[MUD-Dev] Alright... IF your gonan do DESIESE...

[coder at ibm.net]

Its been too long since we've had any decent size posts.  This list
used to be rife with 30K signal filled chunks.  

On 24/05/97 at 07:57 PM, caliban at darklock.com (Caliban Tiresias
Darklock) said:

>There was a game by the name of Man, Myth, and Magic which was very
>very nice... had a cool reincarnation concept and 'distant memory'.

>Something I've discussed with some people is the idea that when a
>player dies in a game with permanent death, it's terribly
>demoralising to start over at ground zero. One thing I have
>considered doing is allowing them to take some credit for previous
>accomplishments in the form of benefits and artificial advancement
>for the next character. For example, in an AD&D game, I'd give them
>some form of starting experience and equipment that allows them to
>hold their own in the party; in a White Wolf game, I'd give them some
>portion of the experience their previous character had earned to buy
>skills and whatnot; in a Cyberpunk game, I'd probably let them start
>with a greater budget for cybernetic enhancements. 

Bartle raises the point that on a goal/level oriented game, that
without permanent death, a mediocre or even flat out incompetent
player can have utter certainty that they will make Wiz or top level
if they merely persist in their plodding way for long enough.  His
contention, and I agree, is that this is a Bad Thing.  The problem
however with the strict interpretation of this view is that it
discourages players from investigation and experimentation with their
world.  Few will willingly risk the total anihilation of their
character, hard built over several weeks if not months, just to see
what happens when they do a cossack dance on the ultra-fragile and
quivering crystal bridge in front of the glowering pantaloon-clad
fairy preventing their further crossing (Hey!  He might join in and
let you across!  Nothing else you've tried has worked, and you never
know...).  This is also a Bad Thing.  

I don't have a pat answer.  I believe that the discouragement to
experimentation is less of a Bad Thing than the knowledge that mere
persistance will always win the day.  I also really dislike the idea
that a player will lose his character because he got hit by net lag at
just the wrong time (I've seen fights on Shades start and finish all
in the time one player was waiting on net lag -- he (me) was unhappy
about that).  As such I believe that a player should be able to
largely protect himself against permanent death. 

I've attempted to solve this in a round-about way, mostly via
side-effects of other design decisions.

I don't like the classical game definition of your character's body is
synonymous with your character, so I split that.  I also don't like
the idea that a human player can have multiple characters in a game,
but has to bend over backwards (login twice or some such) to play them
both simultaneously.  It seems silly.  So I split the game-login from
the character login.  Playing around with the idea of slaves,
will-power fights, demonic possession, swarm bodies (eg hive
intelligences) etc so I made a single character able to simultaneously
control multiple bodies.  

This probably easiest to explain from two viewpoints: the world model,
and the login process.  Dealing with the login process a typical user
might see something as follows (here's to wishing I had a runnable
server right now):

  $ telnet blah 1234
  Welcome to Blah world intro screen.
  Account: Joekovaks
  Password: ........
  Welcome Aaron Voight!  Your available characters are:
    1) Bernie (Boffo, Buster, Guffa)
    2) Bubba (Bubba)
    3) Folly (Fardol, Grinchallo, Mulliwipe, Wayland, Wittenho)
    4) Throgmorton (Murgatroyd)
    5) Twerp (Thwacker, Tink, Twak) 
    6) Zigfield (Zigfield, Zeotrope)
    0) Query character specifics
  Which characters would you like to play? 1,4
  Password for Bernie: ........
  Password for Murgatroyd: ........
  You have now re-entered the world of Blah!
  (Boffo) Long description of somewhere.
  (Buster) Long description of somewhere.
  (Guffa) Long description of somewhere.
  (Murgatroyd) Long description of somewhere.
  Boffo> n
  Description of what happens when Boffo goes north.
  Boffo> cd Murgatroyd
  Murgatroyd>

..etc.  The main thing to notice is the separation of the game login
into a two step process: First logging into the account which gains
access to a set of characters, and then selecting a set of characters
to play with their associated bodies), and then logging those
characters in.

