[MUD-Dev] Reasonable danger [was Alright... IF your gonan do DESIESE...]

[Jeff Kesselman]

At 09:03 PM 6/2/97 PST8PDT, you wrote:
>The solution I liked best, though I haven't seen it implemented ever, was
>the following.  Instead of separating areas by level, each are holds mon-
>sters of all levels.  Including monsters that are pretty much  impossible
>to kill regardless the level and number of players involved. Most of them
>wander and are aggressive to players.
>To balance this low level players,  and players with poor armour classes,
>have much better  hiding and sneaking skills.  So once a low level is out
>of the baby classes,  they have access to a fair collection of skills and
>spells to hide away from pretty much anything in the game.  That way they
>can explore the game world  with reasonable confidence.  

I think its worth at this point mentioning in passing what a pen and paper
judge does...

(1) He/She sends characters out to places where they have a reasonable
chacne of dealign with the issue (this is akin to world segmenting).

(2) He/She balances adversaries on an individual basis.  My rule ws always
"power draw power". The mreo powerful you are, the more the adversaries
pick on you, expecially the larger ones.  Note that in a MUD this would
require an objectoive way to measure power.  This can be tricky in children
of AD&D where WHAt you own can be as important as WHO yo uare.

I'm playing with ways to do (2).  There actually is a THRID thigna judge
does, which is to re-balance combat as it occurs to make up for any
particualrly wonderful or terrible luck, or just top make up for judge's
errors in balance.  Think kidn of dynamic balancing is VERY tricky to do
algortihymicly as its tyoicly more art then science...