[MUD-Dev] A flamewar startingpoint.

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 12:27:46 Derrick Jones
<gunther at online1.magnus1.com> wrote:
>I wonder what other actions could generally be concidered 'details' with
>which players shouldn't be bothered...
>	drinking
>	taxes (actually prompted to pay or auto-pay)
>These seem to fall under the same catagory as eating...left up to the
>player, with a (small) benifit for being meticulous...
>	sleeping
>	changing (clothes)
>	house maintainence (normal)
>I've always thought is was odd that characters never had to sleep on any
>of the muds I've played.  I can't imagine making it playable (1/3 of the
>time you'd be sitting there watching the insides of your eyelids). I guess
>its just an area where realism/playability clash.  The other two are
>things that no one ever does on MUDs...mostly because they fall into the
>'not that important' catagory.

Most of these things are present in a lot of muds I've seen, perhaps you
don't consider "sitting in a room waiting to heal" sleeping, but there are
certainly muds with more explicit "sleep" (usu. with sit/stand/lie)
commands.  Yes, you are stuck watching the insides of your eyelids.  Is
is playable?  If having to sleep is built into the game, where you get
tired from walking around or fighting, and being asleep leaves your 
character vulnerable to attack, then finding a safe place to sleep
becomes part of the game.  This is both playable and realistic.

I would say the biggest problem caused by eating/sleeping activities
is due to accelerated time used in most game worlds.  When one real
hour is one mud day your character has to eat too damn often.  If a
game made me perform my daily routines once an hour (shower, dress,
feed cats, eat lunch, eat dinner, brush teeth, sleep) I wouldn't play.
And there would actually be little immediate consequence if I didn't
do those things once a week or so.  The consequences appear when I
am somehow prevented from those activities for a sustained amount of
time.  So how can a game recognize that I no longer have access to a
good food source?  Perhaps if I'm locked in a cell.  When don't I
sleep?  When driving across country.   

If a character spends seven game days wandering around the desert
he should certainly get hungry.  With money, getting food in a city 
is a trivial exercise and probably doesn't need to be in the game.
I guess I'm saying that these things should be context sensitive.

On Wed, 12 Nov 1997 12:30:37, s001gmu at nova.wright.edu (Greg) wrote:
>hmm... I wonder how feasable it would be to have eating be a semi-automated
>process?  Kind of like breathing.  You can take control, but most of the
>time it's automated.  When you get hungry, assuming you are not too busy
>doing something else (like fighting for your life, or casting a spell), the
>game has the character pull out a loaf of bread or whatever, and eat it.
>You do sacrifice a bit of realism, in that they might be running for their
>lives from that nasty dragon whose layer they just raided, but it takes care
>of a tedious detail, while still keeping some flavour (I am assuming that the
>character and everyone within visual range will see them going about eating).
>It also requires the player to have enough food on hand, adding another
>resource to manage, and a layer of complexity.  

In a context sensitive environment, a dangerous situation (being
hounded by a dragon) should deactivate any automatic functions.
There could of course be different "danger" thresholds for different
functions:

- If in an unsettled area that has few edibile resources, and less than
three days of travel rations -> Stop automated eating.
- If swimming -> Stop taking naps.
- If air is poisonous -> Stop breathing. 

While I would avoid killing characters because they refused to breathe I
would certainly penalize them for other actions.

And I would make characters have to eat an amount of food proportional
to their physical strength and size.  You wanna play a big brawny
barbarian you'll spend most of your time eating.

[Various parallels to fuel and timer-based arcade games have come to
mind.  It'll cost you a quarter for enough fuel to continue the game.
This is probably something most mud people fear.]

- Brandon Rickman - ashes at zennet.com -
While I have never previously found a need for a .sig, this
may be considered one for the purposes of this list
[I don't actually have any cats.]