[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface

[Adam Wiggins]

> On Wednesday, September 24, 1997 5:03 AM, Adam Wiggins 
> [SMTP:nightfall at user2.inficad.com] wrote:
> > > development is a lot of fun when you're *developing*, but after a few
> > > run-throughs you get tired of it. It really doesn't matter how detailed
> > > I can make my character when someone else can walk up and destroy all 
> my
> > > work for no real reason.
> >
> > Wrong.  It makes it everything.  Again, I'm coming from years on Arctic
> > where player-vs-player actions (stealing, fighting..) are common, and 
> expected,
> > parts of the game world.  I find it boring if the procedure is simply
> > jumping through hoops until I have an all powerful character.
> 
> I don't want an all powerful character. I want a character capable of 
> playing the game as long as *I* want to play it. Period. Not as long as 
> people let me. Not as long as I haven't solved every quest. Not as long as 
> I'm not level 50. As long as I want to play, be that a day, a month, a 
> year, or even a decade. I always want someplace else to go, and I don't 
> want any dork anywhere able to *stop* me. Slow me up, yeah; inconvenience 
> me, annoy me, make my life hell? Yeah, go for it, but not *stop* me. ;)

Time to agree to disagree.  I can understand how you feel, but that's
not how I feel, so my mud isn't that way.  On to more productive
topics...

> > To sum up our mud, if such a thing is possible, in one sentence:
> >
> > Get as far as you can.
> 
> The supporting extrapolation:
> 
> 	You will improve your lead by eliminating your competitors.

Yes, I like this.  The definintion of 'competitor' is left up to the
player.  One character being a good swordsman certainly does not keep
you from being just as good, or better.  However, it's human nature to
consider someone in the same profession as you to be 'competition', even
if they don't directly compete for any resource at all.

> > This doesn't mean you every hit some sort of 'ceiling' on your 
> character's
> > abilities, although it does get progressively harder to advance or even
> > keep up your skills, resistances, and so forth.  It means that's it's a
> > dangerous world, full of surprises from both the game and other players.
> 
> Dangerous is good. Hostile is not. The difference between the terms is left 
> as an exercise for the reader.

Again, I think hostile *is* good.  Dangerous implies things like
natural disasters or carniverous animals; things which aren't necessarily
mean for no reason, they just are what they are, and everyone had best
steer clear.  Hostile implies bands of raiding orcs that like to loot
and kill just for the joy of it.  This has a lot more emotion to it, both
for the orcs and for whoever their victims are, which I like.

> You're misunderstanding my goal. My goal is to play the game for an 
> extended period of time, being faced with progressively more challenging 
> situations, without *ever* being faced by situations that are hopeless. I 
> do not under any circumstances want to be faced with a situation which I 
> cannot reasonably be expected to handle.

Is this possible on a mud with any sort of mechanisms?  If you walk into the
dragon's cave and quaff a potion of paralysis two inches from his nose,
how can you 'handle this reasonably', exactly?  Yes, it certainly can
happen - you're blind, deaf, and have no sense of smell thanks to some
NPC you were fighting earlier, and you thought that potion was actually
a point of healing.  What then?

> > Anyhow we've probably beaten this to death.  I like languages; they 
> aren't
> > a huge component, but they are one of those small details that can really
> > bring a world to life.  Did Tolkien's languages make his books any 
> better?
> 
> Yes, they did, as any linguist or historian could tell you.
> 
> > Not really, other than making it easy for him to churn out cool-sounding
> > and consitent names.  But I feel they added a huge amount to the overall
> > mood and setting.
> 
> Which made the books better...

Sorry, I should have said 'stories'.  The books as a whole were enhanced
by the languages, but the stories themselves were independant of the languages.

> > I never said there was no game balance problems.  If anything, they are 
> more
> > difficult, because the character 'states' are less discrete.  What I said
> > was that that particular example was difficult for me to apply, although
> > you'll note I did try anyhow.
> 
> Not very hard. You pointed out the problems with invisible people picking 
> visible things up.

I did?  I think what I said was that we don't have invisibility.

> Try pointing out problems with picking up players 
> instead, which is where it all started.

