[MUD-Dev] What about drugs?

[Adam Wiggins]

[Nathan Y:]
> Just something I thought of, with Adam's post RE herbs...
> several of you probably won't have any input here, being against
> "influencing" players by modification of behavior and output, but, for
> those of you who, like me, like to think of the player as a mind, subject
> to interference from the body, and chemicals therin... what about drugs?

Absolutely.  I consider the role-playing experience to be one of
stepping into someone else's shoes.  With that you get everything expected
of it - if they have differing sensory input (a blind man or a race with
heightened smell) then that changes your perception of the world.
In addition, I find it impossible to model things like the effects of
pain without taking into account mental factors.

> How does one simulate an LSD trip? Cannabis? Halucinations, for some
> cases, obviously...

This is, I think, is the easiest to implement and most fun (for the
player) mental effect to model.  In fact, I first became interested in
this sort of thing when I saw hallucinations on some mud - Ancient Anguish,
maybe?  Dunno, it was a while ago...but at any rate, some who was trying
to kick some mud-drug (White Leaf I think?) ran around the mud for 90 minutes
convinced he was being chased by a giant purple dragon.  Of course, everyone
told him he was crazy, but he kept seeing his hitpoints go down and messages
about the horrible pain, so as far as he knew, he was constantly near death.
*That's* what I call an immersive world.  And that's only a fairly simple
piece of specialty code!  Which makes me think of about a thousand other
things that could occur in a slightly more complicated system...

>and perhaps slowdown and garbled action/information...

Yeah.  One thing we make heavy use of is vague messages.  Ie, 'The hairs
on the back of your neck stand up' or 'You get a sudden chill'.  These
are mainly warning indicators for things like crossbows being trained
on you, or other impending danger nearby.  Players learn that, although
these messages don't give any specific info about what's going on, when
they see something like that they know something is up and should walk
with care.  Thus, we can simulate slight paranoia by simply sending these
sorts of messages eroniously.  The effect is that the player seems
'jumpy', as it were.  Other fun with messages: when a thief attempts
to pick-pocket but bails out at the last moment, sometimes perceptive
players will get a message like 'You notice X eyeing your Y..'  Needless
to say, sending 'false' messages of this sort is *great* for sewing
the seeds of distrust.  Even messages of 'X looks at you' or 'X seems
to be watching you particularly closely' can be fun.  Again, though,
it only works if these messages are as often true as not.  Then you
get the double-reversal of people getting one of these messages and
dismissing it as 'just the alcohol talking' or whatever, even though
it was the genuine article.

> but how does one simulate the mental lethargy of pot, or the weakening of
> cause/effect one gets from alcohol? I don't, incidentally... I'm one of

Well, physical stuff should be easy enough to do...lower agility, reflexes,
or whatever stat(s) you may have to model response time and so forth.
Now, we has just as many 'emotional' stats as we do physical.  Among
these are (off the top of my head) stoicism, passion, pleasure, anger,
fear, mental fortitude, and physical fortitude.  Alcohol fiddles around
with most of these, the most useful of which is the change to physical
fortitude.  Meaning that if that pansy little elf is thrashing around too
much as you try to yank the arrow out of his leg, give him a couple pulls
from your pocket flask and he'll settle down enough for you to get the thing
out.  Of course, it also incites his passion, so suddenly he becomes victim
to massive mood-swings.  And so forth.  It's easy to make drugs affect
both your mental and physical stats, and from there the normal stat-handler
stuff takes care of the rest.  For instance, berserker mushrooms just give
a large enhancement to passion and anger, making it easier to go berserk.
THC (pot) brings your passion towards 0, resulting in a melloing effect.
This can also result in different races having
wildly different reactions to various drugs, as well, if their emotional
stuff works differently.

> those people who gets very intellectual under alcohol... and far less
> human. Somehow, I can't see this as workable in a mud. Perhaps something
> along the lines of reduced information feed, with random fires of too much
> info from random and often unimportant sources?

Sure.  We have alcohol hurt your sensory stats quite a bit, which can
result in you missing some pretty important stuff.