[MUD-Dev] Re: Administrative notes

[coder at ibm.net]

On 17/05/97 at 11:19 AM, cg at ami-cg.graysage.edmonton.ab.ca (Chris Gray)
said:

>I think the key is that in order to increase your skill, you have to be
>doing more difficult things. So, the healer sitting in town healing all
>of the broken fighters will not gain much (if any!) experience from the
>standard patch-and-set stuff. He needs to do other kinds of healing
>(fighting a plague, doing surgery on innards, sawing holes in skulls to
>let out the nasty demons, etc.) in order to gain more experience as a
>healer. To simplify it to the level of the simple combat experience, a
>healer must heal more severely wounded people, in order to gain more
>experience, just like the fighter must fight tougher monsters in order to
>gain more experience. Similarly, in a skill system, there will be many
>healer skills: bone setting, simple wound patching, poison curing,
>disease fighting (several types, perhaps), major trauma handling, etc.

In a rather indirect manner this raises a base question about character
representation in a MUD.

  Does the character in a MUD represent an "being" who has a life
independant of its human player's, and whom the human player guides,
interacts with, and suggests directions to periodically?

  Or does the character in the MUD literally and directly represent the
human player, much in the way of a proxy or avatar, with changes in the
MUD character literally representing changes in the human player (they are
indistinguishable)?

Note: In the first form "advancement" can be considered progress by the
MUD character toward an in-game defined goal.  In the latter that same
advancement is progress by the human player toward making an in-game goal.

I suspect that many immersive RP'ers will come down heavily for the
former.  I am unable to see myself enjoyably playing anything but the
latter as the former seems too insulting (having the machine dictate my
abilities, actions, reactions, character, behaviour etc).  I fail to see
the latter however as contradictory to immersive RP -- it would seem that
were it done well enough it would very literally be the ulimate in
immersive RP (you are literally the character you play, and disassociation
between the RP character abilities and your RL character abilities is up
to you).

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...