[MUD-Dev] Re: Administrative notes

[Adam Wiggins]

[Marian:]
> I wasn't trying to argue that muds are not realistic enough, but rather,
> that combat typically is far less dangerous than it is made out to be.
> Which makes sense, nobody sane wishes to challenge 1000 to 1 odds. The same

Well, I do - on a mud, since I'm not risking much of anything, and it's
fun. :)  That's why it's kinda fun to make berserker-type characters,
although I guess they wouldn't qualify as sane.

> is true for games. If combat is potentially very deadly (and permanently so)
> for your characters you need ways to reduce that risk. That includes having
> the chance to gracefully back out of dangerous situations, typical monsters
> not pursuing the fight until the player is dead, a combat system that focuses
> on sparring rather than on attrition of hitpoints, far less difference
> between levels, offer the opportunity to players to do something meaningfull
> in the game besides fighting ever bigger monsters.

Bingo.  If you don't want to die - don't fight in mortal battles!
That's all there is to it.  Any time you go into a combat situation
you face a pretty big danger of either injury or death.  That's just
how it is.  If you don't like it, don't enter those situations.  There's
plenty of other things to do.  (At least...there should be.)

> > > My problem is that it doesn't work that way. I can throw balls in the air
> > > until my arm falls off without getting in the least better at juggling. S
> 
> > Heh...here you are wrong.  I picked that example because that is *exactly*
> > how I learned to juggle.
> 
> In that case perhaps juggling is a wrong example. I still belief you can
> learn only so much of something by just doing it. You make far better,
> and bigger, progress when you have somebody around explaining how to do
> it (and why, and showing you).

I totally agree with the second part of this statement, but I still have
a pretty major problem with the first.
Almost everything I 'know' how to do is entirely self-taught.  This includes
programming, various muscial instruments (primary being drumkit),
juggling, drawing, and most all the sports I'm descent at (crosscountry and
downhill skiing, volleyball, raquetball).
I don't want to say that I didn't have any help.  In most cases I got
pointers from friends or read books on the subject; but in almost all
cases, I had no one I'd refer to as my teacher.  I just started doing
something, and eventually got good at it.  Instruction is valuable - it
can get you thinking in ways that you might not of yourself - but the
thought that you just can't learn something past a certain point without
having someone take your hand and guide you through it step by step
is pretty far off base, at least by my experience.  Maybe brain surgery
or something - but as I said, all of our skills are much simpler than
that, so I don't consider this an issue.