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

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <199705280515.WAA10375 at user1.inficad.com>, on 05/27/97 
   at 11:25 PM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user1.inficad.com> said:

>[Chris L:]

>> >>   Password for Bernie: ........
>> >>   Password for Murgatroyd: ........
>> 
>> >Hmmm, why do you need different passwords for each character?  I
>> >thought this was one of the advantages of doing the account bit.
>> 
>> Variations in levels of privacy.  A player can let a friend have one
>> of his characters for a while without exposing all his characters. 
>> Not sure its a good idea, or a bad.

>That's fine - why not just implement simple user-level sharing? 

Because I specifically don't want characters passed about among
players.  The way it is now a character's attributes are fairly
tightly tied with the that player's playing style, and wouldn't map
well to another player.  Additionally I have stats that I bind to the
player object directly as vs character or body, and moving characters
between players would allow, err, cheating.

>> Nahh.  I'd have the character pull the arrow out of his leg and then
>> note internally, "resistance to pain is high, ability to act
>> causitively while under pain high, expressed determination high", all
>> of which would be component factors for the game to consider this
>> player formdiable.  

>Hmmm...so when, pray tell, would a player ever *not* want to pull the
>arrow out of their leg?  Not only to they have to deal with having an
>arrow stuck in their leg, but the game doesn't think they are as
>tough or decisive.

Quite often.  Pulling the arrow out hurts like hell, has the chance of
knicking a mjory artery leading death by blood loss, removes the
possibility of using magic to restore the wound to a healthy state (I
have a spell that will "back out" any un-modified effect on a body),
etc.  Pulling the arrow out is not always the smartest choice.

>> Note however, that rather than encourage players to go get stuck with
>> arrows and then pull them out for the above gains, they also get a
>> much bigger black mark against them for getting stuck in the first
>> place.  The game will attempt to notice when you are doing extremely
>> well and everything is going your way, and will bend the rules of luck
>> and probability to help -- however it will also notice when things
>> start to fail, and will then bend the rules against the player,
>> encouraging and flat out causing him to fail more often.  This of
>> course brings up the general point of causitively controlling
>> probability, a generally fascinating idea which I'll discuss in
>> another post.

>I'm confused how this helps gameplay.  This means that, if everything
>bad seems to be happening to your character, you can assure that they
>will only get worse, no matter what you do? *boggle*

Yes-ish.  The idea is to provide an unbalanced feedback situation such
that the good stuff tends to get better and the bad stuff tends to get
worse.  It makes for a more unstable world (one which I feel maps
closely to RL in this regard).  Note that this does not mean that its
ierreversable -- it just skews the probabilities for that character. 
If a player should suspect that he's on a bad luck run, he can just
stop using meduium to low probability actions and cocentrate only on
high-probability stuff until his success rate there has been enough to
throw the balance over to the other side.  

The problem with the approach is that it will quickly be used as an
excuse to not take risks as a character's "luck" stat suddenly becomes
precious.  Tuning is required of the algorithm.  I suspect a simple
rubber-band pattern where the greater the luck value's devation from
0, both the more slowly it will increase its deviation, and the more
difficult it is to change the deviation.  Then just add a *very* low
probability action that reverses the current sign on the luck value,
and a slightly higher probability action that significantly alters the
current value (+ve or -ve) no matter its current value).

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...