[MUD-Dev] Life

[Adam Wiggins]

[Matt C:]
> On Sun, 25 May 1997, Ling wrote:
> > On Sat, 24 May 1997 coder at ibm.net wrote:
> > > On 24/05/97 at 07:57 PM, caliban at darklock.com (Caliban Tiresias
> > > Darklock) said:
> > > 
> > > >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
> > 
> > Yep, I can confirm this, having died at a mud with permanent death.  I
> > just blinked and sat there looking gormless for a bit.  It was a stupid
> > death as well, I tried someone a bit bigger and left it on auto, I thought
> > I was doing something else, mope.
> 
> I've done something mildly similar (died stupidly as a newbie, got
> deleted, boggled, and decided not to try again). Whether or not permanent

This here is a good point - it's *very* disconcerting to have something
along the lines of:

Bubba smashes your head in with his club!
You are dead.
Connection closed by foreign host.
%

Even if it's a little less abbrupt (you get kicked back to a game menu,
possibly given a description of how your soul goes screaming into the
afterlife), this is pretty annoying.
Although we have permadeath, we also have an afterlife.  Your character
continues to exist forever - it's just that, as a spirit, they won't
be able to do much but chat with other spirits.  Not terribly useful, I
suppose, but hopefully it will soften the blow a little bit to not
have your character actually *deleted*.

> while battling through the metaplane, you do not have the stats you had in
> life (so a powerful character is as much use as a weakling would be), but
> rather start with nothing and build up, until you find your way back. The
> amount of time between death and reincarnation is a large factor in how
> much you are damaged by the reincarnation (the ties between spirit and
> reality have weakened over time). It's perceivable that you could
> eventually 'die' for good by never returning. You could in theory play out
> the rest of your time on the game as a ghost.

Nod...a lot of muds have the spirit/reuniting with corpse thing, which I do
like quite a bit better than just throwing you back into the game with a
single hitpoint.  We considered doing a very complex underworld where you
could potentially make bargains with demons or call upon old favors
to the gods to try to escape - or even be rescued by mortals that dare
brave the underworld, ala Greek and Roman mythology.  In effect, you
get a whole new game once you die.

> > I would like to see examples on how to increase the life expectancy of
> > characters.  That is, give me more examples of devices to eliminate death
> > by netlag and such like.  Combat scripts/packages and bestowing some
> > intelligence on the characters are a good start.
> 
> Yeah. It's incredibly hard to think about stopping death via netlag. The
> 'wimpy' function implemented in many muds is a step forwards - but not a
> very good one, since it also has downsides.

In the same vein of character seperation as not walking into walls, we
feel that it's pretty important your character behave like she should even
if you aren't actively typing things.  You get attacked, you'll defend
yourself.  You get the hell beat out of you, you'll start trying to run
away - this can get particularly interesting when the player doesn't *want*
to run away.  Thus, it's pretty impressive when a warrior stands his ground
until the end in order that his friends can get away - most characters will
wimp out and start trying to crawl away at some point, but if your
character has the gumption and overall toughness to stick around, they
might just be able to.

> > Agreed, forcing players to use multiple telnet sessions to a single site
> > is a bit silly.  I have thought about having players control *teams*
> > instead of individual characters.  Team death would not happen as long as
> > at least one of the original characters stay alive (cf: Megatraveller,
> > computer game, actually, I'm heavily influenced by Megatraveller).
> 
> I like this actually.. a bit like Betrayal at Krondor (Sierra), where you
> had a party of three characters. If one or two got KOed, they'd live as
> long as the third made it through.. not necessarily the best way to handle
> it, but the right general idea.

Yeah, most single-player PC RPGs work like this - Might and Magic,
Wizardry (possibly the BEST roll-playing games ever written), and so
forth.  I love it in when there's 5 dead and/or unconscious characters and
one living one, fighting his way back to town...I get this mental imagine
of some guy in full plate, dragging 5 limp bodies (also clad in full plate)
with one hand, while fighting effectively with the other.

> Yeah, well, if you go into great depth, then more time spent playing would
> mean players understand things more, and thus will do better, so forth,
> and such.

Well sure - this is true of any game.  You learn the areas, which
skills and spells are most effective for given tasks, the behaviors and
temperments of various races, how much various materials and objects are
worth (ie, where to get the best price for things), and so on.  I
touched on this in another post - if you even out the power levels, this
knowledge becomes much more valuable.  Your newbie character can still
go to the town of X to sell his pelts, although it's not as easy for
him because he isn't a master woodsman or good buddies with the mayor
of X like your other character was.  But you can still *go* there, at least,
unlike a mud where a newbie character can't even go to 90% of the mud
(either because they aren't powerful enough to survive, or because they don't
have the spell 'astral walk' or whatever).