Right now, puppets “fall asleep” and “wake up” exactly like normal characters do. This is fine, but it creates some slight oddities because of different social conventions around them.
Most players do not remain sleeping in high-traffic rooms – they either travel to a sleeping room before disconnecting, or are swept at some point. Miranda is an exception to this; she’s meant to stay in her café, and as we get more NPC puppets, we’re likely to have more locations with a puppet stationed there for roleplaying purposes.
I’ve noticed some weird dynamics as players try to reconcile Miranda “falling asleep” or “waking up” in the middle of her own café with the idea that it simply isn’t something the owner would do. Perhaps we could add the character trait that she’s overworked and prone to napping, but I think we’d end up needing to do for almost all puppets.
There is a simple no-effort solution, of course; we can just decide not to take the “sleep” message literally. But most of the game’s messages are well-crafted so that we can choose to just incorporate them into what’s happening. So here’s a somewhat higher-effort option that might be nice.
We could replace Miranda’s sleep/wake messages with something like:
“Miranda disappears into the back room.” / “Miranda emerges from the back room.”
If we did that, the messages would be easier to incorporate in the flow of the scene. Obviously building one-off messages for a single NPC is not a good plan, but it seems like allowing those fields to be customized for puppets – especially NPCs shared by multiple players – would help account for the difference in how they behave.
