ValHallen wrote:There will be some kind of choice beyond how you treat your party members?
Of course! You can choose the activities you train in – each party member is skilled in about three disciplines which they can teach you. These activities are not related to evening ‘camp conversations’ and so you can train in one character’s discipline while romancing or building friendships some other party character(s).
You can also choose conversation options which don’t affect your relationships with the other party members directly, but rather develop your own stats (for example, a conversation choice might develop Courage along one path, and Endurance along another).
At several points in the story you can also choose what kind of combat missions to engage in. For example, you have a choice to assault a bandit compound from the main entrance or decide to sneak round another way. This choice will determine the nature of the battles you have (ambush, assault, infiltration, etc.), which party members are best suited for various stages of the mission, and the skill-sets needed to effectively complete the mission.
I will address this aspect of Roger Steel’s role-playing framework in a later SP, and it’s still being designed, so we may have to dial back the big concept a bit. But I have done some thought experiments retro-fitting the RS combat mechanics to, for example, the Loren combat framework.
In my head it works - but then, in my head I'm the next Hemingway…
ValHallen wrote:And why I would treat a party member bad if it will only harm my status and lose one member?
Let’s put it like this: Suppose you feel you need to gain favour with Party Member A, and they have indicated to you that Party Member B has something which would make them feel warmer to you if you 'liberated'. Then you could do something which you might otherwise not…
Alternatively, you may wish to role-play your character to develop certain skills and attributes which invites you to go down one path rather than another…
And then there are those situations concocted by certain evil'n'sneaky writers where a course of action that seems like a good idea at the time turns out to have not such good unforeseen consequences…
As for losing a party member through a bad relationship, in developing the script I realized that actually none of the party members are there because of you, or your brother or sister… That’s why the game is called "Roger Steel and the Human Element", and not "Ann and Arthur’s Excellent Adventure"
, and also why you won’t actually lose party members, they will just become a really ineffective and argumentative group of curmudgeons, which means you lose most of your battles, which means your poor old sibling may never get rescued… (Well, you never did like them much, did you?)