New type of NPC
crowds/swarms

This would allow for GMs to puppet themely riots and mobs more effectively, and require teamwork to take down.

With the way combat is, it'd need an entire rework so we weren't hitting an entire angry mob in the left ear with a baton. And that's way too much work to suggest for this sort of concept.

Like I said, -everything- would need to be reworked and have a dozen more things attached to it. I think we're good as is.

This would -not- be some afternoon's work.

But honestly, I really think you could just flavor it as, 'you swing your dildo at one of the mob-goers and hit a mob-goer in the left ear.'

It's exactly how messages work. You don't need to track specific mob-goers or crowd NPCs, because it's just one big crowd with one health bar that represents the strength of the crowd in general, and an abstracted 'weapon' they use to attack.

Literally every weapon has dozens of messages attached to it. Each one with three points of view.

You spin around Batko, tripping Batko with a sweep of your leg, and bop Batko in the ear.

HolyChrome spins around you, tripping you with a sweep of her leg, and bops you in the ear.

HolyChrome spins around Batko, tripping Batko with a sweep of her leg, and bops Batko in the ear.

Now do this for every hit, miss, block, and parry. For every point of view. For every weapon.

Every single one would need -new- messages added so they had context.

You spin around 'someone in the crowd', tripping 'someone in the crowd' with a sweep of your leg, and bop 'someone in the crowd' in the ear.

'an angry mob-goer' spins around you, tripping you with a sweep of her leg, and bops you in the ear.

'an angry mob-goer' spins around 'someone in the crowd', tripping 'someone in the crowd' with a sweep of her leg, and bops 'someone in the crowd' in the ear.

It's not a beautiful implementation, but we have animals that rub their eyes as they wake up from being unconscious, too, so it's not exactly the worst looking messages.

It's a matter of having the effective name of the 'NPC' here being these words. Not saying it's easy, I haven't looked at the code, but I don't think it'd need a huge rework or anything.

Good and neat, but way more of an undertaking than you might imagine for little in the way of results.

Really, anything is technically- able to be coded . Just a matter of how much of a complete pain in the ass it would be to create and integrate. This would be up there on that scale.

The concept of a crowd, giving it population characteristics, what the percentage is any given group. Those groups have factions, those factions can drive behavior.

When it comes to combat, we spawn npcs dynamically when you shop in the market. This could work the same way in that when the mob is attacking someone, npcs are flitting in and out of existence and the player has no ability to prevent any individual from the crowd from fleeing back into it and being replaced by other attackers. And yes, crowds could spawn multiple npcs in this manner.

I like this idea and its evolutionary from where we are today. Good stuff.

Even beyond code, I don't think this would be a fulfilling experience when we already have individual puppets to manage. This seems like one of those things that's far better on paper than it is in action.

From a combat standpoint, fighting five people is far different from fighting one thing representing give people.

From an RP standpoint, what if you want to capture one person out of the group?

I feel like it would water down interactions with puppets and move away from how we're supposed to treat all NPCs as people rather than "mobs" in a game. Pun absolutely intended.

I disagree, not entirely, but enough to respond. I believe there is absolutely an application for something like this. While I understand that there is a huge difference between fighting five people and fighting one thing representing five people, there are also many other things in the game that are compromises in the name of theme.

From an RP standpoint, capturing one person out of a mob is difficult to begin with, as the moment you grapple one person out of the mob, you open yourself up to being grappled by several of them in turn. Beyond that though, by using a mob to represent a group, the GM is worrying about one token, and has the attention to spawn in the individual NPC you captured if the scene calls for it.

As to your point about this watering down interaction with NPC as people, I feel like this is a fair complaint, but I think the counterpoint to that is that this idea embraces the large world mentality that we seek in our RP. A nameless mob of protestors rampaging around Gold is far more thematic (in my opinion) than three named NPCs walking around different corners of the sector and causing PCs to have to run from point A to B to C and back again.

@Jameson

I am not experienced enough to even begin to try and figure out how exactly this affects game balance. The systems of Sindome that purposefully obfuscate the mechanics from the players make that a nearly impossible task to begin with. That being said, I also do not have the power to unilaterally implement something like this. The people who develop the game however do have the ability, and the insight into the mechanical balance. I would trust that our fine coders and game developers would balance this suggestion if implemented in order to make it fit with the meta as they determine is best.

"What do we gain?" However is something I feel somewhat armed to respond to. Much as I responded to HolyChrome above, I think we gain a better sense of the scale of Withmore when we are not fighting the same named NPCs or even one or two generic NPCs, but rather a seething faceless mob that is angry about their lot in life or about splicers or even about the apartment complex two blocks north of them that got a new soda machine installed. There is a TON of themely RP to be had by giving the GM's this additional tool in their toolbelt. But again, if the developers do not think it's worth it, they will not implement it, so I don't think you have much to worry about there.

Thank you both for your insight and feedback though, I really appreciate the candid feedback everyone gives in these threads. <3

I think there's already issues with characters parsing no NPCs as a room being empty, it stands to reason that a coded crowd in one room and not in another means the room without is not crowded, which is not the case necessarily, but the feedback given to the player wouldn't make that clear.

Mobbing with a chance of riots.

Love it.