[MUD-Dev] UI Issues: Anti-scripting techniques

[Shawn Halpenny]

On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> [Shawn H:]
> > On Sun, 5 Oct 1997, Travis Casey wrote:
> > > However, there's no reason my the numbers displayed have to be the
> > > actual numbers that the mud uses internally.  The players might be
> > > shown their skills on a 0 to 10 scale, for example, even though the
> > > mud internally uses a 0 to 100 scale.
> > 
> > Quite true.  However, this becomes a more involved question if you've
> > adopted a system as I have (similar to the one you posted about
> > relative skill comparisons).
> > 
> > How does one tell the player what skill level he is at with a
> > relative system such as that?  I detest seeing "Your broadsword skill
> > is at 80%".  It is incorrect to say "You are very good at picking
> 
> Percent is something used by skill systems rated from 1 to 100 that I
> really despise.  It's terribly misleading, IMO.

I agree entirely, which is why I've adopted a relative scale.  There
is essentially no upper bound on one's aptitude in a skill, so it's
not possible to reach a point, say, where one has attained half of
some global maximum in swordplay.  One's aptitude is compared at time
of use to whatever requirements need to be met on the target of one's
task.

[ choosing a context with which to relate skill level to user ]

I wouldn't be comfortable with choosing something from a related
setting, since there isn't anything close enough to what I want for
me to draw upon.  I have the same problem with relating it to the
real world.

> - Leave it entirely in-game.  This is, of course, basically
>   ignoring the problem.  On one hand, this will cause players to
>   learn what the game scale is and then all is fine.  On the other
>   hand, it makes things confusing for newbies, which is one of the
>   things we were trying to get around with this whole discussion. 
>   Thus, a rating displayed in a graphical bar of some sort would be
>   fine, but it would take a while for people to get aquinted with
>   the fact that a bar of about halfway in 'climb' is good enough to
>   make it up Mt. Steep but not Mt. Toughie or Mt. Impossible.

Yep.  I would like for the players to learn the game scale, since
that's obviously the most applicable, yet still remains nasty for
newbies.  I wonder how allergic people would be to not ever being
able to tell if they could accomplish something until they tried it? 
Assuming, of course, that something akin to "consider" exists (be it
looking at the task object or whatever) so that they can have an idea
in the current context of how well they'd fare.  Hm.  I'm starting to
like that.

> Personally I like the last one the best.  Here's why: a context is
> created just with a single listing of skills.  Consider:
> 
> Character creation complete.
> You enter the game.
> > skills
> Your skills:
> swordplay: 10
> lockpicking: 3
> burger-flipping: 28
> climbing: 12
> >
> 
> You now know that your character's best ability is burger-flipping.
> The context formed is relative to what's around it.   This doesn't
> say anything about the scale, although the player may well assume
> that it's a scale of 1 to 100.  They could get their skill in
> swordplay up to 80 and think that they are a really kick-ass
> swordfighter, until they happen to meet up with someone that has a
> skill of 564.

When characters enter my game, they all have about the same aptitude
in everything.  There are per-character modifications that one can
choose that will swing the balance in particular areas one way or the
other, but there's no requirement for choosing any of those
modifications.

> We discussed options about text which relates you to whomever else
> you've ever seen, ie:

[ snip example of getting progressively weaker and more stupid as more
  people passed through the room ]

> I wasn't too keen on this, as I didn't see it as a bonus from the
> player's standpoint (other than being mildly amusing for a while),
> nor did I see a clean way to do it.  Something simple, like rating
> according to race (a strength rating of 'great' from an elf is the
> same as 'good' for a human and 'lousy' for an ogre), isn't a bad
> option, if you want to make it more difficult for players to pin
> down the exact numbers.

I wasn't keen on it myself.  Using a relative scale makes it hard to pin
down the exact number in all cases anyway.  Fiddle with the aptitude
requirements for tasks each time they're completed and it makes it even
tougher.

> As to the numbers versus text thing, I am always in favor of not
> showing any numbers.  However, as both a player and an implementor,
> I've come to the conclusion that they are really pretty nice all
> around.  Travis hit most of the key points - my main problem is the
> ambiguity of text outputs.

Very true.  This ambiguity is one of the things keeping me from never
showing any numbers and showing only text.  If I have no upper bound on
aptitude, though, showing players something like:

    < score
    Burger-flipping:  2342562
    Swordplay:        98732
    Navel-gazing:     28376265

is completely meaningless except internally.  If the player knew that
Chef-Bubba had a burger-flipping skill of 1882, he's know he could
out-burger-flip Bubba anytime.  He does not know this, however, and he has
no way of finding out what that number is.

And mapping an infinite aptitude range onto a scale of 0-10 or 0-100, etc.
makes me queazy.  Young Bubba the MagicUser could be waiting a long, long
time for his invisibility skill to go from 20 to 21, meanwhile in the
interim he could have become better at it a thousand times.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the presentation of
personal aptitude to the user should depend entirely on the current case,
or the "what I'm about to do" case, with no indication whatsoever from the
get go.  Anything after that will be a memory--"I remember back when it
used to take me 10 minutes to pick that lock, and now I can do it with my
eyes closed."

> >                             In a relative skill system, how
> > does one effectively (without misleading) convey a newbie's skills to him?
> > Do they all start out as "You're okay at just about everything"?  I know
> > I'd rather have an inkling of how good I am at picking locks before I play
> > my newbie Houdini...
> 
> Also I think this should be defined in character creation.  If you say
> that your character has limited experience with escapism but never bothered
> with swordplay, I can start the game knowing that I'm a better escape artist
> than fighter.

Everyone has the same skills from creation (barring the aforementioned
per-character modifications, but one pays dearly for those).  Chances are,
you're as good a fighter as you are an escape-artist at creation.  As well,
you're probably just as good (or bad, I suppose) at both as is BubbaNewbie.

[ how to present chance of success to player ]

> Looks, as I said.  This requires intense consitency in your world.  It's
> common for muds now to have a wolf in one place which any newbie can kill,
> and a wolf someplace else that is mildly difficult for a mid-level character
> and completely impossible for a newbie.  Usually these were created by
> different people but have similarly menacing descriptions, ie 'A vicious
> wolf with powerful, slathering jaws.'  IMO this consitency is desired
> both for the players and the builders.  However you have to design things
> to work this way from the ground up.

I agree (from both perspectives) that the consistency is important.  But,
(practically) unfettered user-programming makes enforcing descriptions such
as this impractical, so I'm trying to make the determination completely
internal and based on game variables.  Even then, I'm not guaranteed
consistency, since the user who is creating his own wolf can set whatever
skill requirements he wants for those in combat with it.

Related to that, I intend to make the cost of creating your own object
directly proportional (in part) to the amount of per-attribute change
between the old and new objects.  The more you change it, the more it costs
you and the faster it will destroy itself.  Change something too
much, and you find your resources disappearing very quickly and the thing
self-destructs.

--
Shawn Halpenny

"This was Death, come to collect him."
                                - _On a Pale Horse_