Mixture

[Adam Wiggins]

> Regarding command parsing, in NathanY's example:
>  
> > Use rifle on bob
> 
> This would result in bopping Bob over the head with the rifle butt if
> there was no ammo left in rifle.  What would happen if it was:
> 
> > Use spear on bob
> 
> If Bob was quite close, do I end up throwing the spear, jabbing Bob or
> bopping him over the head with my spear?  Sounds silly but I usually try
> dumb tactics when I'm testing stuff (Steve Jackson's Game Design Theory
> book ref: GEV's and Ogre and Fuzzywuzzy).

I don't like this syntax at all.  I don't desire to use it as a player,
for the same reason that I don't desire to try to implement it.
This falls into the same category, I feel, as typing 'aquire money' and having
your character automatically decide what the best method for aquring money
is, and then going out and doing it.  Not only is it ambiguous, but I don't
see how it adds to the game at all.
Kinda reminds me, too, of the old adventuer games which had a general 'use'
command for objects.  You'd pick up a piece of pocket lint or a banana
peel or something similarly obscure and wonder what the hell it was for.
Then you'd go around, randomly clicking objects on other objects to see
what worked.  Normally nothing would happen, eventually you'd find out that
you had to do 'use banana peel on floor', your character would drop the peel,
hide nearby, and this would trigger the guard to come walking down the hall
and slip.  This worked alright for the limited environment of a single-player
adventure game, but in the case of such a broad worldscape as we have in the
style of mud we've been discussing, why would you not just type, "drop peel"
and then "hide", and wait for a mob to wander by?

> Colours in magic, I've always liked this concept instead of black and
> white, bad and good magic or magic is a complete mess but maybe it's
> because I go around quantifying things. I've seen this in a David Gemmel
> book too and it worked pretty well, everything felt natural.  Magic was
> not evil nor good as such but there was a harmony to be retained.  The
> colours all depend on what it's like in the region.  By spreading terror
> in a city, Red would be the dominant colour but the laws of probability
> says that the colours should all be at the same level.

Absolutely.  I'm of the belief that nothing in a mud should come with
preconcieved notions about how it is 'supposed' to work - it is what it is,
and that's it.  Players can then make use of it or ignore it however they
like.  Incedentaly someone mentioned the colors in Magic: The Gathering
(which I played a lot of a few years back)...I think the colors there are
actually pretty cool, a combination of the elements, some good/evil stuff,
and the Circles of Wizardry found in D&D.  In case anyone doesn't
know, they go like this:

The word in paranthesis after the color is the landsource from which the
given color draws its mana.

Blue (Islands): Water, air, illusion, counterspelling, copying spells, 
	flying critters.
Red (Mountains): Fire, destruction.  Goblins, minotaurs, trolls, cave-dwellers.
Green (Forests): Earth, nature, forests, *tons* of land creatures (from bears
	to dragons to mamoths) and enchantments designed to aid creatures.
White (Plains): Light, healing, justice, righteousness.  Incredibly strong on
	defense and healing, as well as creatures that are weak but have
	"banding" (allowing excellent teamwork).
Black (Swamps): Darkness, decay, death.  The most viscious monsters including
	life-draining vampires, wraiths, and zombies.  Pestilence and disease.

Each of the colors has two 'natural' enemies, and they are set up so that
the 'enemy' colors have natural offenses and defences designed to work against
that specific color.  Blue is enemies of red and green (water vs fire and
earth), White is enemies of red and black (defence and light vs offence and
darkness), Green of blue and black, Black of white and green.

Also, there are multi-creatures which use multiple kinds of mana.  Any
deck can contain _any_ colors you desire, including 'enemy' colors, or even
all five if you want.  However, it's usually only effective to have one or
two colors in your deck, or at most three.  This worked extremely well...
simple, easy to understand metaphors for the colors, but there's no
pre-set way you have to use things.  Many cards were totaly ambiguous as
to whether they were good or bad - for instance, enchanting someone's creature
with a Black Ward (makes it immune to any effects of Black) can be both
a blessing (if someone tries to use a pestilence or a weakness, both black
cards) or a curse (if you have 3 unholy strengths on the creatuer already, a
black ward causes them all to 'fall off').
I find this effect extremely cool, and in fact we have modeled our own
magic system much after this as far as the interplay of the various
circles.

