I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

A character also remembers their experience using a method – if they’ve had a positive experience using that method in the past (or if they’ve been *taught* by an superior that a method is good to use), they’ll be more likely to use that method.

Finally, methods will be chosen based upon convenience – the easier and more straightforward methods will be chosen over methods that the character doesn’t have as much information about.

I have more of a weighting system on goals – the closer your attributes match up to a goal, the more likely you will be to choose that goal.. and then you choose methods based on that goal.

The idea is that you may choose a goal, but you may not be able to carry out the method for that goal.. (ie. you decided that you wanted to kill someone, and you create the situation in which you have a chance to kill them, but you can’t bring yourself to actually execute the action – to deal the death blow.)

To further muddy your cognitive waters, I’d imagine that no individual weighting scheme would suffice for your ends… A simplistic model that springs to mind is that there are a set of weighting factors, but a character’s past and relation with that other character’s affects them.

For example, killing someone might be negatively weighted due to a character’s aversion to violence, but under the right circumstances this would be a more acceptable approach inspite of this.

I wonder if the current weakness of the Aussie dollar increases the street value of my random thoughts above $0.02…