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Apocalypse Lawyer

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

vaniver:

Game idea that sprung from a conversation with @brazenautomaton about nonviolent gameplay. Ideally, it’d be Fallout branded, but that’s not necessary

Most RPGs get nonviolent solutions mostly wrong. You click some dialog options, and if you choose the right sequence, people change their minds. This is sort of like how real conversations work, except all the perception and creativity are the author’s. If they have a third solution that you didn’t see, you can take it; if you have a third solution that they didn’t see, or wanted to exclude for some reason, you can’t suggest it.

And it takes real courage for them to actually replace a boss fight with a dialog option. Being able to talk down Legate Lanius is such an example; in Mass Effect, you can, by convincing your opponent they’ve made a colossal mistake, get them to commit suicide–but that means you skip the first stage of a two-stage boss fight.

But there exist games where nonviolent solutions are the primary gameplay mechanism, rather than a shortcut past it. What would it look like to do a similar thing in a Fallout-like setting?

My answer is from David Friedman: viking sagas.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings. Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer–“so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal.” In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles.

Fallout is divided into ‘civilization’ and ‘raiders,’ where you can shoot any raider without penalty (and, indeed, are actively rewarded for killing them). But the player is, in some deep sense, the ultimate raider, roving, killing, and stealing more than anyone else. Almost every quest involves making a bunch more corpses, and almost all of those corpses are people that no one will miss.

Imagine a world where everyone has concentric loyalties, and thus are all ‘morally grey’ in a universalist sense. Very few people are secure enough that they won’t steal from a stranger if presented with a good opportunity, and no one will choose to let their brother die instead of a stranger. In order to neutralize bad elements without earning the enmity of everyone else, you need to put them on trial, basically. In order to end feuds without mutual extermination, you collect wergild. Incidentally, that’s how the players gets paid–victimization creates property rights, which NPCs can sell to the PC, as well as rewarding them for doing natural things for a rover like delivering mail. (Imagine that, a courier who actually delivers the mail!)

A ‘quest’ doesn’t look like “there’s a bunch of mirelurks in the watering hole, kill them all,” it looks like “tribe A and tribe B are about to come to blows over their disagreement over the watering hole; can you convince them of a peaceful resolution?” And if you can’t come to a successful peaceful resolution, they’ll fight, and a fight may develop into a feud, and a feud may result in a tribe getting wiped out. 

What’s neat about this is that you can procedurally generate these disputes, not just by drawing cards from a “dispute” deck or having them always be the same when the player visits a particular town, but by simulating the game world. People consume food and water and various services; other people provide those services or obtain that food and water. And if you can’t trade, you steal, and if you can’t get along, you fight. Combine with a personality and relationship model, and you have a world where conflicts to settle will arrive as a natural consequence of time moving forward. If there’s not enough water to go around, someone is going to get dehydrated, and they (and their friends and family) are not going to be happy about it.

So anyway, in order for this to work well the conversation model needs to be very well done. My thought is allow the player to basically string together ‘concepts’ according to some rules, trying to make various arguments to sway the opinion of other people around them. (They collect those concepts from people they meet along the way / stories they learn / etc., and can also teach them to others.) Much of the challenge, I suspect, is figuring out what will convince who, especially if there’s a lot of things similar to a jury trial where one’s arguing a case before a council.

I’d play it.

I’d program it.

…the mvp is the conflict resolution model. A simple system of characters, attributes, connections, needs, wants, loyalties, reputations, concepts. Trivial enough to be easy to keep track of, non-trivial enough to show the potential. Easy to expand later. Probably start simple with a single location where everyone is constantly, the minimum number of characters, initially hard-coded conflicts to test the conflict-solving system, then emergent processes to test those, then expanding the world in width and depth…

That seems like it’s going to go into an ugly mess quickly.  It’s going to blow up exponentially with the number of people each considering which friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend will do what before killing each other.

Cognitive shortcuts, just like reality! To get results way closer to genuine than the rest of the system would ever be able to process, we only need to consider at most n(dunbar) connections for everyone (and those can be combined into groups and affiliations), combined with people’s self-perceptions as having traits and reputations. “I am a honest person, thus I will not lie. I don’t really care about my extended family, thus I will weigh the effects on them less.”

And then they will disregard that one farm kid who will grow up with the single-minded obsession to take them down, just like in stories…

And we can create hypercompetent big bad chessmaster characters simply by omitting the shortcuts and having them be actually capable of thorough modeling!

3 weeks ago · 127 notes · source: vaniver · .permalink

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    Lawyers, like cockroaches before them, would thrive in the place beyond civilization. With their forbidden arts of...
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    @megaultravires
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    I’m just impressed that there are ancient Icelandic sagas about a lawyer
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