Free roaming, non-controlled character on a hex based boardgame

Use a deck of 6 cards for the 6 directions... shuffle and repeat for each move.

Free roaming doesn't mean random. If your NPC (Non-player character) is going to be more than a chance encounter, it's going to have to pack some heat.

Let's pretend that we have a mechanism for tracking movement by human players. Depending on what the range of motion tends to be, the NPC can gravitate toward a likely victim.

For example, each player has a quest. Generally, this means that they'll have destinations. By extrapolating player movement, the NPC can set an "intercept" course.

In another instance, players are exploring a world, hoping to find a good spot to do whatever they must do to advance their chances for victory.
The NPC could keep track of all of these so-called good spots and "patrol" them. It is bound to run into a player.

In the final example, if the players are wandering aimlessly, waiting for chance encounters with good and evil entities, the NPC may as well target a player who wanders too close to an edge of the "world". That's because the player will have fewer spots to travel toward.

As for the mechanism? Why, siftables of course :)

Cheers,

Mitch

My first thought was a hamster. But they would chew all the cardboard into little bits.

Like any program you need a set of conditions and appropriate responses. The tricky part is making these rules easy to understand and implement. I am all for some randomness in the equation so that the behavior is not 100% predictable. I find this makes the game edgier as long as there is some predictability.

In my game Dead Man’s Island the zombies have one rule which is to gravitate to the closest living target. When they are of equal distance from two targets or have multiple path of the same length to the same target a die determines the outcome. The potential for having multiple zombies mucking about is high so I kept it real simple.

If you have just one wanderer the rules could be much more complex without dragging the game down.

In an early version of our first game, Ogre Castle, the Ogre was a fifth player not owned by any of the four human players. As the last task on each human players turn that player rolled a die and moved the Ogre piece that many spaces. As you might guess, the player usually moved the Ogre away from themselves and toward the most powerful other human player, hoping to force a battle that would weaken that human player.

Such a process might work for your NPC. Each round every player gets to move the NPC so the NPC moves much faster than any other player. And, because the weaker players are motivated by self preservation, the NPC will tend to move toward the most powerful player.

Here's an idea...

At start of play (or whenever a new Hex is laid) you place an upside down token randomly on all hexes where you can possibly travel.

The tokens faced down all appear grey - on the other side they are one of 3 colours (red, yellow, green) that maybe represent how noisily you are moving.

Whenever a player moves onto a new hex they flip over a token to see what colour is revealed.

Red - you make a noise while you move and the NPC 'hears' this and starts to pursue you, immediately moving 1-2 spaces directly toward that hex with the red token...and keeps doing that each turn until you or another player flips another un-turned token.

Yellow token - the NPC gets distracted and stops dead lose interst in pursuit.

Green token - would allow you to proceed with stealth and the NPC would continue doing it's last action (i.e. if previous player last turned a red and ended his turn, then you turned a green then the NPC would still pursue the previous player).

What this doesn't account for is if you move onto previously travlled hexes where there is already a turned over token. Although you could solve this when you move away from a hex by removing the token and replace it with another from a stock of faced down tokens beside the board (ala Carcassonne tiles)

You would leave the active (most recently turned) Red or yellow Token up-turned and in play until another red or yellow is drawn, if a new red or yellow is drawn then that becomes teh active token and the previous red or yellow gets replaced. It would stay active as long as greens are drawn.

Greens get replaced immediately with a new grey after moving off the hex

You could simplify this system further by having only two colours - stealth and alert.

What do you think?

True on both counts.

However, the tokens could be very small as they would not have any writing on them just a colour thus mostly avoiding the masking of the hex issue. But still leaving the hassle aspect.

It also depends on how central the NPC is to the game. If it is a only a small role then i agree my idea may be way too messy to warrant consideration.

In terms of moving towards the activated hex i guess there are a number of options but an 'as the crow flies' or 'line of sight' apporach would solve most. But i agree with hexes there are always at least two options when travelling to a hex 2-away. If the NPC moved 2 hexs at time the destination (2nd) hex would normally be the same whether you went left or right as your first move - so you coudl potentially ignore the 1st hex move?

Anyway just a a quick idea i had, i'm not very expereicned at all with game design, so i'm perfectly happy to rescind it :)

It occurs to me that if the PC with the highest resources is the absolute priority than you can solve the NPC movement issue with a table.

For example, if the PC is on tile 12, and the NPC is on tile 62, then the NPC will always goto tile 54.

Now the real trick is hiding this table:

You could make a card for each hex the NPC is in with instructions.

You might be able to print little numbers on the map. For instance from the example above, on of the tiles would have '54' at the top, it's tile number. On the bottom it would have '62-12' to indicate if the NPC is on 62 and the target PC is on 12, the NPC should go here.

Just thinking out loud, on the net, er ... something

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I'm working on a collaborative game with some friends and we had a similar problem come up [how to decide how to move the NPC token]. Here was our solution.

Number each tile [hex for you]. During the NPC turn, roll a die that corresponds to the number of tiles [hexes] and send the NPC to that tile/hex. Simple and to the point. We have 9 tiles, so we used a D10. On a roll of 10 he just stays put, which allows for him to do extra nastiness. YMMV...

In your case, I'm assuming you want the NPC to interact with Player tokens, so if the NPC moves to a hex that doesn't have a Player token, after the move, send him to the hex closest to where the NPC landed [you can label it as TELEPORTING]. If there is a tie, the NPC goes to the hex with the highest/lowest number that has a Player token in it.

I think you guys are overthinking this way too much. Just sayin... :)

A game I've seen use this idea well is Fearsome Floors or Finstere Flure by Friedemann Friese (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7805). The game has players trying to escape from a dungeon being chased by a monster. The monster has movement each round equal to a card that is flipped, and simple movement rules. The monster walks forward, one space at a time. However, if it sees at any point a player's piece to its left or right, it will turn to the nearest piece. If two players are equidistant on both the left and the right, it will become confused and continue walking forward.

I could see a version of that working for your idea.