[MUD-Dev] Re: Introductions and descriptions

[coder at ibm.net]

On 25/11/97 at 01:55 PM, Richard Woolcock <KaVir at dial.pipex.com> said:

>Survival 0 - You know nothing about survival.
>Survival 1 - You know the basics, recognise simple plants, etc. 
>Survival 2 - You are intermediate, can recognise poisonous fungus, etc. 
>Survival 3 - You are skilled, blah blah blah....etc....

>Thus if Bob has Survival < 2, he won't recognise toadstools, whilst if he
>has Survival >= 2, he will.  Survival ROLLS would be used in 'chance' 
>situations.

The annoying thing about this is that every character with Survival>=2
will know and recognise a deadly nightcap.  Bogus.  _Some_ characters
should recognise it even if their Survival stat is very low (Momma taught
at her knee), where as others are iffy at higher stat levels.

The most common approach to this is to use extremely fine grained skill
webs (this has been discussed before), which create difficult
maintainability problems.  Another possible approach:

For each node in your skill web which a character possesses, also have
that character have a "key".  The key would be equivalent to the random
seed discussed earlier for repetitive terrain generation.  Essentially it
would personalise that skill node for that character.  Bubba would have
one key for this Survival stat of 5, and due to the key couldn't recognise
a deadly nightcap if his nose was rubbed in it, but could also survive
very well indefinitely if dropped naked in Siberia.  Boffo conversely
could have a Survival state of 1, but would always recognise the mushroom,
but couldn't walk thru a hedge without breaking at least two bones and
being assaulted by every animate thing within a mile radius.

The nice thing about this is that the key does not even have to be
pre-deterministic.  You don't have to know what key values will have what
results, or even what changes to the key values will have what results. 
It can be a simple random number.  This will of course have the
interesting side-effect of Bubba knowing everything about toadstools one
minute, advancing and getting new key the next minute and now knowing
nothing about toadstools.  The nice thing is that I doubt the players will
generally notice and it will add considerable flavour to the game.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...