Mixture

[Adam Wiggins]

> On Sun, 23 Mar 1997, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > 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,
[Furball:]
> That's generally the case.  There's only a few LPs that do hide the stats.
> DartMUD is the only one which I've been to which hides everything and it
> actually works.  Genesis hides everything as well but each and every
> number has an equivalent worded version.  Eg: Skill level 10 = seasoned
> novice, skill level 11 = vetern novice, skill level 30 = seasoned student,
> it's just two sets of words combined to form a level, which I think
> defeats the point.

Well, it gives new players a basis for understanding, but as soon
as you know the context, all you pay attention to is the number.
Reminds me of a mud I logged onto and saw, as the first yell, 'Level
224 paladin looking for group!'...I thought, *gah*...of course, I found
out he was actually rather low-level since it was a 1000 level system.
(Logged off soon after that, as you can imagine.)

> Some LPs just hide the skills exact level with words and leave the stats
> alone, probably because the same LPs evolved from the original 2.4.5 lib
> and the players liked the way stats were in numerical form but didn't
> object to skills being vague. 

This is most definitaly not limited to LPs.  Post to any rec.games.mud
newsgroup asking whether stat-hiding is a good thing and you'll always
get the same answer, which is 'Hell no!'
Of course - the reason for this is that numbers _are_ necessary in order
to effectively play most numbers RPGs.  (Roll-playing, as it is called.)
That's fine.  You just have to choose; if you don't want a numbers mud,
don't make it a numbers mud.  Writing a numbers mud and then hiding the
numbers making it difficult and frustrating for players to play is just
downright silly.  One mud I played experimented with removing identify
scrolls a few years ago, since they felt that knowing exact stats on
your character and on objects reduced the role-playing potential.  This
is correct...however, this same mud had 'a heavy axe' which had the
long desc "A powerful-looking weapon with a keen blade" that was 2d6,
and a "silvery hand-axe" with the long desc "A light axe made of silver"
that was 3d4 +2 +2.  Gee, if I had to pick which one to wield for my
barbarian, I'd take the first one every time.  Except that I'd be hurting
my character quite a bit by doing this.  It's that old internal consistancy
thing.  If you don't want a numbers mud, get rid of stupid abstractions
like damage dice, and be done with it.  You can't fake it by doing it
halfway.

> Is it good or bad?  Depends what kind of players do you want to attract.

This is very true.  I always go by the idea that if me and my fellow
admin think it's fun, then chances are there's some other people out there
who think it's fun too.  I don't require hundreds of players online, although
I have no doubt I could write a mud which would attract that many given some
time.  I want to write the mud that _I_ want to play, and hopefully others
will agree with me.

> and levels.  Personally, I prefer words and being completely blind as long
> as the mud isn't too stat orientated.  I went to one mud which said:
> Don't worry about levels or stats, they don't mean anything, just enjoy
> yourself and roleplay.  I found this false as to get anywhere required
> levels and roleplaying was greatly hindered by channels and the way the
> admin would say OOC stuff on the channels whilst telling us players off
> for following his example.

Exactly.  The breakpoints thing I was talking about is exactly this sort
of hindering.  It's not important how strong my character is, exactly -
it's what breakpoints I reach.  Thus a +1 strength neck item *kicks ass*
for a character with a 23 strength, because the extra point pushes him
up an extra point of dam bonus.  It's completely and totally useless for
someone with a 22 strength, because it leaves his hitndam bonus the
same.  Why is the necessary?  Why can't every point of strength be as
useful as every other point?  In that case I don't care what my strength
is, exactly, I just know I want to be as strong as possible.

> > 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?
> 
> Hmm...Character stats for my mud don't change unless the character is
> still growing or has sustained some painful injuries.  They get augmented

nod, we are doing the same...was thinking more of skill advancement...

> (sp?) by implants though.  I'm thinking of displaying it to the player as
> 'relative to their race average' with a little fudging (fudging with a

Yeah...I always wonder what would happen if a mud did this...you can see
the players that will log on and say, "Dammit!  I made five Kzin warriors,
who are supposed to be really strong, but they all had 'average' strengths!!"
*smirk*

> [nice example of Silke and his alter ego Amber of Koshu snipped]
> 
> Ouch, that's really complex.  This could be extended to other senses as

Hum...I thought my point was that it isn't very complex. :)
What I meant was, by simply storing the state which the player 'knows'
the character in, we can figure that into the perception rolls along
with time since last seen, race, etc in order to figure out if the recognize
them, recognize them but botch their name, or even get something like:

A well-dressed man who looks strangely familiar is standing here.

> well, like over comms everyone would have a different voice and a player
> could recognise different voices instead of printing out:
> 
> [100 Mhz] Ceilidh says: Um.
> 
> It'll be:
> 
> [100 Mhz] A baritone voice says: Um.
> 
> Then there's the fact that people sound different over some comms device
> and if the player met Ceilidh, the two won't necessarily recognise each
> other.

Hehe..hadn't even thought of that, although obviously voices you hear
that you don't recognize just come as "a deep voice" or "a shrill voice"
etc.  Very nice for communicators etc, especially if you had voice-changing
devices, or even comptuers with voice-activation (those cheesy voice codes
Picard uses on Star Trek)

> Oh, how do you view your mud as a whole?

You make it sound so offhand with that 'Oh' in there. :)

>Do you have plans for the next year on how it'll evolve?

