Traditional RPGs get stale rather quickly.  They are set in a specific time period which never seems to end.  There is a history to the world, usually something like "once upon a time the world was ruled by a council of just wizards, but there was a great battle and they suddenly vanished, leaving the world chaotic and infested with monsters."  The player is then asked if they have the strength to save the world and rid it of evil - a possibility which the player is certain of, even though everyone knows the world will never be saved.  The only real goals in the game include killing the most monsters and accumulating the most wealth and shiniest equipment.  The players on top are always on top, the players on the bottom are always on the bottom, and the lower class (read: level) is always working its way up to the upper class.

So how about something a little different?  Worlds don't stay the same forever.  Sometimes it pays to be a soldier, and others it pays to be a farmer.  My idea is to create a world which is easily changed.  The world will move in phases, with the storyline being affected by the actions of the players.  At different times, different players will have certain advantages and disadvantages.  Sometimes the fighters will be the heroes, sometimes the craftsmen.  It is not always the players who have been around the longest who are the top dogs.  The ability to prepare for and adapt to change will be what counts, not the patience to spend the most time killing monsters.

Basic Dynamics

Players can use whatever skill they want, provided they purchase the tools, which aren't too expensive.  The class they choose in the beginning determines only their starting equipment.  Skills develop by using them, but the lowest-leveled items created by crafting skills are the most useful, so it's not wasted.  XP is gained in two ways at once: failing at a skill will give experience to the skill only, but succeeding will give experience to both the skill and the character.  One can only learn to fight by fighting and farm by farming, but fighting and farming and all other skills will also make the overall player stronger (gain HP, max hunger, water, stamina).  Leveling will intentionally be slow, so as to keep the plot from moving too quickly.

Every player has certain needs.  They need food, water, and sleep.  Food is provided by farmers, water is freely available in streams, and sleep can be gotten by resting in a bed or chair.  While a player sleeps, they are vulnerable, but the inn in town has rooms which can be locked.  The three basic needs decrease at varying rates.  Water decreases fastest, then green food (vegetable), then red food (meat), then stamina.

The goals of a player are fulfillment of their needs as well as accumulation of wealth.  Private property is expensive but obtainable.  Players begin with communal property (the farm, the crafters guild, the mountain).  Private property must be guarded.  The only thing that prevents people from stealing from and killing each other is the same as it is in real life: fear of death.  When a player dies, they lose everything they are carrying as well as 10% of their total experience.  PVP combat is unaffected by level and skill: when a player attacks another player, there is a 1 in 10 chance of hitting them, no matter what, and damage is calculated as a percentage of hit points, rather than a set number.  Higher level players cannot simply massacre lower level players, because they are as vulnerable as anyone.

A player's inventory is viewable by anyone.  This doesn't mean that players can steal items, only see what other players are carrying.  This is a way to show off what you have, and also a way to keep troublemakers in check - if a player is found to be carrying a prohibited item in town (like a lock pick), other players might choose to gang up on them and kill them or throw them in jail, or at least demand that they destroy the item (when a player destroys an item, it posts a message that everyone in the vicinity can see).  Eventually, crafters will learn how to make containers which can conceal items.

Examples

The game is first released, and the world is at peace.  The only threat to the starting village is some wolves coming down from the mountain which eat the livestock.  A new player can become a farmer, a craftsman, or a soldier, defending the town from the wolves.  The wolves will spawn somewhere on the mountain, and move towards the player farms.  If they reach a player farm, they will eat one of the animals there and then disappear.  Craftsmen can create fences to protect the farms, but they decay over time and must be replaced.  Wolf pelts can be sold to a vendor for cash, keeping soldiers going and able to buy the necessities of life.  Other vendors will purchase a random crop each day for a low price, as well as a random crafted item, so all players have a basic source of money.  The food system should be set up so that the farmers do not overproduce, making food too cheap, and crafted items decay over time so that the market is not flooded with them.

Several things can trigger a change:

A soldier might follow the wolves to their source, a complex maze of tunnels and caves.  If the player manages to navigate to the deepest depths (fighting stronger and stronger wolves as they go), they will discover magical rocks around which all the wolves spawn.  The player has the option to destroy the rock (which will defend itself with lightning bolts, the player must fight it to destroy it and must be reasonably strong to do so).  If the player succeeds, the rock will be permanently destroyed and the wolves specific to that rock will stop coming.  This will be good for the farmers, as they will no longer need to defend themselves against wolves.  It will be bad, however, for the soldiers, if all the wolves are gone, because they will then have nothing to fight, no skins to sell, and no way to make money.  They will ultimately have to take up another trade.  The name of the player(s) who destroyed the stones will be made public, giving them fame or notoriety depending on the perspective.  Once this has been the situation for a short while, and everyone is talking about the disappearing wolves, a moderator will implement another change.  Meanwhile, the storyline starts to form.  What were the stones?  Who made them and put them there?  Why?  All of these questions will eventually be answered.

Farmers provide all the food for the players.  Different types of food give different points.  Meat gives red points (more for cow, less for chicken) and veggies give green points (each vegetable gives a different amount).  Certain vegetables will be obvious choices for farmers to grow, because they take the least time and give the most points (corn will probably be the best of these).  What the farmers don't know right away is that if you grow the same vegetable on the same spot fifty times in a row, that spot will no longer be able to grow that vegetable.  They will get a message when they try to plant the seed that the soil's fertility no longer suits that plant.  Some farmers may figure out that if they rotate which crops they plant on each spot, they will not have this problem.  Other players will likely switch to the next most productive crop, then the next, etc., until they can no longer grow anything on their property.  These farmers will be forced to use the public land (which is reset from time to time) until someone discovers how to make compost.  If nobody figures out crop rotation, there will be a food shortage.  People can hunt for game meat and wild berries on the mountain, but these are hard to find and offer little sustenance.  There will also be a vendor in town which always sells peanuts at a low price, but which restore only 1 point for each type of hunger.

