I recommend you just concentrate on the fun open world sharing a wonderland concept like you did on VTT or whatever that was called, I forgot. Make it more like a reason to interact and not necessarily make it all about fighting things, which is mostly not what you all liked to do anyway. I understand you may not have a legendary dissociative Bear brain with on-demand forgetting and memory locking, but that sounds like more of a sacrifice to your own maximum enjoyment for your fwends' sake. Dawww.
As far as NPC stuff, well, I gotta say we need a break from that daily toil. Just a few years, not too long, it'll fly by! Maybe use a dice to roll what they're going to say, this is what Joy used for the donkeys.
I'll be here if you want to pick my brain, obviously not in the same capacity. Frankly when Ashley suggested this, we had no idea it would take years just to walk through a mine.
