[MUD-Dev] Life

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

On 07/06/97 at 04:41 AM, Martin Keegan <martin at cam.sri.com> said: >On
Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Adam Wiggins wrote:

>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.

Taking that argument down the garden path of course leads us all to
playing a multi-user version of Adventure! or MIST for the next few
millenia. 

>The Eclipse discussions ...

Eclipse?

>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". 

This is the same argument that lead me to seperating characters from
their bodies.  That and I wanted to play with the effects  of a player
being able to guarantee his own immortality (it _can_ be done with
enough dedication and skill).

>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. 

What advantage was there for a player to belong to a house?  Did
advancement of the house in any way reflect upon the player
characters, or did it merely act as a central clearing house for
player-character acquisitions:

  Bubba of house X got special object Y.

  Therefore it is reasonable for Boffo of house X to later have 
    Y despite being a newbie.

How about abilities gamed by players?  Did they cross reflect to other
members of the house?  I can also see this forming the basis of more
interesting clan and political battles.  

  "I may die now, but I do so for for my House, and they shall
benefit!"

  "All for the glory of house Agueface!"

  "Kill the Keegans!"

  "House Burp and House Grunt have joined forces against House Gas."

  "With the defection of House Bolo and House Sewer from the 
    Archivist faction, the Blue Snot Alliance may have a good chance 
    of wresting Silko Castle from them and thus be in a good position 
    for the Kindgom come Bluto's inevitable death."

*MUCH* more intersting than clans....  I like it.

>> 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

Excellant -- borrow from all quarters. 

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

I won't ask which.

The FIDO humor echo banned the entire city of Denver(?) for a long
while, with the comment, "Nothing funny ever comes out of Denver."

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...