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

[Adam Wiggins]

[Shawn H:]
> On Tue, 7 Oct 1997, Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > 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.

I was working under the assumption here that you don't want the player to
be able to pin down exact numbers, just a general idea of where they
stand so that they aren't completely in the dark.

> 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

If your scale is linear this could be a real problem.  Of course, if any
level-based game had a linear experience scale (it takes the same amount
of experience to make each level and monsters are always worth the same
amount) then players would be level 10 billion after playing for a while.

> 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.

What should matter is that he can flip burgers better than Bubba.  An
advantage to not giving out exact numbers but having it relative to something
else is that you avoid the situation of:

Bubba says, 'I can flip burgers better than you!'
You say, 'No you can't, I'm a rocking burger flipper!'
Bubba says, 'My skill is 98!'
< skills
Burger-flipping: 31
< say Uh, I gotta stand over here now..

The idea is that they actually have to try it to find out for sure.  On
the other hand, as I've said already, being compeltely in the dark
kind of sucks for the player.  You want to have a situation where
people can make a good guess but the outcome is never sure, except for
extreme cases.  And this, again, is where having lots of more atomic
skills is real nice - if there's no one single number to compare, it
becomes much more complex, and interesting from the player's standpoint.
Thus you have Bubba the world's fastest short-order cook, Boffo the
renowned gourmet, and a dozen hungry soldiers.  Which cook can achieve
maximum satisfaction for the soldiers?

> 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.

You need to give some sense of scale, I think.  We will probably tell
our players that our skills are on a scale of 1 to 100, but I will be
surprised to see anyone go into three digits, given the exponential curve
of our skill learn function.  (No doubt some enterprising player will
find a way..)

> 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."

Yeah.  Well, you want to be able to pull up a character sheet, less because
it's useful and more because that's an important part of the feedback in
a CRPG.  It can also be useful if you switch between characters frequently,
or don't play one character for a while.  Most important, though, is people
like to see where they stand in a concise form.

What really matters as far as practical applcation is the result of
your consider, and then the action.  The number on the character sheet doesn't
matter at that point.

> > > 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.

I don't like this very much, as a player.  As a creator it sounds reasonable
enough, but this leaves you with no sense of direction when you enter the
game.  The one saving grace of a class-based system is that with a single
choice you can set some simple goals for your character.  Make a thief and
you know right away that you should start picking locks and pockets, and
prowl around in the alleyways looking for shady characters that might be
able to teach you.  A plain vanilla character, even if they have some
character background or other attributes set up at creation, doesn't have
this.  Most of my favorite skill-based (DartMud, Legend, YaMud..) muds suffer
very badly from this problem, as they only have race, stats, and a few other
incendentals selectable during startup.