> I just read the EVOLUTION response again and... waste, restrooms and
> procreation?

Too microscopic.  We were speaking of something much broader.  When you
read a history book, you don't read about these things, but you do read
about King James being succeeded by his son William.  This is the effect
being discussed.

> For character creation, ever thought about using 'lifepaths' instead of
> straight choosing a name, gender and race then leaving the player to train
> up skills.  It seems silly that a character of adventuring age would start
> with no skills.  The aim of lifepaths is that the player would choose (or
> be forced to choose) paths during character creating.  Did her parents die
> during the War?  Is she the only surviving sibling?  Has she got an old
> friend who she can always rely on?  Has she got an enemy or ten?
> Which school did she go to?  What did she specialise in?  What job did she
> secure afterwards?  How long did she stay in that job?  Maybe she picks up
> some contacts on the way too.  As she goes along, she gets older, learns
> more skills, saves more money (maybe) and acquires more possessions.  The
> player could bail out at anytime (limiting it though so there's no 4 year
> old characters, 80 year old is perfectly fine).

Yeah, this is a pretty common method for character creation.  Sometimes
it's in the form of a story, ala Aturian Dynasty:

Your Home
  Ah, home sweet home.  What to do today?  To the north you hear
the sounds of kids playing.  To the east is an old man, carefully turning
the pages of a book in the library.  To the west is an alleyway where it
looks like you might be able to cause some mischief.

As you follow the path, the story gives you options - ie, you pick someone's
pocket in the alleyway, then you get something like this:

The cityguards are hot on your trail!  To the north looks like someplace
where you could stand and fight, while to the west lies a potential escape
route.

To further adjust your character.
Normally it's something more mundane (no storyline), like:

Your parrents were:
a) Greatly respected in the community.
b) A blacksmith and a seamstress.
c) Killed in a great battle while you were very young.
d) Serfs who toiled endlessly for the local baron.

And so on - it leads you through your 'lifetime', branching and so forth.
This is perfectly fine by me, my only complaint is lack of complexity/options.
Usually there just aren't _enough_ questions or choices, so that by your
third character you're already bored with the process.  Secondly, players
quickly figure out what each response 'means':

a) +1 wis, +1 chr, +10 persuasion skill
b) +2 str, +1 dex, +15 smithing, +15 sewing
c) +1 to two random stats
d) +3 con, -1 int

This sort of detracts from the experience, as far as I am concerned.
After all, if you want to just distribute points among your stats, it's
far easier to just do it manually than by this convulted method.
This works vastly better when there are a myriad of questions, arranged
in a tree so that you only see 8 or 10 out of 50 possible questions.
Possibly the same questions would pop up but with different choices for
your answers.  In addition, they shouldn't have simple, gaugable effects
like +3 con, they should bonus and minus to many stats and skills, and with
slightly randomized effects.

One last note: I think it's ridiculous that people need to 'stat hunt' on
some muds.  Hey - if I want a strong character, why not just let me make
one?  I'm gonna get it sooner or later, whether I have to do it via random
rolling or via just selecting the option, "You are particularly large and
strong for your race."  Naturally there will come certain penalities with
this; for instance, if it were aranged like so:

Your character is:
a) Particularly large and strong.
b) Particularly fast and nimble.
c) Pensive and moody.
d) Quick-witted.
e) A hard worker.

A simple example, but rarely do I see this sort of thing.  At best you
get to choose the order of your stats, so that your best die-roll goes to
the first choice, the next best to the next choice, and so on.

