in-game journals

[manikus]

i think this is a cool feature that has been added to dungeon craft. i was setting about to start working on one for the 'contest' entry i'm doing, and came to the shocking realization that i never read them as a player.

sure, i played baldur's gate and icewind dale. i only used the journal once, when i had been away from my icewind dale game for about month due to a move. i skimmed it to get back up to speed, and that was it. [img]smile.gif[/img]

i guess i want to know, if i put a journal in my design, will anybody read it?

[img]graemlins/1druid.gif[/img]

-manikus

[Harri Polsa]

I think a major problem with in-game journals is that they tend to be written in some dull 'standard' speak since the game designers have no idea about the personality of your character, how they would write and how they perceive things. So the journal often tends to be an endless blather of trivial facts reading like a passage from a boring novel. I only read them if I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing during a particular quest, and even then I just quickly look for names and places that I might have missed. Write interesting journals and I will read them.
I'm writing this response (as I've been somewhat lazy leading this forum... for me, the main DC forum is the DC mailing list) for two basic reasons. One, in the process of writing my NWN module I've been doing some thinktanking about how to implement a journal that both works and is interesting to read. And second, when the 'journal' option became available, I spent quite an amount of time adding journal entries to my original DC design tFT. In both cases I have the advantage of having a premade character, so I already have a perspective from which to write the text. In the case of tFT (a futuristic setting), the character makes some short commentaries into her recorder. In a way, it is not a 'written', but a spoken entry. The text is more colorful and perhaps help the player keep track of things.
In the NWN game, the journal is basically divided into two sections. As long as a quest is in 'progress', the entries are very short and to the point. More like notes I might write on a small piece of paper, like 'take item to Joe, city west'. Once it's completed, however, the character writes some thoughts into her 'diary'. The diary entries are more complex and reflect some ideas about the quest and what the character thought about it.

In these two above cases, the design contains many different side quests, making it more important to keep track of things. However, if the game has one basic quest and not so many sidequests, there is no real need to have a journal. It can be used as a storytelling device, but the text must be something that I want to read. Thinking about the recent CRPGs, I haven't really read any of the journals. I read the first few lines, then I close it. The text is just not interesting enough to read.

HtP

[Rami Sihvo]

Yep, I have fantasy to do desing in which journal would be diffrent story like logbook or diary or just diffrent partys story like in FF8... Players would be like "Hey what is this" but I imagine game would have more dimensions when players had to think how text in journal correlates with their quest.