Elven Academy

Thank you to whomsoever purchased a few of my books.

Please note that the first book is Down Where The Blue Violet Beauties Bloom. The book Inside The Dark Heart Of The Garden is actually book three. I need to fix my link or something, because my Smashwords profile page lists the books in the reverse order, based on when they were uploaded. They should be read in the opposite order, from bottom to top.

I was assuming people were buying “Dark Heart” because it is the most sexy-looking and has incubi, but it could also be the misleading order the books are listed. I don’t know, but it needs to be fixed.

So, about the game project. I’ve completed another full playthrough of current content, and I fixed a lot of typos and bugs. Some of those bugs only showed up when played in Spanish, or with a male character, or in Darkgame mode for example. This is a big challenge of QA for the game.

So I decided to go ahead and upload those fixes.

I was pleased that gear seemed to be working well, without noticeable glitches. A total gear handling overhaul was considered, and it’s something that might happen in the future.

I noticed that Chapter A results in some fairly high character stats. I am considering reducing stat gains after the player reaches the second Chapter B, nudging the somewhat experienced player, with some gear to select from, to start considering their gear loadout for adventures. Or I’ll need to tweak the stat gains a bit from the beginning.

The only actual content added here is a new library book: Elven Dating: Using the Modern Arts of Psychology For Success. That should be found in the in-game library under a new Psychology category.

I am still working on Outdoor Adventure C3: Return to the Town of Terror. I considered pushing for a Halloween release, but I’ve been focused on oil painting instead, while writing down my game dev ideas for when I have time.

General patch notes:

Created a formal story and character arc tracker spreadsheet, because the different stories and timelines are getting a bit complicated.

Added mouseover tooltips to the six gear slots in the character sheets. You can now see the stat breakdowns on individual pieces of gear. Ease of managing items and gearing still could use a lot of improvement.

Added C and M hotkeys for opening character sheet and map. Space bar chooses first dialogue option.

A1: Revised and reduced wordy paragraphs yet again. Added missing translations. Fixed a missing graphic.
A2: Minor typo corrections, bits of added dialog, clarifications.
A3: fixed a wand issue for female Dandelion, fixed a game-breaking conversation bug.
A4: Cut and added more paragraph breaks to wordy paragraphs. Developed character goals and motivations for Connor and Jeanie.
A5: Spanish translation corrections.
A6: Spanish translation corrections.
A7: Minor edits and typo corrections.

C1: Spent hours fixing a dizzying array of Spanish translation failures, including text variables mislabeled and therefore missing, paragraph reductions, and paragraph breaks added, which were never previously done.
C2: Translation editing and proofreading, fixed missing translations. More paragraph breaks, reduced cringiness of over-enthusiastic dialog.

D1: Spanish editing and proofreading. Fixes to egregious game-breaking bugs at the final recap conversation. Fixed broken save progress at end. This could still be polished more, including adding health bars for the monsters.

D2: fixed some typos in generated combat text. Fixed spelling of ‘liege’, and the translation to ‘señor’. Fixed broken save code. Fixed display errors of combat spell icons in Spanish first language modes.

I’m currently done with WoW Classic for a while, and I’m back to work on Elven Academy. I’m working on B1: Down The Rabbit Hole. This is the first module in chapter B, which I believe will take the adventurer on a sea voyage to the Unseelie Court.

While writing scenarios for B1, I realized that I’m not using the Persuasion stat much at all. Instead I’m using the other diplomacy stats (Empathy, Intimidation, Presence, etc.) as finer-grained, better flavored methods of persuading in the game. This is bit of an issue.

So I researched my inspiration for using Persuasion as a stat, which was Vampire The Masquerade. Unfortunately I don’t find any in-depth Reddit posts on this topic addressing pen and paper gameplay. I do find a forum post for the VtM:Bloodlines CRPG titled “Persuasion is overpowered, seduction and intimidation are weak.”

According to this post, VtM:Bloodlines took the opposite approach as I am. They over-used Persuasion as a catch-all means of persuading someone, unless there was a clear-cut situation that demanded a specific way of Persuading. I feel like that is non-optimal. I’ve already discussed Diplomacy at length in a previous post: Diplomacy Roleplay In Video Games: Part One, but lets look again.

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Alternatives To Persuasion

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I could replace Persuasion, but I need yet another fine-grained way to persuade. I already have Presence (Leadership), Empathy (Sense Motive, Emotional Connection), Mercantile (Haggling), Intimidation, and Deception (Lying, Cheating).

