Mixture

[Furball]

[Greg]

> Intelligence attribute:  someone (J.C. I think) made a statement to the
> affect that there was no real reason for an intelligence attribute.  I have 
> to dissagree.  For a system where the character is just a different 
> "physical" body for the player, ok, yeah, there should be no intelligence
> attribute.  But for systems where the character is another being that
> the player just pulls the strings on, intelligence is quite important.
> For example, in my system, room descriptions are layered by levels of
> detail (essentially).  The more astute a character is, the fuller a 
> room description/graphical image of the room they will receive, the less
> astute, the more "blury" the description will be (requiring explicit
> commands to investigate something further).  How much the player has to
> work with is based, to some extent, on the character's intelligence.
> (some level of detail will always be presented, to make it playable.)
> 
> -Greg

Yep agreed.  When I did planned for a fantasy mud, the mental stats were:

Willpower:  Resist spells, stubborness.
Reasoning:  Intelligence renamed but it would have been used for
            assimilating spells and such.
Power:      Ability to tap into surrounding mana.
Affinity:   Ability to detect mana/see future, etc (fortune tellers have
            high affinity, low power).

I still think they're quite good stats.  Infact, I'm planning to reuse
some of them.  Okay, so reasoning is sort of Victorian, like MENSA, but
placed in strategic positions, I'm sure it can make sense without
patronising the player.

[AdamW said:  Skills trees suck but they work, or something like that]

Yup, skill trees work but don't quite seem to be the perfect answer so...
Retain the concept a bit, how about skill webs?  So each skill would
depend on a multiple of other skills like in a matrix?  When I was
designing a skill tree, I found it a near impossible task to make a skill
tree which made sense.  Eg:  Climbing should depend on your athletic
skills but surely, by improving combat skills, the character's climbing
should improve also?  Section off skills a bit to make more than one
matrix so there aren't too many multiplications should result in something
quite neat.


This is going to look like credits on some hacker's demo:

Thanx Jon for the pointers re: lists & trees.  I've got a book out so I
won't ask any more blindingly stupid questions, I hope. :)

ChrisG:  My mail keeps bouncing when I send direct mail.  So, via public:
ToyMUD is really cool, I lurve it!

NathanY:  About not using select().. do you have any problems depending on
SIGIO signals?  I heard some dodgy rumour about async being unstable.

Everyone:  I'm off for the weekend to see Griz. :)  So, fill up my mailbox
with lots of ideas wilyer!

  |				"With my naked eyes I saw the falling"
_O_O_  Ling - Freshwater fish	 rain coming down on."