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

[Adam Wiggins]

[Chris L:]
>    at 09:39 AM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at inficad.com> said: >[Chris L:]
>   1) A unified "luck" field such that at times *everyone* will be more
> or less lucky.  The main use of this field would be to spend most of
> its time at 0, but to then erratically and unpredictably bop out and
> get a significant positive or negative value.

Heh, you could do this like nethack - base it on phases of the moon,
Friday the 13th is especially unlucky, etc.
In fact, now that I think of it, Arctic MUD has something very similar.
There are three moons (the ones from Dragonlance), and whether the
moon for your alignment is in or out of phase has a large effect on
your spellcasting abilities - regen times, spell failure, etc.

> >This gives the effect of certain NPCs 'liking' certain kinds of
> >characters better, without being as blantantly obvious as racial or
> >alignment likes/dislikes (though those should be there, too), in a
> >very simple implementation.
> 
> Miro made a couple comments earlier on a theis regarding giving
> mobiles very simple goals and then likes and dislike values for each
> other.  His idea was that doing that and then just "letting the pot
> boil" would get some very interesting dynamics going.  Intriguing
> concept.  I've been playing with it for a while now.

Yeah, I like this a lot.  It's very difficult, however, to get it to
work well; as opposed to a more straightforward (blatant) implementation.
That is, you want to achieve a sort of homeostatis of your system - to
continue to the metaphor, do it wrong and you end up with either all the
water boiling away, or it not boiling at all.  The trick is to find that
ideal stove setting - except that in a system like this, the 'setting'
is adjusted by scores and scores of variables.