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

[Adam Wiggins]

> >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).

The equivilency on muds being that you specifically take your characters
to areas of a given challange level.  (Although sometimes this doesn't
work so well - you wander into an area which is incredibly tough without
realizing it, or possibly, you wander into an area which isn't too
tough except for your character specifically, like say, they are aggresive
to ONLY players of your race and alignment.)

> (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.

On muds, this is what keeps players from getting a bunch of cool gear etc,
then just sitting in town all day long talking about how much ass they kick.
You have other players which may hunt you down on the basis of wanting all
those cool items you're bragging about; you've got mobs which come after
specific items you have (like the ringwraith/One Ring spec in the old Dale
code).

> 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...

Which, unfortunately, does not exist on a mud unless it's one without
automated combat (ie, there's basically an admin acting as DM).  This
is a double-edged thing; in a certain way, it's nice, because you've got
a computer making massive amounts of calculations and coming back to you
with the results without you having to muck about with any numbers -
increasing suspension of disbelief, not to mention heightening the
intensity of the situations.  You KNOW that the computer won't go 'easy'
on you just because they like you or your character, nor will it try
to kill them off because it is tired and wants to go to bed, or just doesn't
like you or your character.  On the other hand, this also means that you
may end up with a favorite character loosing a limb or something due to
dumb luck.  I really don't see any way around this; requiring human
control is out of the question for me.  At best you can put little things
in the code to try to simulate this - mainly, always giving players an
'out' of tough situations, if they react quickly enough.