Picking up anything that large and figity is difficult.  You will get
fatigued very quickly (unless they are very light and you are very strong),
be effectively incapacitated in combat, and unable to do much of anything
but attempt to stagger around, since you need your hands to do most things.
For the person being picked up, you are also basically incapacitated,
again depending on how you were picked up.  Certainly you'll have a nearly
impossible time defend any attacks that happen to come the way of the
person carrying you (which, of course, are also coming at you).  There are
exceptions to this, of course - if you are riding a mount it's signifigantly
different than if someone grabs you and slings you over their shoulder.
Naturally if you don't *want* to be slung over their shoulder, you can figit
and try to escape as much as you want, which effectively incapacitates them
from doing anything at all, except in extreme cases (the 9', 750 lb minotaur
picking up a 2.5', 45 lb goblin).  Even then it's pretty easy to wriggle
free if you set your mind to it, although you have to deal with the problem
of smacking the ground once you escape.
In other words, carrying a heavy object is difficult.  Carrying a *moving*
heavy object for any length of time is damn near impossible, and certainly
not something that is going to give you a big benefit.

> And *try*, instead of going 'well, 
> okay, so you try to walk four miles carrying Bob over your shoulder'. 

If Bob was unconscious and lighter than you, and you were strong and didn't
tire easily, sure, why not?

> Really consider for a moment that you want to take Bubba to place X. How 
> would you get him there? Could you? Could you do it while Bob's player was 
> in the bathroom and AFK without his consent? That's a problem, if place X 
> is someplace Bob doesn't want to be or shouldn't ought to be.

Again, I consider this to be much less of a 'problem' than sticking my
axe into Bob's head without his consent.  Given that the axe thing doesn't
bother me, just carting him around while he's unconscious doesn't seem all
that bad to me.

A scenario for you, since I know you love them so much.

One of Orion's creations are the forest trolls.  These are big (12'+) and
ugly, as you'd expect.  They only come out at night, of course.  During the
night they go stampeding around the forest in small packs (although believe
me, a 'small' pack of trolls can make a hell of a lot of noise), whooping
and yelling and breaking branches and knocking over small trees, and anything
they come across that looks edible they pound on the head and throw in
their sack.  As dawn approaches or their sacks get full (whichever comes
first), they head back to their caves.  At this point they spend quite a
while preparing the stew - simmering various plants and herbs in a giant
cauldron of boiling water.  When they think it's ready, they open up the
sacks, pull out whatever's inside, and throw them into the cauldrons to make
a yummy stew.

Needless to say, if any player is dumb enough to get caught in their way,
they're in for a rough time of it.  I *love* this sort of scenario, and
it's fairly representative of what you'll find in our mud.  Hostile - yes,
absolutely.  Hopeless?  Of course not.  I recommend a knife to cut your
way out of the sack, and then a good sneak skill to get out of the cave
before the chef notices..

> > Anyhow we're not immune at all.  The questions and answers are just
> > different, which is something I like.
> 
> > One thing I hate about muds right now is the MASSIVE amount of time
> > you need to invest to have a descently interesting character.  We're
> > going for short-and-sweet character careers; I imagine few people will
> > play the same character for four months.  Years is probably impossible.
> 
> Now we're talking. THIS is a Great Idea. (Yes, you *earned* the capitals 
> there, my friend; this is probably the best thing I've heard from you yet.) 

<bow>

> While I'm not a fan of short term characters, short term characters need 
> rapid development to be plausible... so this is just perfect.

Yup.  Well, of course, the real question is just what the relationship
between the length of development time vs. the chances of getting killed.
This is something we're very aware of and plan to do much more tweaking
on as we get more players than just our few alpha-testers.

> > So I agree: permadeath is bad on a mud where you 'have' to spend 20+ RL
> > hours just to get a character far enough into the game that it starts to
> > be fun, and frequently 100+ hours for a 'good' character.  Forget that;
> > I don't have time for it.  Back when I was attending a university and
> > had nothing to do but ditch classes it was a little different.
> 
> But you're already creating a situation where it's time consuming to create 
> the character.

When you say create, I assume you mean the actual process of making a
character before you enter the game, which is a little different
from character *development*, which is what I was talking about above.
It's time consuming in that it will take you twenty or thirty minutes if
you want to get really detailed.  If you don't care I don't see any reason
you couldn't complete it in 45 seconds.  I want to leave it up to the player
as to how much they want to customize their character before starting the
actual game.  Personally I enjoy long-ish character creation.

