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Old 09-06-2021, 07:48 AM   #1
Boyboy180
 
Join Date: Aug 2020
Default Virtual worlds and avatars

When making a video game sort of campaign, how do you think the player avatars would work, mostly when it comes to IQ?

I have a few thoughts but I want other people to give their input too.

First, if it is a "Trapped in a video game" setting like SAO, there's no reason for the avatar and player to be two different characters as you're going to be in that body for 99% of the time. Though then what happens if someone is playing a mage? What happens when a mage character would have supernatural levels of IQ when the player playing them is just a normal human for all intents and purposes.

Alternatively what if there was a real world that players could explore? What would the avatar have in that case? Would they be IQ 0 because they don't have agency without the player or would they have "Normal" IQ, as it's still needed for skills. You want your mage character to be able to actually cast spells right?

Basically, odd situations that involve the a "true" and "false" level for IQ and I want input on how it's "meant" to work in cases like this.

Thank you for any tips with this.
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Old 09-06-2021, 08:40 AM   #2
Anaraxes
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: Virtual worlds and avatars

The IQ question is a pretty widely applicable one, about as old as IQ stats in RPGs. As a matter of anything from roleplaying etiquette to hard rules, can/should players be able to use their own intelligence to figure things out?

Pure roleplaying demands thinking of things only the character would think of. On one hand, that means not being as clever as you can be (if you happen to be clever), and willingly letting opportunities slide even though you know better. RPing dumb characters can be fun.

On the other hand, playing a character that's smarter than the player generally means needing a rule to make IQ rolls (of whatever sort) for the GM to give you the answer to some mystery or puzzle that the brilliant character is supposed to deduce -- just as the GM gives the educated characters facts that the player doesn't know, particularly about the game world. You can't play a character smarter than yourself without some sort of mechanical advantage, even if that does lose some fun and flavor. (Hopefully as GM you can find a way to narrate the results in an entertaining fashion, not just always "OK, Smarts, gimme an IQ roll. Ok, good enough; you figure out that the glyphs actually represent numbers, and it's the sequence of primes except that it's missing the 11, so that must mean the eleventh button is the right one to press. You push that button and it reveals a new corridor.")

The video game concept puts a kink in the usual approach because video games usually don't have that RP element. The player is supposed to figure out the puzzles themselves, and that's part of the fun of the CRPG. So in this case -- and having already discussed the game concept with the players to make sure everyone's on the same page -- I'd just disallow any IQ rolls to figure things out or recall facts. That all becomes player knowledge in this game, no xp penalties or social sneers for poor roleplaying. It's just the way this world works.

If the setting is a well-known published one, as opposed to one you're making up, you might still needed to keep the "not things your character wouldn't know" principle. If one of your players is, say, a Elder Scrolls fanatic and knows everything about the world in every version, then their character using their full knowledge won't feel like a player new to the game. They'd still have to abide by not using their full player knowledge. (One alternative answer: they simply don't play supposed newbie characters.)

If the game is a reverse portal fantasy about video characters transported to the real world, then it doesn't make sense to me to talk about their "player". That style generally supposes that the characters actually become real, independent, self-willed entities. So they'd just be regular PCs in a game with their own stats.

If you're going for something where the players are themselves in the real world, yet they have assistance from their video game character, then you might build the "just like me" characters normally, but build their video game adjuncts differently -- not self-willed independent entities at all. Possibilities include Duplication (the "player" PC has a second, different, Dupe that's the video character), an Ally (waive the bit about them being GM-controlled and require that they have Limitations like Slave Mentality; they're mindless robot machines that hack-and-slash by order), or give the "player" PCs Possession or Mind Control (Limited to just the one video avatar). The exact choice depends on the flavor you're going for. For example, you might want Possession to represent the fact that the player is either paying attention to their surroundings, or they're paying attention to their game character to control it, but they can't do both at the same time.

If the players are joined in the real world by video avatars that the players aren't expected to be actively in control of, the way they are in a video game, but where the video characters can act on their own, just build them as Allies.
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Old 09-06-2021, 09:06 AM   #3
Curmudgeon
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Default Re: Virtual worlds and avatars

Quote:
Originally Posted by Boyboy180 View Post
When making a video game sort of campaign, how do you think the player avatars would work, mostly when it comes to IQ?

I have a few thoughts but I want other people to give their input too.

First, if it is a "Trapped in a video game" setting like SAO, there's no reason for the avatar and player to be two different characters as you're going to be in that body for 99% of the time. Though then what happens if someone is playing a mage? What happens when a mage character would have supernatural levels of IQ when the player playing them is just a normal human for all intents and purposes.

Alternatively what if there was a real world that players could explore? What would the avatar have in that case? Would they be IQ 0 because they don't have agency without the player or would they have "Normal" IQ, as it's still needed for skills. You want your mage character to be able to actually cast spells right?