Hmm, this also brings up the issue of number-hiding.  Good or bad, and if
so, how to implement it?  I realize most of the folks on this list come
from an LP background; my experience with LPs has been that they show you
all the numbers right up front, at least those that have stats and skills
as a major part of gameplay.  I cut my teeth on Diku, however, (please,
restrain from booing and hissing) where almost all numbers are totaly hidden.
Usually you don't find out your actual stats (numerically, that is) until
high level, and in some cases never.  Of course, it's not really too
necessary, because it quickly becomes obvious what your stats are.
"Let's see, I can wield pretty heavy weapons without difficulty, so I must
be pretty strong, and I've gotten good hitpoint gains, so I must have a good
con.  Hmmm, my skills are learning rather slowly, though, I must not be
too smart."  Etc.  Skills are the same, only they are almost uniformly _never_
displayed as a numeric value, rather "long blades: very poor" or "disarm
traps: superb".  The skill thing is nice, too, because a mage's skill
in bludegons as 'superb' is roughly equivilent to a warrior's skill with
bludegons at 'fair', due to the nature of the classes.  (Of course I don't
like classes at all, but this method of skill display I find perfect within
that context.)
This would actually all work pretty well, except for a nasty little thing
called breakpoints.  This is a problem which plagues all RPGs, but I find
it most annoying in muds.  That is, only certain points of stats cause
'rollover'.  Thus having a 90 con is the same as a 99 con, but a 100 con
is vastly better than a 99 (or 90, for that matter).  Why?  Mostly
it's because muds still rely on tables, ie:

  hitpoints = hp_table[ch->class][ch->con / 10];

Of course the simple solution to this is to make it a formula:

  hitpoints = ch->con * ch->level;

Assuming you had levels and hitpoints (we don't), of course.

So what sorts of things are you guys doing for character creation and the
handling of numerical abilities for rating varies attributes of characters,
weapons, and so on?

> Language... One of the best implementations I've seen with language was at
> DartMUD (don't know if any of you guys are familiar with it).  Instead of

A *very* cool mud, definitely ahead of its time.  Hmmm, is it still up?
I was looking for it on the mud connector the other day and didn't see it.

> randomly substituting words because you don't know the language, so if a
> player repeated a sentance again and again, another player can eventually
> work out what the sentance meant, each player had certain words which were
> always substituted.  As the player learns a language more, certain words
> won't be substituted anymore.  The side effect of this was that once a
> player got to average skill and was talking to someone else, although the
> word 'the' was substituted into 'eek' (in my case), really complex words
> were understood perfectly.

Ours is very similar to this.  We solved both of these problems, as well.
For the first - we use static random generation.  That is, we seed the
generator with they player's (unique) id number, so that the same sentence
said by the same person with a given skill in a language will always
result in the same words being outputed.  This is the same method we
use for many psuedorandoms - for instance, hiding in a room, the player
will _always_ get the same random generation (just make a dword from the
room's x/y/z coords and the low eight bits of their id num).  Thus the only
way to change whether they can hide in a room or not is to modify other things,
such as their skill with hiding (or, their skill in awareness if they are
the viewer), or the concealment value for the room (if possible).
The second case (saying complex words perfectly but screwing up 'the'),
we simply make a skill roll for each word, and the difficulty is assumed to
be exponentially more difficult as the word gets longer.  The result is that
if you don't know the language well, you're best off speaking in short words,
or breaking up your long words.

> Petty note: I think stillsuits cover the entire body and are quite
> distinctive things because they're a water recycler/armour suit so
> I'd imagine a player would notice the stillsuit, unless the player was a
> fremen too in which case the player would actually notice a lack of
> stillsuit.  But that would all depend on the setting.  If the fremen saw
> Chani arrive whilst in a sietch (den/cave/home) then the fremen will
> expect the stillsuit.  Whilst had the fremen been sitting in a throne
> room, stillsuits will stand out amongst a room full of royalty.  Doesn't
> mean I don't adore the idea. :)

Well, basically what we're talking about here is deciding what the player
should 'notice'.  There are only so many things you can keep track of;
I can't think of any way to code the above in any generalized way.
So the method I mentioned (keeping track of what one character's normal
perecption of what another should look like) is a pretty good way to fake it
and still keep things reasonable.  This also brings in the Silke effect
to a certain extent.  Two character, both know Silke (possibly by different
names).  At first:

Character A sees:
A well dressed, cleanshaven man you know as Silke is standing here.

Character B sees:
A well dressed, cleanshaven man with dark hair is standing here.

Then:
Silke wears a false beard.

Suddenly:

Character A sees:
A well dressed, bearded man you think might be Silke is standing here.

Character B sees:
A well dressed, bearded man you know as Ambar of Koshu is standing here.