[MUD-Dev] Resets, repops and quests

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <338d05d7.277223215 at neptune>, on 05/28/97 
   at 09:00 AM, alexo at bigfoot.com (Alex Oren) said:

>Ling, Jeff (using some vaguely english-like language) and Caliban
>(???) suggested some sorts of imm intervention/control.

Hey, its english, well, 'murcan, with err, random, ahh, transposition,
uhh, after umm, being, ahh, well, you see, he's in the barbed wire
cattle fence/telephone wire part of the world, and the cows are
getting sorta itchy,  Uhh, yeah.

>Quests, as I see them, provide short-term goals and some sense of
>accomplishment and progress.

They also provide a sense of shared achievement that players can
share.  "Have you done the XXX quest?"  "Yeah!  Bitch wasn't it? 
Especially that bit at the end...!"

>I guess the kidnapped princess scenario could be tweaked so the orcs
>will kidnap a different member of the community (could even happen to
>be a player, social implications aside) and repeat the kidnapping
>only after a long time (to replenish slaughtered troops) but what
>happens when some high-level players team up, torch the orc village
>and build a castle there?

How about this:

  The princess is prone to wandering.

  The Orcs have periodic population explosions.

  Wandering parties of Orcs tend to be attracted to buildings.

  Should an Orc find the Princess she will be taken prisoner 
    and conveyed back to Orcish HQ.

  Every time the princess has been captured, and remains captured 
    for some trigger length of time, a new quest has been created.

The problem of Orcs being made extinct can be generally handled by
engineering the world such that Orcs _can't_ be wiped out.  In my
original model there were *always* inaccessable breeder orcs to ensure
that the species survivied.

>But there is a limited number of tinker-resistant quests that will
>not require resets and I desire a more general solution.

Disagreed.  Its a matter of changing the formation of the quest. 
Don't view it from the PoV of, "How do I recreate the goal of the
quest in a new way every time?" and instead use the question, "What
interesting system can I devise to get this thing in a state that I
can make a game of getting that state back again?"  

>BTW, ChrisL - Do you know why all the empty lines were removed from
>my previous post?  Is Stewart to blame?

I looked at the message as received by Steward, and the message I
received at my list subscriptions.  The blank lines were there. 
Please send a copy of the message with all headers to coder at ibm.net
and I'll dig into it.

BTW: For those of you getting dupes: last night's fix to the list
should permanently eradicate them.  I'm now running my own mail hub.

--
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...