[MUD-Dev] Character evolution

[##Make Nylander]

[Original message sent by Caliban Tiresias Darklock]
| 
| Something I've considered here and there is the possibility of hiring
| mobs to do things. When I play MUDs, I often find that I have all this
| money piling up, and nothing I can do with it; so I was thinking, why
| not allow people to pay some amount of money to a mob and give it a
| number of commands? I mean, if you're the medieval equivalent of a
| multi-billionaire, why should you have to do everything yourself?

	Well, shopkeepers and healers found on many stock MUDs are
	mobs rendering the player their services. You could easily
	expand on that model and have mercenaries (mobs that follow
	you and fight for you as long as you keep on paying them),
	assassins, bounty-hunters ("50k gp for anyone who brings me
	Bubba's head!"), butlers ("You sit down. Jeeves lights a pipe
	and offers it to you."), guards, armorers ("and what would you
	like to have inscribed on your sword, sir?") and whatnot.
	In my Diku derivative I have a number of hardcoded "mob
	professions" with different services available for PCs with
	too much money -- most of them useful, some of them jsut
	amusing.
	
	I have no doubt that one could come up with code that would
	enable the player to issue complex orders to a mob, but
	unless you have very advanced "mob AI", that might frustrate
	players rather than help them ("do what I mean, not what I say
	you dumb mobile!").

	One advantage of using pre-defined "professions" for defining
	mob behaviour is that you can easily simulate supply-demand
	economy  for services (e.g. if someone nukes most of the
	assassin mobiles in the game, the remaining ones will raise
	their fees). 

		-- Newt