Quote:
Originally Posted by ibLeo  IMO, the way forward to encourage a player to be more "in character" is to give characters needs, like in the Sims. You set your types of needs and desires when you create the character and then you can't just do the usual "I'll be a saint one minute and a devil the next" tomfoolery; you have to stay in character. Perhaps if we also used Fire Emblem's Rapport System whereby if two characters spend enough time together, they develop a rapport and their enhanced teamwork means that they gain bonuses to their stats when near each other - BUT with the drawback that their company becomes a new "need" whose gauge must be kept relatively full or the character gets depressed from missing their friends and their stats drop drastically.
There could even be a sanity gauge, perhaps, whereby when you continually neglect your character's needs and desires, they go crazy. That way you can't just befriend random NPCs for a while and then randomly kill them later, because your character will be fond of them and murdering them will cause insanity which, although not technically permanent if you return to acting in character, it WILL leave lasting scars on you and maybe your character will randomly suffer from relapses even if you don't do anything else wrong.
There are plenty of ways to enforce a sense of character. |
The game I mentioned earlier attempts something like this, you have a "humanity" level, wich goes from 1 to 10, if you kill an innocent human or are extremely cruel to another being, the level will drop, and can only be regained back by performing good deeds, but the opportunities are quite rare. The thing is, that with less humanity, your dialog choices will be much more limited, and will often come as very violent and insane, easily making NPCs scared of you, losing valuable information, or items, or wathever.
For example, there's a point of the game where you have to infiltrate a private family party, a good way is to try to persuade a family member out of the party to give you his invitation, there are various ways to do so, from passing off as a pitiful person who lost his invitation, to make his wife fight with him. With a low humanity, your choices are mostly limited to "give me a ****ing invitation or I kill you and everyone else in here."