The upcoming MMO Fallen Earth has a set of factions based around the idea of what the future holds for the post-apocalyptic world it is set in - one faction wants to restore civilization, another wants to preserve the anarchy that currently exists, another thinks the devastation could be a boon to nature, etc. We will take some similar broad themes and build them into gameplay and story development, but hopefully in a less overt and more granular way.
Law
The first example of this mechanism is the rule of Law. I used an earlier example of a town in which firearms were restricted, and NPC police cracked down hard on gunfights in the streets. So how did the town get that way? Civilized areas in the game will have a Law rating, based directly off the number of NPC police inhabiting the area and their morale. As in the classic western - a town with a nervous and cowardly sherriff will be much more lawless than one with a courageous team of lawmen walking the streets. Lawbreaking NPCs like Slavers and Bandits will be fewer and farther between in areas with strong Law scores, and those areas will have rules and regulations regarding combat.
So how do players impact the level of Law in an area? Some quests will be law enforcement or crime quests, and their completion will change the attitudes of NPCs in the area - putting police on higher alert and instilling a greater sense of lawlessness in the population. More crimes committed in an area may inspire certain NPCs to concoct criminal schemes of their own, opening up further crime quests. Likewise cracking down on crime in an area will embolden the police forces and encourage stricter regulation.
Quests are a great way to shift the balance. But I don't want too many repeatable quests as that is tough on immersion. Rather, I'd like quests to open doors for the player to influence their surroundings in other ways. In many ways Law is simply the absence of Crime. So a player who has allied themselves with the anarchic forces of Crime through questing may simply commit criminal acts in an area. Crimes going unpunished will decrease the Law score of an area. Other players may enforce the law once they've made good with local lawmen NPCs by apprehending or killing player and NPC criminals. Since it is easier to be casually criminal than to interrupt a crime, players abiding by the law in an area count towards the general atmosphere of Lawfulness.
Finally, NPC allies (to be fleshed out later) may be able to be influenced to take up residence in an area and contribute positively or negatively to that area's Law score. If the player in an earlier example has rescued a gunsmith from Slavers and that gunsmith has become the player's sidekick, the player may be able to encourage him to lend his skills to a town's Sherriff. That gunsmith NPC will then leave the player and take up residence in the town, contributing to the quality of the NPC police force and potentially even becoming a member of it. Likewise the player may be able to convince the gunsmith that 'if you can't beat em, join em' and have him join a Bandit gang in the area, increasing the crime levels locally and adding a member to their gang. NPC allies will be a valuable and interesting way to impact the game world, because players essentially will be able to install them in locations or groups to act as a liason and to change the face of the world. Those allies become a type of resource that you can earn and spend to make changes.
In the same fashion as Law/Crime, broad conditions like Economy, Technology, Wilderness, Culture and Politics can be affected. Towns may grow to be bustling economic hubs, used by players as a refuge and place to trade (much the way Jita in Eve Online became a de facto trade hub without it being built into the original game that way). Political structures may develop, trade between areas and even war between towns in which players may take sides (or may have instigated in the first place!) All through players gaining and exerting influence on NPCs.
So in general the Influence system comes down to: 1) Developing a relationship with NPCs through questing, 2) Exerting that influence to push the environment towards the player's vision.
Groups of players would have even more power in this sense, because they could jointly direct their efforts to build up a trade hub, start a war between two towns, or eradicate the goody-two-shoes lawmen of an area in a bandit raid.
Because attacking NPCs may be a part of this system, something has to account for whether they can actually be killed or not. Since players of course will never truly be destroyed, if NPCs can be destroyed permanently then you might have a depopulation problem. But at the same time if you can't ever truly kill someone, it becomes a bit silly and the value of killing them is diminished - I do want permanent changes to be an effect. So our hypothetical town sherriff should probably be killable, permanently - but we need a way to balance that with the fact that "if something is possible, it will be done" and figure out what it means when a player decides they want to assassinate a public figure in a town. Of course we do also have a mechanic by which players can install public figures in a town - so it might simply be a battle between building and killing. Plus if the right behaviors are built into the NPCs, it could be next to impossible to kill them - if they are protected by bodyguards, or there is a strong local police force to eliminate any lone assassins. In general the struggle of what would otherwise be called griefers to kill off NPCs should really just be part of the game, since it's going to happen anyway. So every NPC will be in theory killable - but the tactical difficulties of doing that are part of the game. If players form a vast army to invade and try to wipe out an NPC town - more power to them! But if somehow a town forms out of the post-apocalyptic wilderness to become a major hub of civilization and law - well, that's pretty cool too. Groups of players dedicated to the preservation of law and order may naturally spring up, and they would add to the town by rescuing allies and installing them, making the town grow. In this way we could really have a living breathing world that the players themselves are vital to the development of.
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