Department:Writing

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This article covers are relevant aspects concerning setting, story and general writing.

Contents

Introduction

What makes the game? The way I see it, we want to create a rich and detailed WORLD in which the PC is free to explore and find "fun" things to do (fun for the Player). Essentially, I consider the world 20 years post WWIII to be a vast wilderness, overgrown with forest with plenty of wild animals. No shortage of human predators, either. Also, it's cold. It's snowy and frozen most of the year, and midwinter is brutally cold and extremely dangerous. However, the world is not (yet...) completely frozen out, there is still a short thaw and growing season (longer as you move south - in this case towards the equator).

Scattered about this wliderness are bits of civilizations... or at least, habitiations. These are Locations. They need your help in creating them. The Locations are basically groups of people with people-like problems, and people-like dreams, and people-like desires. These people are NPCs that the Player, through his PC avatar interacts with. Life can be pretty miserable, scraping together enough food to survive, keeping warm, planning for the long winter, fighting off the wolves and bandits. But there is warmth in there too. And intrigue. And evil. And banality. And Humor. Especially black humor.

The Player meets these people basically by talking to them. What they say and what they do, and what he/she does in response really makes up the game. If you are not familiar with the lingo - when you do stuff that an NPC asks you, it's called a quest. There are basically two types of writing we need for PARPG. One is background - Why is this location the way it is? Why did people choose this place to coalesc around? What are the factions holding it together? Tearing it apart? What is going to happen if the PC intervenes? If he doesn't intervene? The second type of writing is more direct. We need quests. We need dialogue and dialogue options written for all the little (and big) people the NPC encounters.

Make it real.

For a more mechanics based treatment see: How To Play the game

Drafts

These are more or less completed, or at least, accepted proposals.

Setting

Main Story Line

At this moment, we have not decided on a primary story line, although a few things have been proposed:

Smaller stories and ideas

NPCs and Locations

The Player Character and Origin

This overlaps heavily with the Mechanics section. Proposals:Character_generation_and_stats#Character_Origin The general idea is to have "multiple" back stories, customized to some extent, for individual PCs. The may lead to "several" initial starting locations (than can be merged into the main "Trunk" of quests)

Writing dialogue for PARPG

Proposals

Tools

Right now, your favorite text editor. Proposed GUI: http://forums.parpg.net/index.php?topic=481.0

General

Dialogue creation

The current dialogue interface is to create specific YAML files containing dialogue mixed with simple gamestate interaction callbacks and conditionals. Currently, the interface is being extended to handle more complicated quests. A GUI editor has been proposed as well (see above)

Some early thoughts

  • Dia for creating dialogue trees as visual flowcharts. XML-based file format.
  • KompoZer - flexible HTML editor, easy web-style hyperlinking.

Questions

  • What should be the workflow for quest/dialogue writers? Should these tasks, in fact be done by different people? This has not been decided yet. I think either way is fine for now - if you want to write a quest skeleton (but not "real" dialogue) you can create the structure of the quest (in whatever tool we have at the moment) using place holders. Conversely, if you just want to write a text document describing what could happen (even including multiple NPCs) but have exact quotes, etc., someone else could convert that into a set of YAML files composing a quest.

Notes and Inspiration

Right now, this is just a link dump to discussions or inspirations at the PARPG forums and elsewhere.

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