Egregoros

There's a fundamental problem with the "role play" in computer RPGs that the tabletop never had.

The "roleplay" in the tabletop comes from your character behaving as he does, and the content comes to you. This is the DM's job.
In the computer games, it's always the opposite. You must behave a certain way to access the content.

A crude example would be a mission that has people in a bar robbing drunks. How would you access this if your character was a non-drinker? Aha, you might say, well he just *witnesses* them doing it. But then how does his choice to get drunk or not matter? It doesn't.

The first-order approximation the early pioneers of the genre came up with was to just put in a branching path, with dialogue for each. Either you notice the last victim
>Dialogue.Start("Victim","Q423_DrunkardRobbers","Scene01_Victim")
or you're it.
>Inventory.BatchRemove(InventoryFilter("all"),{},+inf)
Both branches end with
>Questlog.add("A Drunk Fool's Errand")
But this becomes unwieldy, considering the many interdependent actions and dialogue choices that the player could have made. ("Didn't I have the accursed ring that can't be taken off, from that one quest?")

This is not a quirk. There is a fundamental combinatorics problem at the heart.
Ultimately why Mass Effect's promise of "choices that matter" fell flat, as it always does in these games. It's a simple impossibility.

How you could use AI to solve this is left as an exercise for the reader. Many are trying this.

Belated #MassEffectMonday post