Tavern gossip

Hi folks!

Don't know if somebody posted something similar before... made a couple of searches and didn't find anything, so here it goes. Even if It's a bit of a longshot, i think it's a cool feature we may consider to have. I'll use colored letters to present the core idea, in an attempt of stopping busy guys from doing a TL;DR.

I keep reading about order vs chaos, and guild wars, and so on... so i assume there will be something alike faction wars, and in this kind of clashes there's something overlooked, and that's information. This information has been managed in games usually using "mole characters", which as far as i'm concerned is against the spirit of the game. But that's not the only source of information. What about gossip?

I'll try to illustrate this with an example. Imagine that the Nefarious Evildoers of the Last Night decide to strike down once and for all his nemesis guild, the Righteous Defenders of the Sacred Hand. To do such, they start arming themselves buying new gear, and to "finance" his war effort they spend a couple of days plundering and killing travellers in the Nightingale's road. Imagine now the scene of one survivor reaching the nearest tavern claiming that the Nefarious Evildoers are assaulting travellers in the Nightingale's road. It will be matter of time that news travel to the rest of taverns in the world, and if the Nefarious evildoers don't take haste in their assault, probably the Righteous Defenders will hear from a barman about their heinous act, and take them in consideration. Apart from that, other travellers hearing the gossip will avoid the Nightingale road since they won't take the risk of being robbed, thus reducing the plundering benefits.

Keeping it simple, notorious activities made by guilds, factions or cities could be implemented as gossip from some NPC's fitting the role (as i said before, barmans are the first choice that comes to my mind) This could be done with some data control by the server, which could raise a flag if an activity from players from a certain faction become "spiked" (meaning the activity reached a value with a significant deviation from the average instances of that activity). Some examples (Event --> Gossip):
- Members of guild XYZ bought more items than usual --> XYZ is getting ready for trouble!
- Members of guild XYZ fought a lot with members of the ABC guild --> there are whispers of war beween XYZ and ABC...
- City ASDF sold more items than usual --> Tales of prosperity came from the merchants of ASDF!

Giving it a bit more of complexity, it could even make gossip to "travel" giving a certain timer to npc's to start spreading the gossip (depending on the distance to the location where most of the events took place) and even include guild, factions, or city names as tags for NPC's to look about specific gossip. It could even be linked to resourceful zones, so players could get intel about state of resource explotation in that zone... or getting the idea into further development, an skill could be implemented which one of its uses being able to "tweak" this numbers up or down, so given enough people using this skill for the same purpose could end in false gossips coming up, or true ones disappearing.

Well... I hope nobody came up with this before because it ended up being a bit of a long post... It would be a shame so much typing for nothing! Either way, i'd love to hear some constructive feedback on this

 

I like this idea. Something similar was posted a while back. Not only did they propose a lore skill that could gather information, but also gypsy magic that could derive similar information using divination.

 

If I recall correctly they also mentioned having localized information as well. I cannot find those posts. They go back to right before the Dev+ forums started, and continued into dev+ a little bit.

I like this idea. t would be nice to have NPCs to share information, and it travel across the land.

Then again I also like the idea that player characters can gather information and be able to share information as well. That way a tavern could have a real player that can give information (that they gathered personally), to other players.

Even if it wasn't a skill, some good role players might make it their business to gather all the up to date information from across the world, and share it with people at their local tavern. (seems like player run taverns might want to have a guy or two dedicated to gathering knowledge for this reason)

 

Its a form of Crier, I like the concept

 

We were also proposing that there be something like that for local info. I am not sure that they can get it in by Episode 1 but it would be good to keep our thoughts out there in case the team feels ready to move on it.

 

I think these are great ideas, but I would modify it in the following way. News of any kind (gossip, rumors, events, etc) shouldn't magically be known by NPCs. They either need to witness it, be told it by players or more critically, by other NPCs.

The concept is that NPCs have social and knowledge graphs. In terms of NPC AI, when NPCs visit each other (again, based on their social graphs), they relay information back and forth (knowledge graph). This works between two NPCs or between an NPC and PC. So this system could allow the scenarios described above to happen in-game. Would love to see them implement this.

 

That's actually awesome! My initial suggestion uses a "third witness" overseer to make it simple... but I must agree with you; thinking about how to develop it, it's certainly the way to go. You could actually get ready to attack an enemy guild so fast that your army travels faster than the gossip... or just make sure you leave no witnesses behind .

Indeed, an elegant way of making a core system which manages not only gossip, but also a sort of "information flow" between the inhabitants of Novia. Just got something worth considering... In the PC-to-NPC flow this system could be passive or active. I'll explain myself:

• By passive I mean every NPC you approach gains knowledge of everything worth knowing. This way you make the information flow faster, but it's more or less the same i proposed.
• An active way means the information exchange requires actual interaction with some NPC; the info will be deployed on that NPC and then it's handled by the NPC charts. It could be done a bit more specific so PC's control where they deploys the knowledge, giving the info to an NPC only by an specific command (NPC roleplay anyone? ).

What do you guys would like most?

 

Even if there isn't a skill, or ability to regurgitate text wouldn't it be nice if player's who have lots of knowledge of the game would role play sages and hang out in taverns from time to time just to give information to players about events they know possibly for a few pieces of gold just to role play?

People who have played through the story could help out newbies, but rather than just tell people exactly how to do something, tell them a tale or give them an idea of where to follow up on something.

 

One way to get the info out to players would be using taverns as a healing and resting place, buy a couple drinks some food, players talking amongst themselves, and NPC picking up on that information and then gossiping about it! you conquered a couple things here, economics (buy ale and food), healing area (for those that have little or no healing), and a way to bring players together(social) that may or may not have even met, without this. It increases a social dynamic getting more and more players meeting each other and forming groups etc... I like the idea of the OP, i would rather buy and sell through other players (RP), but i coudl also buy ale and food from the economy, if there was a perk to find out whats is going on!, the gossip only comes after youve bought some food or drink from NPC tavern people.