to add or remove inventory items directly through dialog nodes), but it is possible. Just be aware that these inventory items are deleted as soon as you leave the quest, so you can't maintain them over the course of a campaign. Of course, you could implement a password-like system to keep track of these things, but it gets complicated.

zovya

Gender recognition can only be implemented through clever dialogue choices. The system can't know the character's gender.

agentjaspor

As tilt mentioned, the lack of items of values that carry over from quest to quest makes this sort of thing hard to maintain throughout a campaign. One thing I've been considering is having an initial NPC conversation where you ask the players a few questions to kind of "set up" the continuation. Something like "Oh, hey, you look familiar? Are you the one who rescued my cat from that tree (from the previous quest)?" If they answer yes, proceed like you know them. If they say no, well, then don't.

Just another possible approach.

quazar1492

Thanks for the tips, I was actually thinking of something similar agentjaspor. I was hoping to add and remove items directly through dialog as a way to make dialog more dynamic, oh well that's a bit of a shame I guess I'll have to figure out a workaround, thanks for the info tilt. Thanks for confirming my suspicions zovya, I guess I'm going to have to think outside the box

drakedge2

zovya wrote: »

Gender recognition can only be implemented through clever dialogue choices. The system can't know the character's gender.

I hope they implement something like that somthing like [gender pronoun] or other some such ways to determine the gender of the player. It would help a lot in the context of some speech.