A Rough Shape

While I don't want detailed numbers for hitpoints, strength, etc, I still need a way for characters to have different skills, strengths, weaknesses, and other interesting attributes. Characters need to have rules for combat and other interactions. I also want player and npc actions to create rumors that can in turn directly affect other actions. Finally, I want to be able to eventually have towns and cities with realistic populations.

Tags (or whatever I finally call them) should be my answer to all of these things.

This is a vague and simplified example of how tags would affect combat.
This is a vague and simplified example of how I want rumors to work.

A big chunk of the guts of the game engine will be one or more large tables of tags (I have them split into categories: character, item, socioeconomic, situational, environmental, etc), so that any two tags can be quickly compared against each other to get a resulting action, informational text popup, third tag, combat result, etc. The downside to this is that any time I change, add or remove a tag, I'm going to have to go through and edit a number of things. The upside is that it'll all be in one place. Another truly excellent upside is that it should allow characters to say, swing a chair at someone, stand in a street and shout at strangers about blood, try to eat a door, throw
eggs at a guard, or whatever else they want. The interface for all that will be interesting to figure out...

One thing I like a lot is the thought of someone starting a rumor about a demon going around murdering nobles. Once the rumor takes hold, they could make a scary mask and go attack a noble, who if he believes the rumor, will be at a massive disadvantage thanks to a "urinated in his pants" tag or something.

Conversations are going to be another interesting bit. Since there's going to be no set plot you're forced to follow, conversations will be the main way you learn about the world. They're going to have to be able to pull tags from the current rumors and knowledge an npc has and form those into usable dialogue. The player's also going to need a way to use tags to "remember" items, people or locations in the game so that they can ask npcs about those things later on.

As far as cities and towns.. only major characters and perhaps people like smiths and shopkeepers will be premade or saved. The rest of the population can be created when the player visits an area, given their appropriate tags from a semi-random pool, and then they should interact with each other, the character and their surroundings according to that area's current rumor tags and whatever else is going on.

So, I've got a lot of ideas that feel fairly solid, and I've got some detailed stuff worked out on at least how I think I can get it to all fit together. Before I can get to those fun bits though, it's time to figure out how to implement the basics. I'm going to start with a 2x2 grid with two characters on it, and test some different ideas for tiles and items. I'll also use that to figure out how to create and use tags, and see how my ideas for a combat system play out.