Oh god...please don't tell me it's going to evolve over the next year.
Our development process has been like this:

a) implement really cool idea, requires lots of re-coding.
b) near completion of implementation, write areas which take advantage of
   the new capabilities.
c) someone says, 'Hey...I've got an idea...'
d) goto step a.

Hell, it basically started out with a brainstorming session with six or seven
of my mud-buddies at my college apartment nearly two years ago.  I downloaded
a generic code base and started fooling around.  With that many people in
on it, especially so many seasoned mudders and paper RPGers, there were
zillions of great ideas flying around.  Pretty soon things got out of hand.
Since then I've dropped out of college (no, not related to the mud, got
tired of the univeristy sucking down all my cash for classes I didn't go
to anyways, and got a good job offer), and we've gone through (we estimate)
about five versions of MUDs.  Hell, every one of those versions was a good
mud in itself...I'm almost sorry we didn't hang onto them and either distribute
them as codebases or have one of our friends bring it up and maintain it.
(Sort of the Owen Elem syndrome..)
Anyhow I think we've finally got it how we (mostly) want it.  Now we're facing
problems of just not enough areas, as developing areas for us is both
time-consuming and difficult.  (We've had 8 or 10 potential builders that loved
our ideas but freaked out when they saw all the stuff they'd have to do
to develop a zone...)
With luck, we'll have the stupid thing online sometime this year.  With work
now taking a lot of my time I only have a few spare hours a week to work on
it, and my partner goes to school all week and drives halfway across California
every weekend to visit his girlfriend.  Somehow we manage to get work done
from time to time, though, and at any rate I'm not in any hurry.  We're having
a lot of fun and I've certainly become a better programmer from trying to
tackle something of such a huge scope.  Half the time at work I find myself
going, "Oh, I did something like this for the mud.  This'll be easy, I'll
just write a version that's about 1,000 times less complex, but uses the same
idea."

> The current plan atm is to create this universe (all 3 solar systems),
> then keep working on it and making it more and more detailed, as
> intersystem travel is uncommon, maybe even have each solar system on a
> different server (then I could have really complex systems :).  Once the
> player population reaches something sizeable to abuse, I was
> hoping to stage lots of special one off creator run quests.  These little
> quests lead up to one great big finale involving some glorious plot
> endings.  And...then...I'd close the mud down and work on a sequel.

Cool.  Sounds kind of MUX-ish, actually.
One idea we had was to bring up two different muds which were actually the
same mud...except they'd have different DNS entries, perhaps a gateway for
one of the muds to make them have wildly different IPs.  One would come up,
put up a post in r.g.m.announce advertising an original fantasy mud with
elves, dwarves, etc.  Some months later another, totaly differnt post
advertising a mud with only the 'dark' races, trolls orcs and so on.
Now...they would both be the same mud, but since the players would start up
in vastly different locations from each other, they'd never know.  Get
all the players from virtual mud A to get used to killing trolls and orcs;
get all the players from virtual mud B to get used to killing elves and
dwarves.  Sooner or later some far-ranging PCs are gonna meet, and likely attack
one another without thinking.  If you do it right (make languages, don't allow
for emotes, have mobs all wear full sets of gear so that players don't
look unusual), it should be quite a while before they start to figure out
what's going on.  Even once *one* players figures it out, he's got to try
to convice a player on the other side to put down their axe long enough to
attempt to communicate.  (Naturally one would have to have the mobiles
frequently say things, so that both sides are used to their enemies blathering
in a language they don't understand.)
I suppose this would actually be more of a social experiement than a mud.
Basically inspired by the original Mortal Conquest, where the 'whities'
outnumbered the 'darkies' around 100-to-20 during the daytime.  When we came
whitie town for raids, many of the newbie whities just thought we were
particularly intelligent mobiles (since they only saw, 'an evil orc').
This was helped a bit, I'm sure by the fact that there were around 50 races
to choose from and only two of them were evil.

> In case you're wondering why the mud should close down, it's coz the
> finale involves opening up a gateway to the rest of the galaxy and there's
> zero chance of me even considering making up an entire galaxy.

Hehe...well...I'm not too interested in muds with storylines...too hard
to maintain given the tenutiveness of characters within the mud world
(ie people logging on at different times, starting and stopping playing
seemingly at random, etc)...which is why I don't like MUSHes a whole lot,
even though in principle they sound a whole lot cooler than normal muds,
to me.  I guess the answer is that I'm more interested in creating a world,
than I am in creating a game.  A world evolves on its own, without any
need for a storyline framework; the stuff that people do becomes the 'story'.
Maybe I'm just lazy.  Actually, that's exactly it.

> About inviting George Reese to this list, one word:  Eeek!
> Just my experience in dealing with him hasn't been something to write home
> about.

Well, he's intelligent and knowledgable.  Unfortunately he's also close-minded
and tends to talk down to people, which quickly get them on his case even
when what he's saying is basically true.
For instance, I replied to a post about hiding numbers (discuss much the
same things I did at the top of this one) and he replied with a one-line
message saying basically, "Players like numbers.  Anyone who doesn't have
levels, hitpoints, and visible stats is just wasting their time."
Oooookay.  Guess I didn't actually have fun when I was playing those muds
(and other games) which hide your stats, I was just imagining it.
There are others I'd rather see on this list, although I'm hesitant to
extend any invitations as my mailbox is full enough as it is :)