Procedural genaration and permadeath

Okay so we want to somehow automate the "social" plots of pencil and paper RPGs.

I think at this point the procedural generation comes in. If the social plots are pre-scripted, it just means that the game author has to think of everything in advance, probably including fixing the solutions to the problems to some extent. So you can only really play each plot once, and you don't get the creative buzz of creating your own way of solving it. You could try replaying it and trying something different but that's not very narratively satisfying, you're effectively playing guess the verb. You've forgotten the story and you're just trying to guess what the author thinks you should do.

Let's have procedurally generated social plots!

NetHack has procedurally generated dungeon crawls. This has several interesting consequences:

• Every time you play it is different
• There's a nice "exploration" element
• Sometimes there's no way to solve a problem. You might just walk into a room full of orcs and not be able to survive.
• The nice thing is that the procedural generation throws up new problems randomly.

Unusually, the authors of NetHack also tried to institute "permadeath" in the game. In software terms players can hack around it, but this is against the authors' intentions. I think this was an interesting choice. Replaying the same level detracts from the narrative. Knowing you could undo death means it just doesn't have the narrative meaning of death. So, since we're interested in narrative, let's have permadeath too.

As this article on permadeath says, "if you cannot fail, can you really succeed?". That's a very zen justification for permadeath.

You can still save games in NetHack of course. After all your girlfriend might ring or something. However, you can only restore the game once. If your restore ended in you playing it and dying then (assuming you did not hack around it) that's that narrative gone forever, you can't restore from the same point ever again. So there is only one version of the narrative as a whole.

If we really want to ensure permadeath but still have saved games, maybe the game should be server moderated. The user does not have access to the server so cannot hack around our permadeath mechanism. On the other hand this does limit players to having to have an internet connection in order to play the game.