Recording character event news

[Callan S.]

I was thinking of recording various events in a characters life as they are played, as a way of making the game world have more tangibility when you view the history and see the game world existing that way.

Thinking about it, I'm guessing probably each news item having it's own entry in a special news table would be the best way to manage it.

Now I'm thinking I wont end up with thousands of players - but if a few hundred players generate several news entries from their play every day, then look up their history three or four times a day, is that gunna get crazy?

Should I destroy news after a certain time period? I kind of like the idea of keeping it all and looking through the DB would be looking through every event of the game world, a step at a time. Should I put some sort of 'old news' flag on old news, and make searches avoid looking up old news?

It's slightly radical to me to both make new entries for one character and to do it in another table - I'm used to just working with the one character entry in the players database. I know many of you probably handle inventory by many seperate entries on another table, but it seems weird to me.

[Jackolantern]

What kind of "news" are you wanting to store? Depending on what it is, there are probably efficient ways of storing it.

[Callan S.]

Probably things like monsters defeated, doing an impressive amount of damage, recieving healing (just for the time being)

I was planning simply to have a number that coresponds with a list, for what message to type out, and then perhaps a second number for pointing at the right monster (if one is involved in the message)

[Jackolantern]

If you ended up doing it more like a record-breaker thing, that would greatly reduce the space needed. Plus, record-highs are the only really interesting part of the logs. Players won't really care that they healed 30 HP on a low-level player. They would want to remember doing 790 HP healing on a critical heal if it broke their record high.

[Callan S.]

I think such summerisation is what I'm trying to avoid in this.

The idea is to not exist as much as your last high score break, but to engage with the idea of a character creating a history just as much as characters in books have a history and it's not all high score breaking. Sure, the stuff I've mentioned so far isn't quite up there with a novel, but that's not really the key issue.

The idea is to have a character that has a history and so more exists as an entity, like other peoples PC's would exist for you after doing table top roleplay for awhile.

I'm planning for other players to view the history of other players as part of a reward mechanism and the player to see how many views he's had since last he looked.

It's like when you're in a mmorpg - seeing another player suddenly run across your view makes the world more tangible - why bother showing their position and movement (at quite some bandwidth cost) if high score breaking is the only thing? Certainly I always felt the world of the first guildwars game lacked something for never seeing another player in it.

[Jackolantern]

What information do you want to show?