Getting Fight Locked sucks. But so does getting stuck in NPC-Conversations that draw out emails, and hamper progression. So Conversation Locked is a thing.
In the distant past, we’d punt these to AIM conversations. They took both time requirements and availability concerns.
In today’s world, its email banter. No guarantee you’ll get more than 1. All subject to availability, and time. Ref’s take on a shit-ton of time to invest. And would prefer to stick to creative writing.
I’m playing with an alternative solution powered by AI. The ref will setup an NPC passing it various notes:
NPC Name,
Image,
Personality & Attitude,
Story Hooks,
Conversation End Triggers, and
allow the ref to append any Player-NPC History.
Save the NPC for future use.
In future versions, the NPCs will consider past conversations as well. A form of progression and memory. If say… Bob talked to him a month ago. But Tim is talking to him now, he will remember the conversation from Bob. Might come up, might not.
Ref will indicate the players name this conversation is intended for, and generates a link.
That Link is then passed to the player to enjoy.
All alpha testing. Still an idea in its infancy. But it is quite fun. Play around with the demo conversation a bit. The AI-Demo-Seifer is pretty dumb, doesn’t have a lot of actual game knowledge.
But ask nicely… and we’ll generate a conversation just for you.
Mado asked something of a TLDR in my discord. Thought I’d post it here too:
The concept:
At some point or another, the player will meet a NPC mentioned in one of Dalun’s emails. The character might choose to engage in a conversation with said NPC.
Instead of 1 email a day conversation banter, which kills game progression…
…Dalun could setup this NPC within PMNTS. And send the player a link to conduct his conversation.
Player receives the link, conducts the conversation… then responds to his email with what he does next.
Ref reviews the conversation Summary (or reads the full log), then reads the email… acts accordingly.
Within the NPC ref menu of PMNTS… refs leave story hooks for players to potentially pick up on. Sometimes clues about locations, story, questlines, etc.
I’ve setup a couple of NPCs… they have given away location information after digging for it, saying the right things to receive an item, even caused a fight to break out a handful of times.
They can we written quickly enough… pretty much by anyone with familiarity with DBZ. Like the obvious characters: Piccolo, Goku, etc…
Even by players:
Given their Personality & Attitude, Conversational End Triggers, etc.
At some point though, the ref area will have sensitive information - at which point the password will get locked down to refs only. As only they can really fill in the details for story hooks, and perhaps any Player+NPC history.
ATM, the NPCs have no history of prior conversations enjoyed by beta-tester players. But this is on purpose for the moment. We will give them memory when the time is right.
While this is still in an Alpha state (aka. not involved in the game at this time), this has been identified as a high chance of becoming involved. It’s served by https://pmnts.planetmado.com/ now.
I experimented with it a decent amount this morning and it works pretty well. I think it’ll be a really good option for players who want to have a longer conversation with NPCs and not use up valuable email updates for it.
