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

[Travis Casey]

Shawn Halpenny <malachai at iname.com> wrote:
>On Sun, 5 Oct 1997, Travis Casey wrote:
>> Brian Price <blprice at bedford.net> wrote:
>>
>> >I'm against numeric displays of anytype except where they represent
>> >something that could be realistically measured on some scale within
>> >the game.  In most cases I believe they lead directly to power gaming
>> >attempts and indirectly to scripting/spamming.  If you simply must
>> >use a gradual improvement % based skill system, I believe that using
>> >incompetent for 01-10, barely competent for 11-20, etc. would give
>> >the necessary feedback to the player while doing much to hide any
>> >gains from spamming or scripting, reducing the incentive as it were.
>>
>> I like using numbers -- they're easy to display and understand,
>> where many "descriptive" systems use adjectives where it can be
>> hard to tell which is better.  Also, since Arabic numerals are used
>> in many languages, they make it easier for players who aren't
>> native English speakers.
>>
>> 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
>locks", since not all locks require the same amount of skill to pick
>(nor are all locks requiring a range of skill X to Y necessarily
>similar, which would render the message "You are very good at picking
>Yale locks" acceptable).  Ideally, I want to present "You are capable
>of besting the meanest of red dragons" or somesuch, but that implies
>that somewhere a calculation has gone on that was aware of the
>meanest red dragon in the world.  I think this sort of thing depends
>very much on the character and must be based on what the character
>has accomplished.  Given that, what should a newly created character
>see when he queries his sword skill if he's never had a chance to
>compare it to anything?

Well... let's think about it for a minute.  As the mud creator, you're
the one who decides what skills and stats NPCs should have, and who sets
difficulties for performing tasks.  In order to set these things, you have
to have an implicit scale already in mind -- for example, if you give an
NPC who's supposed to be a master swordsman a skill of 150 in his favorite
sword type, then a 150 must be a very good sword skill.

You also get to set up the parameters that should decide how long it will
take for a character to get to a certain level of skill -- and you should
have used this in setting up the skill levels of NPCs and difficulties of
tasks.  To continue with our master swordsman above, if a 150 is a master,
I'd assume that it will take a mudder who logs in a couple of hours a
night at least a month or two to reach that level of skill.  If someone can
do it in a single day, you've got a problem in the making.

You may need to do some playtesting before seeing how long it will really
take players to reach certain skill levels, and then need to adjust numbers
based on the playtesting.  For the sake of convenience, though, let's assume
that you have a good idea what these numbers will be.

Given that, it's not hard to create an informative ranking system which will
give the player some idea where his/her character stands with each skill.
The important part, then, becomes the questions of how the character knows
this ranking and how accurately.

Most RPGs work on the assumption that the players and the characters are
separate.  The character is usually assumed to have an existence that began
before the player "created" him/her -- that is, the character is a native of
the game world and has grown up in it, and the player is simply assuming
control of this character at the point where he/she is ready to start
adventuring (or possibly even after that point).  If this is the case, then
the *character* ought to have some idea where he/she stands with various
skills -- it might not be a completely accurate idea, but it will be *some*
idea.  To draw a real-world analogy, remember the grasp on your own
abilities
that you had when you were 18 years old -- it was probably accurate on some
things, wildly off on others, and only somewhat off on still others.

The character's self-assessment depends on a number of things, such as
personality, actual level of competence in the skill, and the levels of
competence of others that he/she has dealt with.  Depending on your
character creation scheme, you may be able to determine some of these
and use them to help you in determining how accurate the character's
initial impressions of him/herself are.  E.g., if you're using a lifepath
system and the player chooses "served in the army" as part of the
character's
background, that character should have a fairly realistic idea of his/her
own combat skills.

Another possible way of handling a character/player split is that the
*player*
has perfect knowledge of the character's stats, skills, etc., but is
supposed
to roleplay the character in a way that represents the fact that the
*character* doesn't share that perfect knowledge.  This is, in fact, the
position that most paper RPGs take.  However, since mud players rarely show
much inclination towards roleplaying their character's weaknesses, this
method generally won't work as well on a mud.

Of course, it's also possible to have a world in which the characters are
more
closely associated with their players, and do indeed spring into the world
fully-formed at the moment their players create them.  In such a case, it
would be possible for the characters to have no idea of how powerful they
were vis-a-vis others to start off with.

Representing all this for the players is another story.  Personally, I like
to use a 0 to 10 scale, with 0 being no ability/no learning and 10 being
the best that any human can be/is.  A 5 should be average (for abilities)
or a good amateur/beginning professional (for skills).  People in the US,
at least, are familiar with the concept of rating things on a 1 to 10 scale,
so this seems natural -- it gives something easy to understand without
carrying
the heavy cultural baggage or assumed world knowledge of some of the other
proposals.
--
      |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
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