Rational Monster Behavior (MMOs)

As I recall World of Warcraft and other MMOs have fairly crude rules for determining whether monsters attack PCs. Most monsters will attack as soon as they enter the PCs threat area, this "threat area" being inversely proportional to the PCs level. This makes some sense, but it means monsters will still make Kamikaze runs against high-level PCs who run too close. It's stupid, and annoying for the player, too, who just wants to get to his high-level dungeon without fighting all the Murlocs in his way.

Here's one way I'd model monster behavior, if I could. (No idea if this would be impractical to program, take too much processor power, or what have you.) Assume PCs and monsters can be classified as "low aggression" and "high aggression." "Low aggression" creatures only attack out of fear or self-defense; they get no material advantage from killing. "High aggression" creatures, on the other hand, attack to get something from their victims (meat, money, XP, or whatever). Also assume, for the sake of argument, that higher level monsters always defeat low-level PCs, and lower-level monsters never defeat high-level PCs. (This isn't true, but it's a close enough approximation for the chart.) Given these assumptions, rational monster behavior would look like this:

			PC Aggression
			Low	High
Monster Aggression	Low	Lower-Level	Ignore	Hide/Flee
		Higher-Level	Ignore	Attack
	High	Lower-Level	Ignore	Hide/Flee
		Higher-Level	Attack	Attack

(Sorry for the crude formatting. I'm too lazy to do HTML tables by hand, and I'm only willing to waste so much time cleaning up Word HTML for an LJ entry.) In this table, "Lower-Level" means the monster is weaker than the PC, "Higher-Level" means he's tougher. "Ignore," "Hide/Flee" and "Attack" indicate the monster's responses.

Now if you assume PCs are all "High-Aggression" then the monster's decisions are easy: They should attack weaker PCs, hide or flee from the stronger ones. This alone would make the game more interesting (it's hard farming creatures who flee at the sight of you), but I think it'd add another layer of interest if certain players can be perceived as less-aggressive. This would work especially well if players could advance through non-violent means.

Writing a Pre-History, Part II

I noted, about a month ago, that I was working on a pre-history of my fantasy world. I had to stop for a bit while I moved in earnest, and during that time Google Docs apparently changed its file-sharing settings, so you can make docs available to the whole Web. (If GD always had this feature, and I missed it, my apologies.)

Anyway ... here's my latest draft for the "second era," or prehistoric human history. It's not pretty -- I tried to record events as straightforwardly as possible -- but it gives you the basic gist.