Attitude
From Shadowrun: Awakened
Attitude is a social mechanic that determines the reaction an NPC has in Shadowrun Awakened.
Game Rules Description
Whether people admit it or not, everyone has prejudices and people almost always have a reaction to those they meet. This judgments are based on the intrinsic quality of the character and allows NPCs to express more of a personality. This can include racist or sexist reactions, attempting seduction on members of a preferred gender, or just commenting on the player's big gun when engaging in conversation. It is possible this could go to an extreme length such as attacking others without provocation. This includes not only violent racists, but also Lone Star officers who notice a player has an illegal firearm.
Racism is the most specific aspect of NPC attitude in Shadowrun. Non-humans have gained rights, but not total social acceptance. There are people who deeply admire, emulate them ("Posers"), and those who wish to eliminate them (the Humanis Policlub being the best known). NPCs are often racist against one or many metahuman races. When adding a detail like this, try to consider what caused the racism and give the character a reason.
Technical Implementation
The intrinsic information of a character include:
- Gender
- Race
- Equipment
- Attributes
- Reputation with factions
- Street Cred
- Contacts and Enemies
While the ability to use magic is an intrinsic quality, it is often non-obvious that a character has the capability. It would break suspension of disbelief if all NPCs immediately commented on magic use. When to allow an NPC to identify magical ability in a PC is unclear.
This boils down to having some script that will set an NPC's demeanor based on intrinsic qualities of a target character. This would be called with the complete information characters as the NPC interacts with the world. There are two obvious places to call this script. One is to call this reaction script are at the start of a conversation with a PC. This will set the NPC's attitude for the conversation and keep it from being changed until the conversation is over. The second time this script should be called is when the character visually detects a PC. This ties into the sneaking mechanic.
The attitude mechanic, especially since it falls into the sneaking mechanic, could cause extraneous amounts of script calling. It is likely advantageous for perform if the actor of examining is done by an object in code that is only setup by scripting (instead of calling scripting every time). Also, caching some queried information (things that are unlikely to change) somewhere that is not accessible to the NPC logic, but able to be recalled without performing searches would be advantageous.