Basically, odd situations that involve the a "true" and "false" level for IQ and I want input on how it's "meant" to work in cases like this.

Thank you for any tips with this.
There is no definitive, official, "meant" to work for this. GURPS treats it as a worldbuilding question, it's "meant" to work the way you want it to. That said, and having no idea exactly what SAO is, here are some thoughts.

Arguably, the recent Jumanji movies would work for a Trapped in a Video Game campaign. NPCs don't really have IQs. They're just infodumps/transition aids that loop their behaviors until the PCs deliver something close to the expected response. Villain NPCs don't really have IQs either, but they have more decision branches so they seem to be reacting intelligently to the PCs, so you could assign IQ scores to represent them. The PC Avatars have the PCs IQ and may or may not be able to meta-game the game to advantage. For unusual abilities, i.e. ones the PCs don't have in real life, particularly spells, psionics, superpowers or, maybe nuclear physics skill, the game will prompt the information to them, but abilities may only unlock once the PC Avatar performs some in-game task to unlock the ability. Until then, the PC doesn't even know it's possible.

As far as having the Avatar have a consciousness that shares the Avatar body with the PC, I would suggest that it sounds similar enough to sharing consciousness with the body's original mind under Retrogression in GURPS Time Travel from 3rd Edition that I'll note that it came with a warning that it could rapidly cease to be fun if the two consciousnesses are at odds.

As for Avatars exploring the real world, it depends, a lot. In the original cyberpunk literature Avatars of hackers who were "casting spells" weren't really doing magic at all, they were uploading programs, apps and hacking code on the fly to "attack" dataports they wanted. They "knew and understood the spells and what they could do" because they knew what the underlying program was doing to the system, the magic was just how the system interpreted and displayed the interaction between the programs. Different programs might be interpreted as effectively the same spell for display purposes while the same program might appear as different spells depending on the program it was attacking. Thus the PC Avatar "knows" magic as long as the PC knows what he is really trying to do. In an exploratory virtual world, at least some NPC Avatars will be other explorers from the outside world, who will definitely have their own IQ.

As for "unmanned" Avatars, it depends on what you want. They could be IQ 0 when inactive. For exploratory Avatars, they might cease to exist when the operating PC jacks out of the system, returning to existence when the PC jacks back in, which would mean that the Avatar is ignorant of any changes to the world while it was non-existent.

OTOH, you could go for Wreck-It Ralph and have Avatars have lives of their own between uses of the program, which would mean they actually have IQs and aren't just bundles of instructions with limited responses.
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Old 09-06-2021, 09:35 AM   #4
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Virtual worlds and avatars

This isn't "fantasy" in the normal sense, but GURPS Portal Fantasy has some guidelines that might be helpful, both for campaigns where you travel back and forth, and for campaigns where you stay in the portal realm.
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Old 09-06-2021, 10:58 AM   #5
Ulzgoroth
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: Virtual worlds and avatars

Quote:
Originally Posted by Boyboy180 View Post
When making a video game sort of campaign, how do you think the player avatars would work, mostly when it comes to IQ?

I have a few thoughts but I want other people to give their input too.

First, if it is a "Trapped in a video game" setting like SAO, there's no reason for the avatar and player to be two different characters as you're going to be in that body for 99% of the time. Though then what happens if someone is playing a mage? What happens when a mage character would have supernatural levels of IQ when the player playing them is just a normal human for all intents and purposes.

Alternatively what if there was a real world that players could explore? What would the avatar have in that case? Would they be IQ 0 because they don't have agency without the player or would they have "Normal" IQ, as it's still needed for skills. You want your mage character to be able to actually cast spells right?

Basically, odd situations that involve the a "true" and "false" level for IQ and I want input on how it's "meant" to work in cases like this.

Thank you for any tips with this.
For the first, in GURPS it's certainly allowable for a possession/alternate form/however you conceptualize it to augment a characters intelligence. It's not compulsory for it to do so though, it is as has been said a setting design decision for you. You certainly can build ways for the game system to bestow in-game representations of high intelligence without actually enhancing the player's cognition at all.

As for an avatar in the real world, if it's doing anything (beyond dumb scripted behavior) it doesn't have intelligence 0. If it's in the real world being controlled by the player, presumably it has the same intelligence as when its in its native world being controlled by the player. If not, what mind is in control? Real videogame avatars don't normally have any independent behavior at all obviously, but I don't know what the tropes of your media source may be.

I'd note that it's probably more accurate to not model literal video game magic as based on intelligence at all, incidentally, unless it behaves nothing like magic in both real video games and much of the gaming-inspired literature. Even if the lore says magic is an intellectual activity, that part of the process is almost always abstracted out of existence in favor of simple on-demand activation.
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