[MUD-Dev] Something complete different

[Marian Griffith]

On Thu 18 Sep, Brandon J. Rickman wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Sep 1997 Marian Griffith <gryphon at iaehv.nl> wrote:

> >I would hazard that in any situation remotely resembling reality a corpse
> >would not stay around very long. Scanvengers would soon finish the bigger
> >parts of it,  then worms and insects  would remove the remaining  eadible
> >stuff.  By that time things are already so small that they are subject to
> >being moved around by small animals  and even by wind.  Unless the corpse
> >was very large, e.g. human sized or bigger, it is unrecognisable within a
> >matter of days.
> >Another problem here is,  of course,  where all those fluffy bunnies come
> >from. They ought to be either extinct, or evolve into killer bunnies that
> >hunt newbie characters.

> I really shouldn't have used corpses as a test case, but while I'm
> already off the thread:

> A newbie area is almost always some specially protected area where larger
> predators (carnivores, big monsters) are not allowed, and they
> generally encourage overpopulation (so there is something for newbies to
> kill).  Given the typically wholesale slaughter that takes place in
> most newbie areas, there should in fact be *lots* of uneaten and
> unscavenged corpses lying around, because the scavengers are well fed!
> But to make the claim that newbie areas are "unnatural" is hardly worth
> saying.

If you're after realism then there should be none, or hardly any rabbits
in that newbie area. Of course that would defeat the purpose of the area
so that never happens. All this assuming that we are talking about fair-
ly traditional muds  where the only goal is to kill as many creatures as
possible in the shortest time.

> >> While this would make a mud quite novel it probably wouldn't be too
> >> appealing to a large number of players, and the type of mud where such
> >> a situation would be most likely to actually occur would probably 
> >> want to have more than a few players.

> >Truth be told is that the vast majority of players has descriptions set
> >to brief and won't notice the room full of corpses anyway.

> Ah, one point I was trying to make was that, in many situations, the
> players _don't_ care about the details, so you might as well fake them.

*nod* And I think that all games in fact do just that.  Of course then
you run into problems if some of those details end up to be not so ob-
scure as you thought they would be.  Or if you want to give the game a
broader basis of possible activities.

> >Things decay unless repaired. Living creatures repair themselves
> >continuously until they stop being living.  Metals and rocks are
> >very resilient against decay so they stay around longer. Nothing
> >mysterious about it in my opinion. Of course I am not the person
> >who has to code this :)

> I might not have made a clear enough distinction between /objects/
> that decay and /details/ that decay. 

Now you are confusing me :(


Marian
--
Yes - at last - You. I Choose you. Out of all the world,
out of all the seeking, I have found you, young sister of
my heart! You are mine and I am yours - and never again
will there be loneliness ...

Rolan Choosing Talia,
Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey