[MUD-Dev] Life

[Nathan Yospe]

On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Adam Wiggins wrote:

:> 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.

I have a feeling that the consequences of death are going to seriously
turn a lot of people off on my own game, but honestly, I don't give a
damn. The ones that stay will eventually increase, and I really never want
to get trapped in the 'do it this way because everybody does it that way'
trap.

:>  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'.

IMO, not sticking their head in that dark cave and going "Hallloooo?" is
exercizing a fair amount of control. Otherwise, they really can't complain
too much about getting maulled by whatever was making those heavy
breathing noises inside.

:> 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%.

I actually took my death model from, of all things, the Transformers comic
book that ran about eight years ago. By that time, it had gained a
sophistication that its publisher, Marvel comics, had utterly failed to
imbue in anything else they were putting out. The Transformers were a
nearly immortal race, and could survive anything short of actual
destruction of a tiny little walnut sized brain unit, and even then if
they had a chance to prepare. They could, on the other hand, get ripped to
shreds and left crippled with their parts strewn across the landscape.
Between issues 60 and 80, the best run of the series, they were written by
a guy who was trying to tell a story of heroism... tragic heroism. VERY
tragic heroism. They were also penciled by a guy with an incredible
attention both to expression and to detail. The looks of building agony on
the faces, and the cumulative dings, scratches, missing parts, exposed
wiring, fluid stained footprints, constant presense of medical units on
both sides, and in particular a couple of scenes showing old enemies
looking around at the land they had been fighting for, utterly demolished,
and at each other, practically destroyed, but still going out of sheer
stubbornness.... I kinda like that. 
   The idea is, death is rarely a product of physical injuries. You can
hang just this side of life as long as you can focus your attention on
staying alive, even with the lower half of your body missing. With enough
nanotech, even with the upper half missing. It won't be fun, and if no one
gets you to a medic, eventually exhaustion and pain are going to get you,
and you will pass out and die. But you can hold out a damn long time. If
you don't give up the ghost. If you DO give up the ghost, you are toasted.
If you have an account with revival, you can come back in a new body.
Unaugmented. But you still have your ID. And a smattering of your skills.
Skills don't translate over well to a new body and brain. If you have a
direct tap, you might have even more of your skills. But still not
perfect. If they manage to repair you, either by stimulated tissue growth
or all out cybernetic replacement, you have a LOT more of your skills
still intact. (Same brain, remember...) Itsd also a lot cheaper if they
don't have to transfer your mind to a new brain. And if you can't afford
revival, that's it. If there is enough of you left, they might ice you,
and you COULD have another character later revive your dead id. If you can
afford the icing. Death is not THAT permanent a state, but it is nothing
to sneeze at. It is fairly easy to come by... just don't retreat when you
are getting pounded. A lot of the Andies (Andromedans) don't much care if
you've surrendered. Some of them might smack mouthparts at the thought.
*munch* *munch*.

:> 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'.

Hmmm. I tend to think in terms of what is needed to support the system if
the player number is about 10. At that point, it is nice to have some NPC
establishments that serve these roles. BUT... that's not hardcoded.

: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.

*grin* Absolute statements always seem to get people into trouble.

:> 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.

Mine is like that too... but there are a lot of places where the odds of
danger are one in several thousand. Going somewhere dangerous, however, is
signing up to die. No ifs, ands, or buts.

:> 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.

Agreed. I think it is rather snobbish to usurp the word (which originally
refered to a type of impromptu acting activity in the nineteenth century,
if certain books are to be believed, and did not resemble mushes in the
slightest) and define world immersive role players out of it. World
immersive role players require a world that at least approximates support
for them. I think story immersion, which is what most mushes seem to do,
is fine, at times, but hardly the only "true role play" option.

:> 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.

I find myself a little dissatisfied by a good movie that ends poorly.
Sort of like a rich chocolate with a faintly soapy aftertaste.

:>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.

I KNOW I've seen an action movie in which the purported main character
dies a third of the way through. The rest of the movie focussed on his
father out seeking revenge. I wouldn't have minded seeing the physicist/
love interest character from The Saint fighting her way out of a hostile
russia after Val's character had been gunned down.

:>  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.

Mind you, this rarely happens. A good writer can usually craft at the very
least a decent ending. But you must also remember that when you play a
game with a centerpoint of stupidity, you cannot expect to live. Players
killing each other is another matter. In Sing2, my solution was simple. If
it was done while in politically maintained territory, or as a member of a
military force of any kind, the chances of surviving, in game, the
consequences of killing someone were minimal. And... murderers are not
generally revived. (Unless someone gets around to building a black
market/underground revival center.)

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  /_  / / ) /_  /_) / ) /| /| / /\            First Light of a Nova Dawn
 /   / / \ /_  /_) / \ /-|/ |/ /_/            Final Night of a World Gone
Nathan F. Yospe - University of Hawaii Dept of Physics - yospe at hawaii.edu