[MUD-Dev] Heroes

[Nathan Yospe]

On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Jeff Kesselman wrote:

:At 08:39 PM 6/19/97 PST8PDT, Nathan wrote:
:
:>:Part of your mistake ofcourse is that you are treatign AD&D characters as
:>:normal peopel. Theya re not, at high levels they are epic heros.
:>
:>Which is rather odd. A world with a hundred epic heroes running around all
:>the time... bleah. AD&D does not translate well to muds.
:
:Ahah. Now THIS is an interestign issue and oft not well addressed.
:
:The goal of the adventure gamer is to be a hero. How do yo usupport a world
:full of geros?  An interestign design topic...

Well, if you actually insist on doing it (and, to a degree, I do as well),
there are three options I can think of right off the bat:

1] Reusable plotcasting - this is the motive for my split universe quest
engine. You get to be the hero of the scenario, and remembered for it. In
your own private universe. And you still interact with others... the set
of minor differences each time through the region mean that noone will
realize that the hero of Cambul actually destroyed essentially the same
complex as the butcher of Rhieasal. There is a call for this sort of
thing. Of course, players won't get these sort of distinctions often, and
lose most characters in the effort, making the victory sweeter. This lets
the older players feel like they belong to a "hero's fraternity", and the
younger players feel like they have something (heroism) to strive for.

2] Overwhelming admin driven NPCs to play the non heroic roles, and
convince the PCs that they are (even early on) heroes. This strikes me as
futile. There is a point in Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" in which
the main character is in his morality class in high school, and the
teacher confronts him on the meaning (and falseness) of "The best things
in life are free". This impacts here (mainly because Troopers, along with
Cobra and Armor, are major influences on Sing2. That, and a bit of the
heroism of Star Wars for spice... but mainly the utter brutality and
senselessness of Troopers and Armor. I'm trying to teach the players
something, you see. Several somethings. A bit of physics, a bit of social
engineering, a bit of real life. As such, I want them to scrap for every
bit of glory they earn, until it becomes trully precious... and then they
get dropped into the middle of an enemy civilian populace, one that has
never seen war, with an order to kill. And I repeat this until it is
drummed in deep. I LIKE yanking emotional strings, hard. So option 2 is
out. People cannot really learn to be heroes, unless they have paid in
blood and sweat and tears.

3] Keep the numbers low. Cycle three games, with their "generations" of
heroes, so that each set of heroes bonds into aligned teams, just in time
to take a new generation, percieved seperate, under their wing. Cycle it
on a rate of three days per recruitment drive per game. A week difference
between the youngest of a generation and the oldest of the next should be
enough. Muds run fast. So you end up with the established heroes, about to
go to the next plain, and the ones before them, already demigods, and
between these and the newbies, say seven layers of heroism. The local
heroes, the state heroes, the national heroes, the global heroes, the
heroes of the solar system, the heroes of the galaxy... using a sci-fi
basis, of course.

Anyway, its a start.

   __    _   __  _   _   ,  ,  , ,  
  /_  / / ) /_  /_) / ) /| /| / /\            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