Note that, for the purposes of our game, character creation creates only
the body you will inhabit, and only has an indirect influence on the
character's attitudes, habbits, biases, and other personality traits.
This basically reflects the way I used to make characters for PnP games:
I'd create a character with all the vital statistics you'd expect, plus a rough
idea of what their personality was going to be.  As the game developed this
personality evolved into something much more complete.  I suppose this is
rather at odds with the MUSH-method of creating an entire character history and
background, so that they can leap into the world as a fully fleshed-out
character.

> Why not have faster methods? Why not store your last 
> character's starting stats and allow you to use those same choices next 
> time?

Well, you don't really pick stats this way, nor would you really want
the same stats for different characters, unless you were trying to clone
your previous character for whatever reason.

> Then I could be back online in seconds, which would keep me playing 
> longer.

Well, I do NOT want it to be a frag-fest.  As I said there's no reason you
couldn't hop through the creation process doing a minimum amount of
customization and be done in less than a minute.  I don't want the effect
of, 'Oh dang I'm dead, just hit the spacebar and re-enter'.  I *do* want the
effect of, 'Man, did he ever go down in flames.  Hum, well that was a lot
of fun.  I think I want to try an Issathi now, I've always wanted to try
being a cleric of Rahl...'

The closest thing I can think to point to is Angband, one of my favorite
Rogue/Hack/Larn/Moria derivatives.  There are a couple key points about
the flow of gameplay in that game that I really like:

- It's fun from the moment you start playing the game.  The game does
change siginficantly as you progress; by the end you're basically playing
the game completely differently.  But there are no points in the game that
are really busy-work that just let you 'get on' to the real fun.
- Your character may have a lifespan of five minutes or five months.  Most of
them will probably die after five to twenty hours of play, depending on
how good of a player you are.  You don't get to 'keep' anything from one
character to the next - once your character dies, they are just gone.  You
have to start from scratch.  However, since the most important thing about
playing that game is knowledge, it's not like you wasted your time (at least,
as far as the game is concerned).  You'll make a new character, armed with
more knowledge about how to do things.  Each character you make will get a
little further.  I myself have invested probably several hundred hours
into various versions of Angband, but I've only beaten it twice.  Because
it is so difficult, however, those victories really meant something to me,
instead of just, 'yawn, beat it with another char.  guess I'll try a cleric
now'.  I've probably played several hundred characters in the game, as
well, but only ten or twelve stick out in my mind as being really special.
And, the fact that they were only a few out of a large number makes them
that much more special to me, whether they finished the game or not.
- There is a large luck factor.  A good player can, if they are careful,
get very far most of the time.  But, there's always a chance of a nasty
dragon breathing some element you don't have a resistance to from down a dark
coridor.  Unfair?  Yes.  The world isn't 'fair', and I see the task of
trying to make a game 'fair' without a human DM/admin overseeing it as
impossible.  Besides which, I'm not too hung up on fairness anyhow.  You do
your best and take what you get.  Some of my favorite memories are of being
dealt a TERRIBLE hand.  Frequently this has resulted in my character's death.
For instance, my hobbit rogue that was trying to fight an ancient multi-hued
dragon when a pack of nexus hounds came 'round the corner, breathed on him,
scrambled all his stats, mixing his 18/100 intelligence with his 12 wisdom.
Now he couldn't cast his resist element spell.  He died two turns later
when the dragon breathed.  Not fair, no.  One of my favorite moments, yes.
One of my favorite characters, yes.  Was I unhappy he died?  Of course.
Does this mean I wish that hadn't happened?  No.

> > We get around this two ways: for one, characters
> > start descently strong.  No being defeated by dogs or squirrels.  Second,
> > you get character points added to your account when you loose (via death
> > or deletion) a 'built up' character, so that you can start you next one
> > with more advantages.
> 
> That's also a good thing; I proposed that on a MUSH I was working at once, 
> and got quite a lot of bad reaction to it. It's an idea not quite ready for 
> prime time, but hey, someone has to prove it works. After you've played 
> AD&D with the same people for 5 years, do you start their new characters at 
> level 1? No! Of course not! They're above that now. Same with MUDders. :)

Right.  Well, one incentive we give players to stick with a single account
(thus preventing multi-charing) is that your *account* actually grows with
time.  You get character points, access to new races and options, and so forth.
I don't expect this to keep people from making more than one account, but
it does make it more difficult to make throw-away characters or multi-char.

