[lojban-beginners] Lojban Combat RPG System

["Matt Arnold" <matt.mattarn@gmail.com>]

For those of you who don't read the Lojban blog on the homepage, this
is a post I just made there. If you've read it there you can skip
this.

I've been working on another web game idea for Lojban, which I'll
refer to as the Lojban RPG. As with all my other web game ideas, this
one has an ulterior motive to build the resources for the Lojban
language project. Every game mechanic in a game of this type is
designed for two purposes:

#1 The player is rewarded by succeeding in the game.
#2 The game creator is rewarded by having humans perform tasks that
computers can't perform.

My objective was to design a game that would reward players for
forming sample sentences with rare Lojban words. A large collection of
good sample sentences would assist the BPFK in its work, allowing them
to focus on tasks that require their expertise. That's the ulterior
motive.

(Disclaimer: this game would not serve as a decision-making process,
or substitute in any way for the expertise of the BPFK commissioners.
It would create usage samples, which the BPFK can choose to use for
their language definition proposals as examples of various ways to use
a word, <i>or important examples of how not to</i>.)

This Lojban RPG uses Lojban words as magical attack, healing, and
other spells. In combat it would give the player a limited set of
Lojban words to assemble into a sentence and cast at monsters to
attack them, or cast on yourself to cure damage the monsters did to
you. Different words have different levels of magical potency in
combat, based on their rarity of usage, especially cmavo. (That's in
order to encourage players to form all the rare samples of cmavo usage
we need.) The rarity settings would begin using the existing corpus,
but as words are used more often in the game, they will change their
relative rarity.

Words function like arrows; when you use them in combat, you no longer
have them. If you have more than one of the same word in your arsenal,
you can attack with it in combat that many times. The common and weak
words such as {le} are necessary to collect despite being weak,
because you need them to form sentences. You cannot use a rare word in
isolation; it can only be used in a complete Lojban bridi that is
approved by the automated parser.

Your arsenal determines how powerful your attacks and cures are. Armor
works differently. Your armor level is the number of gismu and cmavo
your character has used at least once at any time. Using a word you've
never used before (and having it approved through the process
described below) permanently increases your maximum health by one.
This does not count the cumulative number of usages of each word. For
instance, the first time you use {lo}, it adds 1 to your maximum
health and will never add to it again.

You can cast gibberish sentences in battle, as long as they parse. So
I came up with a fitness-selection mechanism to make sure our BPFK
experts didn't have to wade through endless gibberish. Every time a
sentence is formed in combat, the game adds it to a database of
sentences, which is also full of decoy sentences from a random
sentence generator, written by monsters in combat against player
characters. These sentences are each given a certain rating of quality
for BPFK work, using the method I'm about to describe, but each
monster in the game world will consist of a set of sentences. The
monster "owns" all the words in all those sentences, and its armor
level is based on the total of their BPFK rating. In order to recharge
your arsenal of words, you find monsters in the game world, they pose
a multiple-choice question, and demand that you guess which of their
sentences is the human-generated one. (It will never be a sentence
that you wrote)

If you correctly guess a sentence that was generated by a human,
- That sentence is given a higher rating for purposes of BPFK work.
- The random sentences are given a lower rating for purposes of BPFK work.
- You may select words from the monster to add to your arsenal to be
used once in combat, whose points add up to the human sentence's
current rating for BPFK work.
- The monster does not initiate an attack on you, although you may
attack it if you feel confident.
- Some other player character (not you) who created that sentence in a
previous combat will now "level up" his or her armor according to the
number of new words in that sentence the player never used before.

If you guess incorrectly,
- The computer-generated sentence which you thought was human is given
a slightly higher rating for BPFK work.
- The human-generated sentence which you thought was
computer-generated is given a lower rating for BPFK work.
- You receive random words from the monster into your arsenal, whose
power points add up to the BPFK rating of the lowest-ranked sentence
in the monster.
- The monster attacks you.

If you defeat a monster in combat, you may take all its words in your
arsenal and your rank in the game increases. If it defeats you, it
will reduce your rank in the game.

Robin Lee Powell suggested that this game could be implemented in the
existing Lojban Multi-User Dungeon, and I think if the MUD can be
hacked to do this, it will become far more popular. To begin with,
before we program it, what we need to do is playtest this system by
email or IRC! I'm happy to volunteer to be the gamemaster.

-Eppcott