How can we make it possible for a player to choose at the onset of the game which character they'd play in the story, but then based on that choice, all the non-selected characters would be NPCs that have their "NPC" qualities initiated?

I got this idea because I read another guy in forums wanting to make games out of other people's stories. I thought, "hmmm, it might actually be fun to produce some versions of Public Domain works as fully-fleshed-out text adventure games. I grabbed a couple small ones, but then wanted to do it this way.

So I was going to test it out with the Princess and the Pea. or "The Real Princess" or maybe "The Emperor's New Clothes" collected by Hanz Christian Andersen.

But Wouldn't it be better, rather than just picking one character and doing the story from their perspective, to allow the player to choose any of several. Then the other characters would revert to NPC mode. If you're the prince, you've got your interactions and choices. If you're the King, you've got yours. The princess her own. But if you haven't chosen them, they'd need to walk around, talk, etc. and be NPCs so the story would progress correctly around the player.

What would I need to do to switch who the player is playing only once from the first choice in the game, and have dormant the NPC aspects/enable them also upon that choice?

Thanks for any ideas. My first thoughts are to create npc versons and player versions of each, and move them into the game when the choice is made. Then would it be easy to simply put game.pov = whatevercharacterchosen ?

Maybe there's a better way?

That seems like a sensible way to do it; but I'm not sure it's necessary to create separate versions of the character. If a character is playable, then when you set game.pov to be that character, the stuff on their "Player" tab basically replaces the regular attributes.

I suspect a lot of the NPC dialogue will depend on which character you are, but that's just a case of a lot of if or {if in the text, I think.

That sounds interesting.

If you have extra time, play my Slew of Despond. I used the change player object script and if (player object is ) which are in tabs, in fact. I did not add a lot of detail to the look-at-me descriptions, but I did change them. I'm sure someone could run an extensive script on just that one tab.
But I don't know how to include a look at verb for player characters, because they don't exist except as a player's actions. I guess an object link? I just know there is a way to choose more than one alias and specify when they are used, but I still have to examine how that is done.
Sorry, I was on a joint computer a minute ago.