Mixture

[Adam Wiggins]

[Travis:]
> The main advantage to using lifepaths rather than using a straight
> point system is that the character comes out with a history instead
> of just a set of numbers.  Making that history more detailed can 
> give people role-playing hooks.
> This can allow things like this:
> 
> John:  So, you were in the army?  What unit?
> 
> Jim:   I was in the 104th Dragons.
> 
> John:  Hey, that's my old unit!  When were you in?
> 
> Now, I've never seen a lifepath system that detailed... but it's certainly
> possible.  :-)

I love it!  Not difficult at all, in fact.  I think the trickiest part
would just be acquainting the player with that knowledge.  Thus they might
choose this at character creation, but they're pretty likely to forget
it once in the game, since it's not 'relevant' in the same way that
something concrete like choosing your strength is.
The only thing I can think of right off hand would be to do something like:

A Dragoneer is relaxing here.
You recognize the patch on his arm as the 104th division, your old unit.
You think back to your days in the army...

Or even having players actually inserted into your memory before you
ever actually 'meet' them in the mud, giving you a connection aside from
the obvious ones like race.  You walk into a room of unfamiliar people and
see:

An unshaven man is here, reading a book.
A tired-looking woman is standing here.
A young, blonde-haired fellow named Stephan is buttoning his coat.
Hey!  It's your old buddy Stephan, from the 104th Dragons!

He sees something similar, and instantly you two have a strange sort of bond
which doesn't have anything to do with anything, really, other than soemthing
the random-number generator pulled out of its electronic ass.  Not all
these 'memories' have to be good - you could start with a debt to a crime
boss (if you choose to start the game with a really nice vehicle, say)
or even old enemies.

> IMHO, a better way of having people create characters than the traditional
> one would be to let them create characters via one or more web-based
> forms.  This would make it easier for players to start over, change
> their minds, etc., than doing it through a series of questions and
> answers on the mud.  It would be possible to allow players to back up
> and change their answers through a mud text-based interface, but it would
> require a good deal of additional programming.

Shrug...I think making the "back" command take you back one menu would
work perfectly fine, and a "startover" option as well, similar to the
character creator for Angband.

> Using JavaScript or VBscript for the forms could move some of the 
> calculations off the server.  Of course, you'd then need to have the
> server check the data which comes back to make sure that people aren't
> downloading your form, seeing how it works, and then trying to cheat.

I tend not to like offloading anything to a remote system, for one because
I've got processor space to spare, and for another because no matter
*how* secure you make the thing, eventually someone is gonna hack it.
The only advantage, then, is that you get a local-response time once the
form is downloaded, instead of having to wait for confirmation, but I
don't see this as a huge plus.
On the other hand, you _could_ actually make character creation as part of
your web page, and once created, they are then launched into the mud.
I don't have any desire to, but I think this would be easy and of course
wouldn't require you writing a seperate client.

> An idea I had along those lines a while back... instead of allowing
> players to actually choose how many points to put into attributes
> and skills, use the numbers they put in as priority levels.  Thus, if
> someone puts in a 20 for strength and a 10 for dexterity, it just means
> that strength is twice as important to him/her as dexterity.  When the
> server receives the form back, it can use those priorities to decide how
> to split up points.  Thus, someone who puts down that he wants a high
> score in everything will find that he gets an average score in everything.

Heh, a handy and simple way to do it, similar to the stat ordering thing.
We simply require that the player 'balance' their character.  If they
choose to be incredibly strong, they are going to have to choose a bunch
of negatives, which range from things like having a big nose to being
dumber than a bowling ball.  In addition we have an 'extra' stat for luck,
which is inversely proportional to how "good" your character's stats are
(a holdover from our more number-oriented days, actually).  This stat
comes into play in many situations, such as how much damage you take
when you fall down a cliff or how well you do at cards.
Basically you're going to always get a balanced character, but there are
a myriad of options for actually customizing the character how you want
them.  This leaves in the fun of character creation and avoids the
everyone-is-the-same syndrome, but makes stathunting pointless and
makes getting 'bad' stats impossible.  (I was having an incredibly difficult
time playing my first character on my first mud, until someone pointed out
to me that I had somehow managed to roll a half-giant warrior who
was weaker than the average human - and I listed 'str' as my most important
stat, meaning that all my others were worse.  End result was that the game
was nearly unplayable for that charater.)

> I don't have any problem with displaying numbers, so long as things are
> kept reasonable... if you use a name-based scale, players pretty quickly
> learn what's better than what, and by approximately how much.
> 
> Personally, I prefer to give players info about stats and other things
> that the characters would know fairly well in terms of a 1 to 10 scale,
> where 5 is human average and 10 is human maximum.  This doesn't have to
> be the scale that's actually used internally, though.

Nod...numbers are handy from the standpoint of being a very short
(usually ~2 characters) way of displaying info, in a way that is very
obvious (I know that 17 is large than 12, but not whether 'above average'
is less or more than 'fair').

> Where I *don't* like specific numbers is in things like hit points...
> a character should have an idea of how tough he/she is and how wounded
> he/she is, but there should be some doubt as to exactly how far down
> you are, to help keep players on their toes.

I don't like hitpoints in general, but I consider this a different
issue.
Most dikus have prompts that look like this in combat:

61h 81v 106m [Dante: v.good] [Kyst: pretty hurt]>

Dante is the tank, Kyst is the target.  This works pretty well, I think -
everyone understands that 'pretty hurt' means around 20-30% of the total
hitpoints, and people are even able to pretty accurately guess how many
hitpoints mobiles generally load up with based on how long it takes to kill
them.  Crude, but a good example of a place where the absense of exact
numbers doesn't seem to bother anyone.

> Hmm... none of the muds I've worked on has used tables or had 
> breakpoints like this... but I'll take your word for it.  :-)

Well, if you've ever played any single-player computer RPG or pen-and-paper
RPG, you'll know what I'm talking about.  Borrow someone's copy of the
D&D handbook and look up saving throws, hit-n-dam tables, or spell
memorization values.

> I like the idea of using predictable seeds for the random number
> generator... it reminds me of a rule that the paper RPG Arduin has:
> namely, that when it comes to things like picking locks, saving 
> against spells, etc., you only get one try.  If you fail, you'll
> always fail unless either the situation changes (i.e., modifiers 
> give you a better chance) or your level goes up.  Conversely, if
> you *make* a saving throw against a mage's spell, you'll always 
> make it until either the situation changes against you or the mage
> goes up a level.

Arctic actually keeps track of what locks you've picked, traps you've tried
to disarm, mobs you've fought, and so on.  Each time you do one of these
things on a given target, you have less of a chance for learning the skill,
as well as getting vastly less exp for succesfully completing it.  In fact,
the exp thing is such that after killing a given mob about 4 times, it's
entirely worthless to kill them again (you get so little exp).  They can
afford this because of their humungous world which has been in development
for 4+ years.  Works pretty well, too - people are always interesting in
exploring new places, because it means that they have a vastly higher chance
of learning their skills and getting good experience.  One warrior I used
to group with complained, because I always paralzyed mobs we were fighting...
since they were paralyzed, he didn't 'learn' any skills (they aren't fighting
back after all, not much to actually learn), but they were listed in his
mobile list of having been fought, thus his skills wouldn't go up on them
in the future.  Makes perfect sense as long as you think about it with
normal common sense instead of 'mud logic'.