[MUD-Dev] Re: Administrative notes

[Adam Wiggins]

> On Mon 19 May, Orion Henry wrote:
> > 	Well, that healer who sits in town all day, healing people,
> > should get REALLY REALLY good at sitting in a town all day healing
> > people.  When he encounters things he's unfamiliar with or has not
> > had much experience dealing with, then he should be in trouble (the
> > plague, major burns, etc...)
[Marian:]
> Which may be one of the reasons why the good people of the town award
> this healer with more than she needs to survive. In the hope that she
> will get better at healing so that when an emergency occurs they have
> a competent healer about rather than one who knows how to deal with
> the common minor wounds and diseases.

Yes.  Plus of course, as you get more experience, you can charge more for
your services (whether this be monetary or otherwise), gain a certain
amount of respect (everyone watches out for you because you're the
only one who knows the remedy to X) and notoriety (pupils come from
far and wide to learn at your feet).

> Fighters spend (or should do so anyway) much of their time at
> "keeping their edge" at combat, and occasionally, when they
> get the opportunity learn to counter different fighting styles.
> The same is true for mages, who -need- to learn only so much as
> to get themselves a roof over their head and a job that is paying
> decently. After that they can spend some time increasing their
> skills, by encountering different types of magick and learning
> from them.

Yes - well, again, it's risk vs reward.  Learning to juggle has low
risk, but low reward.  Learning to juggle chainsaws has a higher risk
and a higher reward (more people will pay to see you juggle chainsaws
than they will balls).  Being a person that gets into fights all the
time means that you're constantly throwing yourself into the face of
danger.  This will make you good at dealing with danger, should you
manage to live.  Just because, as another class/job/life focus, you
spend less time throwing yourself into the face of danger doesn't
mean it's less interesting, just less dangerous.  Danger can be fun,
but I doubt it's the *only* way to have fun.  It just that, as of now,
combat systems are usually the most detailed (and therefore, interesting)
technical (ie, part of the game and not introduced by the players) part of
a mud.

> None of all this learning has any degree of risk in it. In fact
> the reality is quite the opposite. One rarely learns things by
> jumping in headfirst. One usually gets killed that way.

Depends on what you're talking about.  I learned how to program
by jumping in headfirst, and I'm still alive. :)
Of course, it's impossible to generalize by saying "Healing is always
a safe job."  If you sit in your house and heal whoever comes in, at
worst you're facing communicable disease.  If you go out into the battlefield
to heal wounded soldiers, go to study the Black Plague at an infected village,
or go to seek out an ancient remedy by scaling a mountain range and travelling
through a troll-infested swamp, yada yada yada...things get plenty dangerous.
And there's always random chance - if a berserking ogre comes thundering
into the village, the 'safest' class to be is cross-country runner.

> > Things that are way out of his league should not educate him as he
> > doent have any knowledge there.  Things like "patch-and-set"
> > opperations on broken fighters should only cease to be educational 
> > when it becomes so routine that it can be done without thought.
> > Otherwise there is room for imporvement.
> 
> Learning is done by two people, one teacher who already knows and
> -explains- how it is done, and showing it at such a slow speed that
> the other, the student, can repeat it. Once the trick is learned then
> the student must -practice- it until she becomes proficient (and ready
> to learn the next trick). And after that she must -excercise- it to
> prevent the skill from becoming (too) rusty.

Again, implying that it's impossible to learn anything without having a
teacher seems a bit strange to me.  How, pray tell, did we (humanity, that
is) ever manage to learn anything since we didn't know anything to
begin with? :)

> Nice opportunity for RP in that too, especially if you allow any
> player to teach any other player. And restrict the success of the
> teaching to the skill of the teacher, the ability to teach and the
> ability of the student to learn. You could even have people learn
> some fairly crucial skill pretty badly from a bad teacher and be
> haunted by it the rest of their game-life without ever knowing it.

Heh...we (naturally) have a skill called 'teaching'.  Most any mob can
be convinced to teach things to you, it's just that most are so bad at teaching
that you won't get a whole lot out of it, or at least no more than you would
by just watching them do it.  Thus you can get a few pointers on how to
swing a sword from the town guardsman, but you'll benefit much more in the
same amount of time by visiting a professional sword instructor.  (Even
a master swordsman may not be able to teach you much...he knows how he does
it, but he may not be able to put that into words in such a way that a
novice can understand.)