[MUD-Dev] Re: Introductions and descriptions

[Richard Woolcock]

Maddy wrote:
> 
> Previously, Richard Woolcock wrote....
> > Maddy wrote:
> 
> > > Well you still have to remember the name of things.  If Bob ignores the
> > > mushroom and walks back and forth through the room several times, eventually
> > > he'll succeed.  Likewise, Fred may eventually fail and think it's a tasty
> > > looking mushroom.
> >
> > I don't see why you would have to remember the names of things.  If Bob
> > doesn't know that the mushroom is poisonous, there is no way he's going to
> > find out unless someone tells him or he eats one.  Admittedly, from then
> > on he would still be unable to identify which mushrooms were good to eat -
> > but its probably a pretty safe bet that he wouldn't try eating another one
> > until he did a little research on wilderness Survival.  Equally, Fred is
> > hardly likely to forget that the mushroom is deadly - how many times have
> > you 'forgotten', for example, not to eat something you personally hate
> > eating (or something poisonous)?
> 
> Well Bob will find out eventually if he keeps seeing this mushroom, because
> for the game to describe it as "Oooh a lovely mushroom", it requires Bob to
> perform his survival skill and he could succeed at some stage.  The only way

Hmmm you could use a 'chance of success' - however what I was referring to was
more along the lines of skill levels - thus

Survival 0 - You know nothing about survival.
Survival 1 - You know the basics, recognise simple plants, etc.
Survival 2 - You are intermediate, can recognise poisonous fungus, etc.
Survival 3 - You are skilled, blah blah blah....etc....

Thus if Bob has Survival < 2, he won't recognise toadstools, whilst if he
has Survival >= 2, he will.  Survival ROLLS would be used in 'chance' 
situations.

> around this is to store something which says Bob's seen this mushroom and
> thinks it's not deadly, hence - remembering the name.  You could I guess
> store some kind of flag, it'd have to be very generic though, but given your
> ideas on characters having a bit more freewill it'd fit right in.

Yes you could store the name, or maybe have a 'fungus' bit, or perhaps a
number of different fungi...but my suggestions was a 'simple' solution.
Storing loads of stuff like this is nice, but I don't see it as essential
to the game, when you could equally say 'Bob is fed up of eating toadstools,
so he gets Fred to teach him more Survival techniques, raising his Survival
skill to level 2'.

>     >look at mushroom
>     [Succeeds the spot well dodgy mushroom skill]
>     You see a vile lesser spotted warthog mushroom - highly poisonous.
>     >eat mushroom
>     No matter how hard you try, you just can't force yourself to eat it.

But it would have to be a 'one off' roll (ie object-recognition), so if
you don't recognise it the first time, you never will unless someone tells
you (although you might well see it the next time as "One of those dodgy
mushrooms"...or would you?  You'd have to have paid a lot of attention to
the toadstool, and many fungus look extremely similar).

> If you had to make a survival skill every time, you could have ended up
> eating the mushroom cos you had forgotten.  But I guess that it'd not make
> it hard to check if it were deadly poisonous just by storing the name.

Not hard, but its still a hassle for something which I don't really need
to that level of detail.

KaVir.