[MUD-Dev] Re: Levels (was: Administrative notes)

[Adam Wiggins]

>    at 08:29 AM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at inficad.com> said: > [ChrisL:]
> >> I'm in two minds on this one.  I sodding well despise the model of
> >> having to go track down some mobile so I can then issue a standardised
> >> command (or perform some standard obesiance/duty) and have my "skills"
> >> automagically increased in response.  Blech.
> 
> >Agreed, when you put it this way.  But...
[Chris L:]
> Okay.  What's the effective difference between this and (quoting from
> later in your post):
> 
>   "...I like the scenario of a person hiking deep into the wilderness 
>   to find the hermit who is rumored to live somewhere high upon a 
>   mountain.  The hermit declares that he will only teach her the 
>   fabled herbal recipe for his cure-all concoction if she will bring 
>   him the blosom from the century plant which grows upon a faraway 
>   peak, and is blooming sometime in the next three months."

Well, the main difference is that the way *I* put it sounds like fun to me,
the way you put it doesn't.  But the key point is that you said, "..having
to go.."  I dislike requiring a certain 'guildmaster' to teach you some
skill past a certain number.  I like the idea of teachers, books, etc
being able to greatly aid your learning, but I dislike *having* to hunt
down some mob just to be able to continue my studies.

> >> OTOH I am quite fond of having to figure out what other player may
> >> know something about XXX skill that I don't know, and then tracking
> >> him down, and personally persuading him to teach me (followed by the
> >> same automagical part).  
> 
> >I like mobiles as teachers just fine.  For one thing, they are online
> >24 hours a day.  
> 
> Remember: I don't remove player characters from the game when they
> logout.  If the player for the character you want doesn't set up his
> character to handle teaching when he's not online, then tough -- you
> have to go find someone else.  Life is like that: not fair.

Good point.  I'm also thinking of the early days of the mud - with only
30 people online most of the time, your chances of finding someone who
knows exactly what you want to learn is next to nothing.

> A more significant difference is being missed here: practical skill vs
> theory.  Theory is one thing -- practical application when under fire
> is another.  

Yes, absolutely.  I've found that storing both these values instead of just
one catch-all solves many, many problems...the most obvious of which is
that of the guy who sits in the library reading about how to be a swordmaster.

> >I'm still not sure why you don't like mental stats; they
> >reflect your charcters ability to do certain things in the world,
> >they don't have the mud try to do the player's thinking for them.
> 
> If you have the stat it will tend to be used by the system for some
> form of decision making despite your best efforts (someone will make
> the short-circuit), and I consider that unacceptable.  If you have the

We don't consider intelligence as having anything to do with reasoning.
Intelligence is, for our purposes, the speed at which your neural net
(brain) adapts to new inputs.  This says nothing about your character's
knowledge or ability to reason.

> stat and manage to keep the system from ever using it (eg Bubba is
> dumb as a post and has an IQ stat to indicate that to RP'ers so that
> they RP him as dumb as a post, but the system never accesses that IQ
> stat) they I see little reason for that stat to be in the system in
> the first place (tho it might be excused as in the example as form of
> inter-player notes on the character).

If you're going to do that, there's hardly even any point to making it a
stat.  Just put, "You're dumb as a post" in the character history/desc.
Personally, I find the intelligence stat extremelly useful in many situations,
none of which have anything to do with character decision-making.
I wouldn't cry if a mud didn't model that, though.  It's one of those things
that I find very nice as a creator, not terribly interesting as a player.