I made a post fairly recently showing how I handle moving between
characters and bodies within the game, and directing commands to
specific bodies etc.  That than recreate all that stuff in the above
contrived example, its easier to cut'n'paste.  One thing I didn't
show, and which I'll leave to your imaginations for now, are things
like will-power fights in which one player can steal another player's
or mobile's body and add it to their collection (or of course you
could have your own body stolen from you).

--<cut>--

My current handling (from memory):

  Bubba> whoami
    (Bubba) Account: tester
      Active characters: Bernie, Boffo, Bubba.
      Bernie has one body: Bernie  // Bodies default to char. names
      Boffo has three bodies:  Marsh, Slug, Thwacker
      Bubba has one body: Bruce    // But don't have to
  Bubba> who
    (Bubba) Active accounts:
      Aulder     // Player's accounts currently active in the game
      Charliehorse
      Klepto
      Tester
      Thisnthat
  Bubba> l
    (Bruce) You see a long description
      of some place wherever.
  Bubba> switch to boffo  // You can be at the character or body level
  Boffo> l
    (Marsh) You see a long description
      of some place wherever.
    (Slug) You see a long description
      of some place wherever.
    (Thwacker) You see a long description
      of some place wherever.
  Bubba> bernie < l
    (Bernie) You see a long description
      of some place wherever.  
  Bubba> bernie < get bag
    (Thwacker) The troll smashes you over the head with his 
      club!  Ouch!
    (Bernie) Do you want the:
      1) Red bag
      2) Tattered paper bag
      3) Mouldy sack
      0) Cancel command
  Bernie>>                       // Auto prints the non current prompt
  Bubba> thwacker < fight troll  // because there's a filter there
    (Thwacker)  ...combat script stuff...
  Bernie>>
  Bubba> bernie < 2
    (Bernie) You take the paper bag.
  Bubba> cd thwacker              // Also works
  Thwacker> (do something nasty to troll)
    (Thwacker)...etc.

<<Been a long time since I've even looked at this stuff, I know I
forgot something, but I'm at work and the code is at home.  I'm pretty
sure I changed the "Bodyid < Command" syntax to something else, but I
don't remember what.>>

I don't encourage players to play multiple characters with multiple
bodies simultaneously due to the playability aspects and IO overhead,
but it can happen.  More typically I'd expect to see players playing a
single character with perhaps two or three bodies.  Most smart players
will always have at least two bodies per character as death is
permanent and only occurs when all of a character's bodies die.

Note: This is also a big reason to play swarm/hive-type bodies.  They
are damned near immortal.

--<cut>--

The world view of the game is fairly simple if atypical:

  You are a player.  You are outside of the game and can meddle with
it.  You can control characters.  In the context of the game world
characters can be considered synonymous with "spirits" or "souls" (I
dislike both words equally as being overloaded with unwanted
connotations).  A character (soul) is capable of animating one or more
bodies.  Outside of the multiplicity angle this is fairly synonymous
with most religions which posit the existance of a soul which is the
temporary inhabitant of a body and which is responsible for its
actions (ie the "soul" is the "I" in the sense of identity).  Without
a controlling character for a body, the body dies (tho typically it
will be taken over by a game-supplied character (ie turned into a
mobile)).  Bodies themselves are pawns.  They have no internal
animating force,and can be considered synonymous with
nervous-twitching slabs of meat, much in the sense that many of
undoubtedly consider the slabs of beef hanging at the back of our
local butchers.  Bodies are expressly built to be picked up and
discarded as easily as we might put on or take off a pair of jeans
IRL.

Characters are dependant on their bodies.  Diverting also from the
standard religious model, should a character lose all his bodies, the
character will die, permanently, and will be erased from the game. 
Loosing a body comes in a few forms:

  1) The body dies.

  2) Someone else takes over the body and compleatly ousts your
possession and any claims you have to it.  

This last is particularly interesting as most body possessions will be
of the form where the attacker takes control of the body, but does not
compleatly oust the prior owner(s) (the body may have been similarly
stolen before) from the body.  As such what happens is that the new
chap has control of the body, but the old owner(s) are along for the
ride and can see and hear everything the new owner does -- they just
can't input commands to their old body.  What this also means is that
should the latest owner "give up" the body, the previous owners who
still have claims get to fight for it (usually the most recent will
win by default).

