[MUD-Dev] Combat and Roleplay

[Jeff Kesselman]

At 08:13 PM 6/4/97 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins wrote:
>>  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'.

Granted and I really never meant complete control.

But if at any time anywhere an asshole with significantly more exp then you
can jump you and kill you, thats NO control, right?

>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'.

OKies. Well I stil think the system has to at least support a combat model
where there is accountability for that to work, and accountability is no
easy nut to crack on the net.

Im also comign to the conclusion that you have all been dealign with FAR
more sophisticated audiances then i have. As long as you remian with thsoe
audiances, I guess you can do that kind of stuff.

>
>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.

Well, there needs to be a bit mreo tehn that at least dealign with Joe
Public.  The game needs to never SEND the players into dangerous areas.
We had a problem with this too until we expanded the origial DSO world--
tehre was nopalce we coudl designate a PvP zone that SOME important game
quest didn't bring you through.  The world was way too small.



>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.

Do you really? Or do you play yourself within the fictional envrionment? To
me, a roelplayer must act, must take on the personality of a totally
different character with different formative experiences and differnt
points of view on the world? If so, then by defition youa re already
'story-aware" in that youa re responding to your characters' experiences
given the story of what has gone before for the character.

If not then, you are right, I don't consider this roleplay.  I don't think
it matches either the standard pen and paper definition, or the psychology
definition from which the term was taken.


>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.

Maybe we should but I HATE communciation impasse so forgicve me if I try
once more.  Everyoen coming to the game expects something out of it.  As
extremes the combat jock expects it to be a war of words and punches to
determine who is the strongest (see, i resisted any erefences to anatomy;) )

Your pure "story-drive" roleplayer, to use your terminology for clarity,
expects other players to be sensative to their own character's story and
direction in how they interract.

Put em together with no rules and you have Napoleon and Ghandi trying to do
something in the same space.  The conflict is inevitable.

What is interestign is that people on thsi list who I would term
'roleplayers' by my defintiion all agree on this need.  The oens who I
owuld term PvPers don't seem to understand it or want it.  That in of
itself may be a proof of the diochotomy of which I speak, and the vehemence
we have seen as a smal lexampel ofwhat happens wjhen these peopel meet with
no guidance.

When was the last time JC had to tell this list to clam down over something?
:) :) :)

JK

>
>> 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.
>
>
>