We found out all the Lone Wolf adventure books had been set up as a web application.

Now we have this:

Quote from: Krimson;934213Cortex Plus Heroic[/B] particularly Marvel Heroic coupled with the Hacker's Guide and skills from Firefly. Use Time Dice in place of Initiative and you have the fastest combat resolution for play by post games I have ever seen. This is my go to system for running games on forums. I borrowed and adapted the Approaches from Fate Accelerated and used them in place of Affiliations. Since Approaches are verbs which can easily become adverbs, I also swap out Specialties for Firefly Skills which are verbs, and can be combined to form sentences like, "I ly the with my ". This let a player not only declare what they were going to to but it also let them build their dice pool right from the sentence. When Cam gets licencing sorted I may be very happy.

This brings to mind the old Infocom text games I played hell out of back in the Apple II days which had much better syntax analysis than say, Zork.

So when we look at the classic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure RPG books, they were usually based on some kind of existing traditional RPG system, or maybe one created for the adventure series.

Would something highly narrative to begin with, like Cortex Plus, be perfectly suited to be the engine behind a simple input designed around natural sentence structure syntax and metadata tags?  It seems like this would be pretty easy for software today to parse, interpret, run the numbers and dice, and deliver output.

Anyway, just thinking out loud.

Okay. Since that's my quote I should probably reply. Funny thing is at the moment I am working on an OSRish thing that replaces skills with Approaches, and then assigns actions to them. So in that system you don't have the syntax I use for Cortex Plus because you don't have a dice pool to build. I was just toying with the idea, and then realized when assigned actions that things like saving throws are also actions and suddenly I didn't need to worry about saving throws. The Approaches I use are called Charming, Clever, Forceful, Quick, Smart and Willful. I am not overly happy with the word Willful but I haven't found anything better. They pair up with ability scores, but similar to Doctor Who Adventures in Time and Space, they can be paired with other ability scores depending on the circumstance. Like a smart gnome noticing that a monster has a high sense of gravity and if you hit it hard enough it might fall over into the pit behind it, so you might pair Intelligence with Forceful.

Anyway this is relevant because assigning actions to Approaches in Cortex Plus, because computers need to quantify stuff. Well at least until a game gets hooked up to a neural network. Unfortunately, depend on who's coding it will determine the complexity. I think that assigning actions to the Approaches would be the way to go here. You could have your object or whatever it is that you're interacting with, and have them defined as to which Approaches and Ability Scores and Signature Items/Powers can affect them. Something I also find valuable in any game system is a list of damage types. This is handy because then you can quantify certain effects. You'd probably have to define conditions as well. I'm thinking of D&D like conditions such as stunned, but those can easily translate to Complications. In fact, it would almost have to in Cortex Plus because I sure as hell am not going to start adding math when I have to run the Doom Pool.

The funny thing is, I could imagine this as a phone or tablet game, where you draw people in at the promise of texting and then force them to use proper sentences. You could also kind of do this in reverse. Instead of a keyboard, you could have buttons corresponding to your Approaches, Signature Item/Power Sets, Distinctions, and any other relevant assets. Make them toggle buttons and you can build your pool, which could let the game construct sentences on their own. This approach would of course negate the necessity of having an AI recognize speech, but if you had both there would be advantages. For instance, say on your button area other resources pop up as relevant? Like a Scene Asset, where your hero might attempt to stop a bank robber with a potted plant. So in effect, you could type out your sentence and then adjust it. The creepy part about the game constructing sentences from a toggled dice pool is that the "GM" can do it to. The funny thing is, computer games being what they are, is eventually you'd start recognizing phrases and hopefully cringing at certain words knowing what the game is about to throw at you. It's a bit meta, but it's too late to do anything about it.

Now in my play by post games I tend to use Time Dice from the Hacker's Guide in place of Initiative. Especially Marvel Heroic Initiative which is amazing in a face to face game but online you're basically herding cats. So the idea is you have an extra die for your pool from d4 to d12 based on when you act in the round. In D&D terms, it's like Initiative rolled in with Aim. The advantage of this is that you can handle character actions out of sequence and then resolve the order of action after everyone or mostly everyone has posted their actions. It worked quite well. The other reason I use it is for time steps. In certain situation, it might be useful to have triggered events after a certain amount of time elapses. If your group of characters are all being stealthy and sneaky and rolling d12 Time Dice, that event is going to happen a lot sooner. It could be a bomb going off, or when a building collapses, or when enemy reinforcements arrive. This of course is optional and probably a pain to implement.

I could see something like this as a persistent roguelike, though if I were making it in Clickteam Fusion (because it has the easiest UI and lots of tutorials) the Syntax parsing would be like way low on my list of things to do. Though I think before that I'd be scouring their forums to see if anyone has done something similar.

Now, the thing is you could make a game like this totally text driven and if you wanted to get really old school, you wouldn't need graphics. Like those old MUDs where you just had descriptions of where you were. I'd still have modern conveniences like a character sheet and inventory. In that scenario you'd really be playing in a text based theater of the mind.

Ever play Kingdom Death: Monster?
You could probably use an AI deck or a little book with flowcharts instead of software.

Someone could try to make a GM AI, but Zork and the later Infocom (who published Zork I, II, III and Enchanter and Sorceror which were sequels where you could cast spells, as well as many with other interesting settings and genres such as murder mystery and sci fi) text adventure games were all using a similar text parser, which was pretty much the best text adventure parser until text adventures stopped being commonly published, but it was still just a text parser, not really an AI, with all of the possible actions mapped out for each game by humans.

Making a GM AI is an interesting idea, but I think most practical would actually be an expert system which would include a good text parser and a way to map commands to actions, taking into account character/equipment/situation to figure results and then generate outcomes... but I think we're mainly talking about adding a rich text interface for a rich computer RPG, so combining the Infocom's Sorceror with Rogue and Ultima... which would be cool, but I wouldn't think the way to do it would be to try to use actual AI for a GM (an expert system yes, but I would use that more for the behavior of the agents in the game and to handle/interpret game events, not to figure out text commands - a parser would I think make more sense for that).

Ive noted this a few times before.

On various MUDs theres been some headway in coding AIs. Some of its fairly simple. The NPC listens to what you are saying and records some keywords so the next time you talk to it it might ask you about that. Or AIs that change their usual daily pattern based on stimulus. The example given was a farmer whos woken in the morning by the crowing of the rooster. Putters around the farm and then heads into town an hour later. But. If you say kill the rooster he wakes up late and that can alter everything else he does.

Most interesting is the one I've noted before that a friend had running on their game. It was a free roaming AI that posed as a player and would help people if asked and held a fairly good conversation too.

The main problem is storage space. They can take up alot of memory for, well, memory.

To a lesser degree way back on the FRUA group there were some modules made that did some ingenious things with flags to simulate relationship development with NPCs. Quite a few PC games and even a few FF style gamebooks use variations on that. Bit too limited in scope though.

I think though a simple targeted GM AI/emulator is doable using a relatively narrow setting/adventure. EG: Wilderness exploration, city adventure, dungeon delving, etc. Or limit it to a single module.