[MUD-Dev] Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list

[coder at ibm.net]

On 16/05/97 at 10:12 PM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user1.inficad.com> said:

> [ChrisL:]
>> Didn't see that one.  Orion Henry and I stared a spirited chat on the
>> area in r.g.m.m back when (which I think ended up with me inviting him
>> to the old list).

>Yeah, that was me, posting from the mud account between compiles (which
>has Orion's name on it).

Speaking of whom, his account has been generating a lot of bounces lately
(he lost almost all of last week's mail (I don't think I saw any bounces
today).  If he wants a resend of the last week or two, I'm perfectly
willing.

>> In one case UggUgg gave his magical objects to you to exhaust your
>> mana and cause your and his magical objects to instantly decay, and
>> your spells to fail.  The problem here is that this action is not
>> necessarily harmful.  It depends on whether you consider the
>> destrution of the magic items to be damaging or not (their absence
>> certainly simplifies the combat), whether your mana reserves can
>> withstand the strain, or even whether those magic items are actually
>> helpful to you to accomplish something you want (last component for a
>> super spell?)  There's a lot of context here, and a lot of subjective
>> assessment.

>How about just ignoring what the actual action was?  If someone does
>somehting which causes your magical items to decay, it doesn't matter
>what that action was.  This also has the nice side effects of causing
>misunderstandings, ie:

>  Bubba gives you a mithril longsword.
>  Your Great Axe of Hair-Splitting turns to dust.
>  > say you asshole!!!!

Hurm.  Ignoring the problem of the system auto-deciding what your reaction
as a player is to a circumstance in the game (something I *REALLY* don't
like).

>Even if the cause of your axe dusting was actually a sudden mana vortex
>in the room or soemthing, rather than the mithril longsword.

Bingo.

>I'm not even sure about that.  Combat is a tag that we, as humans, like
>to stick on a certain set of actions...the mud shouldn't care, to my
>mind.  People just do stuff, and they can call it whatever they like. Is
>Bubba accidentally dropping his rifle, causing it to fire, which hits
>Joebob (who happens to be flying 400 ft overhead) in the foot, combat? We
>wouldn't define it as such, but it has all the necessary elements. (No
>point in mentioning 'intentional'...there's just no way to define
>intentional results...only the person issuing the command knows their
>intentions, and this is out of the scope of the mud.)
>
>So we can save a lot of time by just not ever worrying about it.

I have advanced to firmly agreeing with you here.  See my fairly recent
posts specc'ing having a stateless model where a combat state can be
causitively invoked on a per-player purely to simplify the entering of
combat-type commands for that player (and the auto-generation of combat
scripts etc).

>> Even more indirect methods are event more effective, decently
>> guaranteed, and difficult to track.

>Sure.  Mudders love to come up with stuff like this.  Given some of the
>totaly creative things I've seen people make use of in the relatively
>rigid environments of 'normal' muds, I'd *love* to see what happens in an
>environment like this...

That's precisely my hope.  Just enough structure to define a decent
goal-oriented game, and more than enough flexability for them all to hang
themselves twenty times over.  

Aside: I'm actually considering making user-programming a dangerous
activity unless done under very guarded circumstances...  Probably this
would take the form of user-programming realising "aethir" (for want of a
bettter world).  Said aethir flows like a liquid in much the same ways as
mana, but also has the interesting property of attracting rather vicious
predatory teleportory beasties who are intensely irritated by it.

>>   All blows/spells/etc have a chance of failing, whereupon they all 
>>     also have a chance of reflecting back on their source (swing 
>>     sword at Bubba and chop off own leg, shell explodes in barrel, 
>>     ice spell freezes you instead)

>In addition, I'd like to totally get rid of the boolean effect of
>actions. Normally there is just sort of a failure state and non failure
>state. You can fail to cast the spell, or cast it successfully.  Boolean
>#2 is if they make their save or not.  There's no inbetweens - a paralyze
>spell always renders them totally helpless, or does nothing at all.  How
>about if you cast it poorly, it might still work, but end up only slowing
>them down a bit?  Or, as you said - failed spells don't just fail, they
>end up going off on the wrong target (possibly your friends or yourself),
>being too weak (fly spell that makes someone feel lighter but doesn't
>actually lift them off the ground), and so on.

Exactly!  A ressurection spell that actually only produces zombies when it
falters, a freeze spell that only gives you a runny nose, a teleport spell
that backfires by instead bring chunks of the destination here, etc.

>>   Combat doesn't last long.  Less than 5 - 10 minutes IRL.

>This counts as 'not long'?  

My first run had combats lasting 30+ minutes...

>...Does this mean that after 5 or 10 minutes someone is
>assured to be dead/flee, or just that the combatants get so tired out
>that can't continue?

The two are effectively synonymous for me.

>> True, they reek of their pulse/heartbeat based systems.  The problem
>> is that I explicitly DON'T want to pace normal action in the game.  If
>> the guy wants to walk across the entire land, and can enter (and have
>> the server process) the commands quickly enough, then by Gum, he'll
>> walk 10,000 miles in 3 seconds flat.  The comparitive problem with
>> this is that I want combat to be forced to be a less hurried affair,
>> and thus requiring pacing.  

>Hmmm...you have limitations on how far the player can walk?

I don't have any plans for it to be.

>Hmmm, does this mean sense == things which will delay the completion of
>my codebase by at least several months?
>In that case, all we ever do is talk sense...:)

That's the whole purpose of thsi list...

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