[MUD-Dev] Life

[Adam Wiggins]

> >Being upset at an end to a character is fine, but there's upset as in
> >you aren't really happy with the way it turned out, and then there's
> >upset as in you're in severe emotional shock, you complain to the admin,
> >etc etc.  This is not fun for anyone involved.
> 
> And now its MY turn ironicly to call 'system'.
> 
> If this happens once in awhile, from the smal lsegment of then populatio
> nwho always compalin anyway, you are reasonably safe to ignroe it.
> If it happens alot then the problem is nto with the users, its with the
> game that its making them feel so unsatisfied.

Agreed 100%.

> Neitehr does the roleplayer. The difference is that to a roleplayer,
> character death is the most SERIOUS negitive consequnce possible. As I
> outlined befoer it goes much deepr then just "oh shit,I lost some items
> and exp".

Yup, I hate this style of death probably more than just about anyone.
If it were up to me I'd get rid of it on just about every mud in existance,
but unfortunately many of them have actually been built up around the
presuposition that death works this way.

>  For this reason, they SHOULD feel a fair amount of cotnrol
> over this eventuallity.

There's a rather large difference between 'a fair amount of control' and
'complete control'.

> My watchword has always been that death should be seldom and devistating.
> That best matches the perceived risk/real risk goals I set up earlier. 

Again, also agreed 100%.

> In order to do that, the designer needs to exert soem control. If one
> maxxed asshole can run around and kill 20 people in an hour, you've just
> lost the seldom part.

I've played a large number of muds with unrestricted player interaction
(ie, PK etc allowed).  Most of them had little to no admin intervention,
pre-suposed social structure, or any sort of built-in policing.  Yet
most of them managed to sustain dozens or even hundreds of users living
in what is more or less harmony, with the occasional problem case being
quickly taken care of by players.  There is social structure; there is
policing; but it's all 100% defined by the players - complete outside
the 'system'.

As near as I can tell, you're saying that this could never happen.
I don't mean to seem negative, but since I've been playing games that work
EXACTLY like this for the last ~3 years, I tend to disagree.

> You're missing the point.  Death itself isn't a "choice", but to put
> oneself IN a potentially mortal situation should be. In this way the
> player has control over the <bold>circumstances of the death</bold>, not
> the death itself.

Once again, I agree completely with this.  If you never want to die, don't
go anyplace it's dangerous.  My game world happens to be set up so
that there is nowhere at all that is 100% safe, but that is a relative
rarity on muds.

> >If not, why is it a 'problem' when they die?  I'm not saying that you
> 
> I hope I've explained this.  You are not beign asked to agree. Yo uneed
> however to accept that this IS the game roleplayers play, and its
> different from the one you do.

Okay, I guess what keeps me in constant confusion is your reference to
'roleplayers'.  You're actually talking about a subset of role-players;
I think possibly that the name 'story-conscious role-players' or even
'story-builders' is a better and less confusing name.  Myself and others
on this list qualify as role-players without ever necessarily playing
the game the way you describe.  I think of role-playing (without an
qualifiers) in the pure sense of the word - you play a role.  That's
it.

> >It's unfair to expect players to play a game when they don't even
> >know the basic premise, rules, etc from the outset.
> 
> Just becareful to realize that, as someone else suggested, just
> describing your world settign is NOT enough.  You need to describe the
> expected player behavior within that setting.

Guess we're not going to reach any kind of agreement here.  You keep
saying, 'You must define player behavior.'  I keep saying, 'I've been
playing games without defined player behaviors for years, and don't really
understand how this works or what the purpose would be exactly.'  To
which you respond that you must define player behavior...so guess we can
just drop it.

> Bad example.  I DO walk out of the theatre pissed off when the plot was
> badly conceived and poorly executed and thus gave me no significant
> enjoyment.

*nod* especially with the price of movies today. :)
I agree, but this (rarely) has anything to do with the *ending* of the
movie.  I've seen great movies with terrible endings.  I think they have
terrible endings, but that doesn't keep me from thinking the movie was
enjoyable.  I've also seen movies that just plain suck all the way through;
the analogy to this would be a character who was never fun or interesting
to play, in which case I'm GLAD it's over.

>THAT is the analogy to a random character death.  What if you
> went to see "The Saint" and the mvoie ended half way through by some
> idiot jumping out of a russian alley and knifing Val Kilmer to death
> 'cause it was "cool", "fun", or they wanted his jacket?  Would you have
> found that satisfying movie experience?

Haven't seen it, but I would *love* to see a movie like this.  It would
never work, of course, because everyone would give it away after opening
night (kinda like the Crying Game or Usual Suspects), but I'm bored
to death with 'action' sequences where the hero goes up against some
gun-wielding guys.  You know full well there's no way he's gonna die, because
it's only 45 mins into the movie, the question is only HOW he will dispatch
said gun-wielders.  There's no suspense or surprise anywhere, two things
that I find add greatly to the mood and enhance my entertainment.
I guess that's why I enjoy the Band Apart movies so much (Resevoir Dogs
is my favorite, Pulp Fiction ain't bad either).  You have characters
like Vincent Vega - a trained hitman, one of the 'heros' of the movie, who
dies when he leaves his gun lieing on the counter to go to the bathroom.

>  And Il lask YOU... havent you ever had a book or movie that started out
> great destroyed for you by a totally inappropriate and incompetant end? I
> know I sure have.

Erm, no, but then, I guess I take things a little bit more at face value.
If a book is great up until the last chapter, then my opinion of that
book is that it's 99% good, and 1% not good, which is a pretty good
ratio by my count.  For instance, I very much enjoyed the first Dune book,
but the next few I found pretty boring.  I didn't feel that they 'took away'
from the first book, however.  It was perfectly good when I read it, and
it still is.  I just didn't like what came later, and think that the
whole series would have been better off not being a series at all.