[MUD-Dev] Life

[Martin Keegan]

On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> [Nathy Y:]

> > 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.
> 
> I really don't think it'll be that big of a deal once you get off the
> ground.  It's just a matter of what players are used to.  The hard-core

It most certainly is - mud players are very change-averse and risk-averse.
It takes extra effort to learn an unfamiliar new mud type, so why not
stick to the codebase you know - that's how most people will think.

> destroyed its playability.  IF you start from the ground up, and everything
> is designed more or less in such a way to support permanent death, then
> there shouldn't be a problem.  It's only a design issue, just like any
> other.

The Eclipse discussions basically concluded that since character death in
Eclipse is so likely as to be inevitable and would discourage players from
investing effort in characters, characters could form "Houses". 

A house was basically a family, sharing a common name, to which characters
could belong. It was expected that players with multiple concurrent
characters would make them all members of the same house, and might
conceivably invite other players' characters to be members of their house.
Whereas a player would outlive his/her characters, a house would be more
or less permanent and might conceivably outlive players. The notion of
houses then became central to advancement on Eclipse, and also overlapped
with grouping and multicharring. 

> I take heat from all quarters.  The 'true' role-players I show my mud
> to say, 'Ew!  Feature <X> reminds me of LP!'  The diku players say, 'Ew!
> Feature <Y> looks like something from a MUX!'  The LP players say, 'Ew!
> Feature <Z> seems like a diku thing of some sort!'  I tried explaining

Yes - this is exasperating. I banned a whole country from Island when
someone accused me of lying about what "mudlib" Island was.

Mk