rpatten wrote:
Double? Probably triple. But I am looking for ideas on subtly guiding the conversation.
I've looked at blogs, articles and coding examples, but either I'm missing something, or this hasn't been talked about much. Perhaps it is unattainable, but I believe it can be done.
Conversation is the biggest pain as far as game design goes, and at some point, you've got to look at the law of diminishing returns. If you have only a small number of conversations in the game (say three), then ok. More than that, I'd say it's not worth doing.
Why do I say that? The complexity explosion for one. If you have three NPCs interacting, say, and each has two topics, then you have nine possibilities that you have to design (3^2). More topics = more possibilities, and even if each topic only has one NPC that will say something about it, you still have to go through the work to design all of this. Now if the PC possesses an NPC, if he's not going to be bound by the NPC's knowledge (or script), then your conversation map just went out the window, and the complexity ramped up even more.
For two, most players won't care about switching characters at conversation point A versus B, and you can easily concoct a plausible explanation why possession can't happen in midstream (concentration perhaps). All your work just won't be used in most game sessions.
Last, the ability to take over an NPC is way more interesting than the ability to do so in the middle of a conversation. If you forbid this, the PC will possess different people, trying to see what they know about the other characters. If the PC can possess someone in the middle of a conversation, he'll still resort to this serial conversation technique, because there's no guarantee he can switch in time once he discovers something. Many conversations are one-way streets ("I've already talked about that and I'm done with it!"), so he'll have to go back and start from square one with a new conversation anyways.
My WIP, Seasons, is pretty heavy on conversation, and I'm not using I7, but the same principles apply. Only you'll probably be more frustrated than I am, due to the endless beta of I7.
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