SmartMonsters
  
Welcome
 | 
TriadCity
 | 
Player Pages
 | 
Bookstore
 | 
Links
 | 
Account
  

TriadCity Message of the Day
2005-03-15

Alignment drift as the result of violent acts has been placed under fine-grained control by world authors. Builders now have the ability to flag each NPC so that attackers will receive negative, positive, or no drift.

The default is negative. Attacking nearly any NPC will cause your drift to go negative.

Certain NPCs are flagged positive drift. These tend to be "unnatural" creatures such as vampires, ghasts, ghouls, skeletons, or giant spiders. The positive drift for killing these creatures says, in effect, The world is better without these monsters.

Certain other NPCs are flagged no drift at all. These include Deathsuckers, Flatheads, and other Gym Lemmings. Lack of drift implies that these creatures are free kills for one and all.

Alignment drift as the result of violence occurs only when you're the attacker. If something attacks you, you'll defend yourself automatically, and your drift won't change. Only changes if you initiate the fight.

This list of NPC flags is accurate -- we think -- for right this moment. It'll change, of course, as world authors do their thing.

Back to the MOTD index.

 
 
© 2012 SmartMonsters, Inc. All Rights are Reserved.


"Two of the most common approaches [to academic study of] adventure games seem to be apologetics and trivialization. Both generally fail to grasp the intrinsic qualities of the genre, because they both privilege the aesthetic ideals of another genre, that of narrative literature, typically the novel. For the apologists, adventure games may one day -- when their Cervantes or Dickens comes along -- reach their true potential, produce works of literary value that rival the current narrative masterpieces, and claim their place in the canon. For the trivialists, this will never happen; adventure games are games, they cannot possibly be taken seriously as literature nor attain the level of sophistication of a good novel. Although the trivialists are right -- adventure games will never become good novels -- they are also making an irrelevant point, because adventure games are not novels at all. The adventure game is an artistic genre of its own, a unique aesthetic field of possibilities, which must be judged on its own terms. And while the apologists certainly are wrong, in that the games will never be considered good novels, they are right in insisting that the genre may improve and eventually turn out something rich and wonderful. This may or may not happen, so the only way to understand the genre is to study the various works that already exist and how they are played."
-- Espen J. Aarseth,
Cybertext (info)
Login
Login
Not a Member? Join!
_

Our Sponsors:
Our Sponsors:
_