Crafters will trigger several changes by discovering new items to make.  In the crafter's inventory they can "combine" an item with another item in their inventory, or "use" a tool on an item (or combination of items) to see what they can make.  Most items have unrealistically complicated manufacture, making it difficult to find out how to make many of them.  One of these is the lockpick.  Until it is discovered, there is no way around locks, and everything locked is secure.  Once a player has a lockpick in their inventory, they gain the lockpick skill.  Lockpicks are expensive to make, one use and have a high failure rate, making leveling lockpick very difficult.  Still, locks will not be completely secure again until someone finds out how to make fortified locks.  Players will have to defend their possessions by fighting, making traps, building barriers, or storing them in the bank, which has a fortified lock.  Of course, eventually someone will learn how to make dynamite, enabling them to pass fortified locks (though the materials needed to make it will be extremely rare, mined in the mountain with only 1 in 5000 odds of getting it), and so the cycle continues.  Another such item is the compost bin - once farmers can compost and restore their soil's fertility, they can again grow the same plants.  Rotating crops, however, will still be more efficient than relying on compost, which is difficult to make.

Once the wolves have been gone for a short while, the next major phase comes into effect.  The river dries up, taking away the main source of water.  There is a well in the center of town, but it has been closed off by the mayor, who is now selling small drinks for a price.  The players now have two choices: learn how to make wells, or explore to find another source of water.  Wells can be made on private property, but they are difficult and expensive.  Following the riverbed will reveal a mountain pass that was formerly filled with water, so now players can explore further.  There is a lake on the other side, but the entire area is goblin territory.  The soldiers have a purpose again - fight off the goblins to get to the water and bring it back to town to sell.

The triggers in this phase will be a little different.  Again, the soldiers will eventually find the source of the problems - the goblin warlord, who insists on leading his tribe with a violent culture.  This warlord will be incredibly powerful, and will probably kill many soldiers before he is finally defeated.  Once he is, the passage he was guarding will be open, and inside the players will find the peaceful chieftain of the goblins.  She will tell the players that the warlord had taken over and forced them to be violent, but they were actually, at heart, a very peaceful people.  The warlord was the one who blocked off the river to form the lake, but now it will be opened back up, and the river will flow back to the town.  Furthermore, the goblins are excellent farmers, and offer to sell their produce and meat to the human settlement for a very low price.  The well will be opened back up, the river will flow again (the pass will widen to allow players through), and a new goblin vendor appears in town selling very cheap food.  Now the farmers have no work other than selling to the vendors, and must take up another trade.  The soldiers are kept employed by the goblins, who are now beset by strong wolves and will pay a lot for their pelts.  This time, however, their source will not be so easy to find and remove.

But What About Power Leveling?

There is none.  The type of player who wants only to grind until they are the most powerful player is not going to have much luck here.  Which skills are useful will change as the game progresses, and over time some skills will be eliminated completely.  This game is not about being the strongest.  It's about adapting to change, anticipating what comes next, and engaging with the storyline.  The game designers will always be working on ways to take the most powerful players down a notch.

Of course, a game does need some competition and achievement, and that will be accomplished with trophies.  Players get trophies for accomplishing certain tasks - maxing a skill, selling a certain number of an item to a vendor, etc.  Players who set off plot points will get special trophies.  The trophies are actual items which can be carried in a player's inventory, or displayed in their house.  Trophies are the only items which can't be lost by dying or stolen by thieves.  If a trophy is in an area where everything gets destroyed, it will be returned to its owner's inventory.

About Sappho

Sappho is the game designer.  She is a 22-year-old with a BA in comparative literature, minor in classical studies, and graduated magna cum laude and with honors this past May.  She is planning to go to graduate school after taking a year to travel.  She is skilled with writing, linguistics, foreign languages, and maps.  She can speak English, German, some Spanish, a little Italian, French, and Russian, and can read and write decent Latin and basic Ancient Greek.  She was recently a team member of a group of students and professors doing field research on the effects of coffee farming on mammals in Costa Rica's rainforest.  She has been drinking vodka for years and has never once gotten sick due to alcohol consumption.  She has been designing games since age eight, and has been trying to learn to code these games since age ten.

And whenever she tries to learn a programming languages, she gets as far as if...then statements okay, then, as soon as variables come into play, she has a minor nervous breakdown.

Despite reading endless online tutorials and even taking a high school course on Visual Basic, Sappho has never been able to learn the fine art of programming.  Something in her brain simply refuses to comprehend it.  She likens the feeling to trying to learn calculus in her freshman year of college - at first, the professor might as well have been speaking Chinese, the stress of which caused many nights of frustration, stress, and crying.  Eventually, it clicked, and she did well (she earned an A in MTH 141).  The next semester she dared to try Calculus 2.  She spent the entire semester in freaking-out-stressed-crazy-I-don't-understand-this mode, and managed only a C in MTH 142.

Basically, she either needs a programmer to write the code for this game, or a tutor who is capable of teaching advanced calculus to a linguist (this type of person would almost certainly be able to get coding to "click" in her mind).

Sappho can be reached at saphosgolos@yahoo.com - please don't hesitate to contact her with questions, comments, thoughts, inquiries, debasing insults, compliments, offers, and gratitude. 

Notes: All of the content on this page is original and property of Sappho, copyright 2007.  Do not copy or redistribute this information without permission.  To ask for permission or apply to help create the game, contact saphosgolos@yahoo.com.  The game is designed for implementation with the Byond gaming system (www.byond.com), but the developer is open to creating it with other systems.