Just a bit of musing

[Adam Wiggins]

> >In the past, when I've been "lurking", reading everyones contributions,
> >there seems to be a lot of emphasis on making things more realistic
> >(unique, I suppose, which is good), but it seems to me what is often
> >overlooked is the "fun" factor.  It's a game.  With approximations,
> 
> True.  However what is easy to ignore in such discussions is that adding
> such "realism" also allows really neat unrealistic items to be coded more
> easily.  Consider the simple case of character names:

I tend to argue this stuff quite feverently.  The reason I'm so sold on
it is that, to me, the strength of a mud is that it is not a game.  It's
a large, virtual environment with certain parameters, physical laws,
cultures, locations, etc which make it unique.  Then you toss in a bunch
of players and the "fun" of the thing basically emerges on its own.  You
don't need to code silly puzzles and "quests" to keep the users entertained,
although there's nothing wrong with doing so.  But, if your world is
rich and detailed enough, they will have plenty of fun running around,
exploring, advancing their characters, and interacting with each other.
(Which is why I'm such a large proponent of completely unrestricted pk/psteal
etc..makes so many more fun situations that can occur.)
The best part about doing a "realistic" (== self-consistent) is that, as a
coder, you get to see things happen which you never planned of (as in,
wrote specific code for) but which works correctly anyways.  That is,
you code a herbal system over here...then eight months later you code traps.
Quickly players learn to coat the traps' needles with paralyzing poisons
for best effect.  Now you may not have coded anything specific on the
traps to allow for this - you just made the trap have an object on it
of type "blade", and part of your herbal code allows people to coat objects
with various concoxions.  When the blade breaks the skill, the agent on
the blade is introduced into the bloodstream and then the fun begins...