Possible other ideas:

Manners – knowledge and use of social decorum and refined speech. A lot of this is in Presence.
Seduction – using flattery, attractiveness, sexual desire to persuade.
Logic – trying to reason with someone, appeal to intellect.

Manners sounds boring, but I’ve wanted manners to be important to the elves. The main problem with Seduction is that it overlaps with the Romance stat, which I’ve implemented currently in the skills/professions category.

A discussion on RPG StackExchange came up with some other ideas like Logic and Acting. Logic is interesting, but Acting is hard to implement in a scripted CRPG. Pen and paper would work better for both this and Manners, I think.

A reddit user spoke of breaking Diplomacy into sub-skills, which I’ve already done. They suggest skills related to socio-economic backgrounds, i.e. Aristocracy, Street, etc. This is something that has been tried, i.e. in Cyberpunk 2020.

So this would be a vote for a Manners-type stat, but how do you use this to persuade people, or make real action and decisions happen in the game? It’s sketchy in terms of gameplay without a GM.

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Persuasion Based On Socioeconomic Kinship

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So this idea is to break your Diplomacy ability as a whole into your character background: aristocrat, warrior class, street urchin, and priest class, for example. You’re better at negotiating with your own people. This makes a lot of sense.

This idea doesn’t translate to any gameplay, however. Gameplay would be the idea of Cyberpunk 2077, which is to create stories based on your background. Obviously we can give bonuses based on background. We could tie this into a reputation system. Suppose you weren’t born a warrior, but you’ve done a million quests for the warrior’s guild.

The effect would be equal. Background and Reputation both equate to roll bonuses, maybe non-overlapping. Whichever is higher, to prevent overpowered effects like the one cited in the post linked above.

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Persuasion Based On Leverage

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In the comment to the discussion on Diplomacy, a GM mentioned the importance of leverage in the game “Dungeon World”: “There’s a Move (action, basically) called Parlay, which sort of covers what Persuasion and Intimidate skills would cover in a different game. The trick is that you can’t make a roll unless you have some form of ‘leverage’.”

It seems to me that leverage is a continuum, and each end renders it useless as a mechanic to implement. This leverage can often be boiled down to a quest item. “Here is the XYZ, now give me the thing/fight me/etc.” Or the leverage is moot. “Will five gold coins suffice?” (Just use haggle or another diplomacy skill that in this case just costs money.)

In the middle of that continuum between 100% leverage, and leverage you always have (gold), you have bonuses to the roll based on the strength of the leverage.

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Conclusion

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Origins (Street, Aristocrat, etc.) and Reputation could be employed as simple roll bonuses towards diplomacy skills. This means each NPC needs to be coded with a faction, which I’ve already done. Another way to code the NPC’s is with a disposition. The original Fallout games by Interplay used disposition heavily when negotiating with NPC’s, and the change in NPC facial expression was graphically rewarding at the time.

Disposition is overly complicated for the goals of my simple RPG. I’m going with KISS (Keep it simple, stupid), which is consistent with the inspirations for my game. And I’m leaning towards not replacing Persuasion with Seduction, but rather re-defining Persuasion per se to be like a seduction. It is derived from the same stats that Seduction would come from, and used when Seduction would be used.

As an aside, I’m also planning to replace the icons for the Diplomacy skills into something more representative. How do you arrive at icons for Diplomacy skills? The only theme of icons that seems to work, at the moment, is close-ups of eyes and eyebrows. Mouths can’t express enough.

I thought about icons showing hands (i.e. a fist for Intimidation, a handshake for Mercantile.) Or stick figures (i.e. a ninja for deception). I also considered animals, because this is an elven themed game. A bear for intimidation. An eagle for presence. A snake for deception. What animal persuades? What animal is empathic?

That’s all for now. Thanks for visiting, happy gaming, and feel free to leave a comment below.

French Club is now live! Visit Professor Souray on the sunset balcony to learn a bit about French. Features include:

• Study the basics of French language.
• Study numbers, shopping, and essential verbs.
• More verbs, adverbs, and prepositions.
• Tricks, traps, and colloquialisms.
• Quiz battle against Chary to improve your Scholar skill a bit.

I’d like to improve this learning module mainly by adding voice to the basic word sets. I’m also not 100% sure the affection gains are working for Chary and Oshka. If you have any other suggestions or things that would help you and other students, please leave feedback.