Note: Having such a partial claim to a body gives a character
significant advantage in trying to reclaim it.  The more recent the
claim, the greater the advantage.

Note: a player with such a partial claim to a body can drop his claim,
at which point he has no claim to the body at all.

Note: Compleatly ousting prior owners from a body is a laborious and
expensive proposition.  It is much easier in general to just wrest
control and leave the hangers on at that.  It does make it more likely
that they might grab the body back, but it sure saves a lot of effort
and debilitating work.

Note: A character will not die if it loses all its bodies but has
remaining an interest in a body it does not control.  A character only
dies and is deleted when it loses all contact with the game world --
ie all bodies are dead and no claims exist.

This separation into bodies and characters also complicates several of
the old MUD models for stats.  I've handled this by deriving the stats
into three classes:

  1) Physical -- these apply to the body, and only to the body.
  2) Character -- these apply to the character and only to the
character.
  2) Account  -- well, you guess.

The physical stats are all the simple things like strength, weight,
endurance, size, etc.  The character stats are all the touchy-feelie
stats like magic ability, will power, etc.  The account stats are a
dubious set, but mainly consist of a couple simple stat weights which
are touched periodically depending on how well the player has been
playing.  Essentially they attempt to slant the probabilities so that
a player who is being successful will continue to be successful, but a
player who is losing (a character death, several body deaths/losses,
etc) will fail more often.

In line with this general separation of affairs, a character can look
out thru the eyes of his bodies as per normal, but can also view the
"spirit world" (I dislike this name too), which enables him to "see"
other characters, but not to see the connections of those characters
to their bodies (its a non-euclidian space which does /not/ map to the
game world space).  A character may communicate directly to other
characters in the "spirit world", and even position his own character
in that space (proximity to a target character benefits a
take-over/body-steal attempt).  The spirit world communications are
analagous to channels in normal MUDs.  A character may have one of its
bodies "speak" (SAY command etc) to another body, and thus attempt to
communicate to another character (if it can figure out what characters
own what bodies (remember WHO only reports active accounts, not
characters).  

Placement in spirit space also helps group action -- for instance a
number of characters may conspire to mutually attack (not their
bodies) another character.  As such the proximity fo the groups
characters to each other strengthens their attacks, while the distance
to the enemy weakens it.  This is actually the *only* way to take out
some of the big targets in the game (other targets have incredibly
powerful characters, but wimpy bodies).  

Note: Underlieing this of course is the general problem of relating a
character to its body -- a damned difficult if not impossible feat.  

Advancement in the game is not the simple old progressionm of levels,
or the hoary old class/multi-class chestnut.  The goal is to advance
your characters.  You do this by increasing your character's skill
sets (whcih instantly spread to all their bodies), by gaining magical
ability, by gaining mana abilities, by gaining strength and will
power, etc.  

None of these are reported by simple adsolute scales.  Instead its a
sliding scale based on that character's awareness of abilities in that
stat and his placement in that field

The long term goal of a character is to resurrect himself as a god. 
The basic definition of a god in this context is one of immortality
(no requirements on bodies), and unlimited access and creative
abilities inthe physical. magical, and spirit worlds in the game. 
Godhood is a definite, quantifiable state.  Approaching godhood
however just means that you gain more and more god-like abilities --
but you can still be knocked back down.  Gods are unassaultable except
by other gods, and do not rely on other characters in any way.

I actually have no idea what sort of world I want -- futuristic,
fantasy, etc, other than to know without doubt that I don't want
anything tied to a particular author, novel, or standard genre (WoD,
Pern, Vampire, Tolkein, StarTrek, DrWho, Tron, etc).  If I had any
idea of how to do it, I'd probably do something along the line of
Myer's Silverlock (an absolute !__*MUST*__! read for any of you here,
massively, highly, unendingly recommended (Amazon might be able to get
you a copy (No, you can't have mine))) as a fantastic romp thru all of
literature, mythology, and the more dimly lit recesses of our common
imaginations.

I won't pretend its a roleplaying game in MIro's definition, nor that
it fits Jeff K's concept of the beer swillin' armpit scratchin'
minimally literate hormone driven game buying/playing out there.  OTOH
I do think it is fun.  With luck, should I ever get it up and running,
others will think so too.

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