> > Also, the power difference between a brand-new character and the best 
> swordsman
> > that ever lived is much, much, MUCH smaller than your average mud
> > nowadays.  The best swordsman that ever lived will have a rough go of it
> > against three or more descently trained opponents.  An army of newbies is
> > enough to run him down no problem, assuming he's not smart enough to run
> > the other direction as soon as he sees them.
> 
> I have to wonder how he'd fare against people with missile weapons and 

Yes, missile weapons are deadly.  You can snipe them from afar without them
ever even knowing how killed them.  Note that we aren't so cruel as to
give you no defence.  The master swordsman mentioned would probably
see something like:

> n
In the Forest
  Heavy shadows beneath the canopy of trees conceal every nook and cranny.
>
You feel as if you are being watched.
> peer
You peer about.
> 
The hair stands up on the back of your neck, and you whirl around at the sound
of a bowstring being loosed.
You draw your sword and cut a southwards-flying arrow out of the air.
> l n
You see a glint of metal in a shadow just to the north.
> n

Missile weapons are very powerful in certain regards, but difficult to
maintain and make use of.  If you're going to kill someone, you'd best
kill them in one shot.  This is, of course, a major game-balance issue,
something I expect we'll be spending much time tweaking in the future.

> vice-versa. What about magic? Do spells have a similar balance against 
> weapons?

Yes.  Thaumaturgy is very different from normal spellcasting.  First of
all, spellcasting is very difficult and very time-consuming to learn.  You
certainly can't just make a character, walk to the mage guild and learn
a few cantrips.

In a nutshell:

There are two requirements for elemental invocation, aka spellcasting.  First
you must have the physical pathways carved into your body.  We call this
process 'poping your cherry'.  This involves finding an invoker of the
element you want to pursue and having her stream large amounts of elemental
energy into your body.  If all goes well the pathways will be opened
just enough for you to be able to draw very, very small amounts of energy
into your body.  If it goes badly you will either go insane or die.
One you have a pathway, you must find someone to teach you the actual
schools of invocation, which will probably be the same person that broke
your pathways open to begin with.  They have an interest in you learning
as quickly as possible, since they have formed a bond with you by poping
your cherry.  This bond may eventually be a boon to you both, but at the
moment it's a major vulnerability for them.
There are no 'spells', but invoking the various schools can get effects
similar to a spell.  A simple example would be invoking Sun energy on
something to set in on fire.  The actual act of invocation is time-consuming.
You must first draw mu from the surrounding environment, which may or may
not be availible depending on your location, time of day, and what other
invocation has happened their recently.  Once you've drawn it, you can
absorb it into your limbs in order to keep it with you for later use (namely
someplace where there isn't any mu availible), or you can stream it immediately
to invoke a spell, which may be quick or slow depending on what you want to
do and your abillity.  Naturally, backfires or unwanted side-effects are
frequent.  A semi-trained mage is a danger to himself and anyone unlucky enough
to be around him as he tries to invoke.

A good mage, however, is very powerful.  You'll probably hate this, but a
really powerful mage can easily roast a whole town full of people with
a minimum of effort, given some time to prepare and plenty of mu nearby.

> Actually, I wasn't making any assumptions about your game, I was going over 
> what I dislike about existing MUDs -- since they're the only MUDs I can 
> actually play. Think about it.

You'll be much better off assuming that anyone posting to this list is
working on a project that is nothing like any current mud.

> > Heh.  Twink usually means a whiner or someone just incompetent on a
> > hack'n'slasher.  Guess the definiton of the term represents the
> > views of the playerbase.
> 
> It's pretty damn hard to be an *incompetent* roleplayer. I mean, you can be 
> a BAD roleplayer, sure, but incompetent? God, you'd have to suck.

Well, true.  Still, one might wonder where the line between 'incompetent
player' and 'incompetent character' is drawn.  Reminds me of some games
of GURPS where there was this one fellow who was constantly fucking things
up for the party, no matter what kind of character he played.  It wasn't
because he was role-playing an incompetent character, it was just that he
was doing stupid things all the time.  My friend finally made a berserker
for the express reason of having a good excuse for attacking him the next
time the dumb-ass cast a flame arrow into his back.

> > Are you saying that you think that this is a better method?
> > Having tried both in a variety of different skill areas including
> > unarmed combat, programming, archery, and plenty of others I could
> > probably rattle off if anyone cared, I *much* prefer actual intruction as
> > opposed to being pounded into the ground faster than I can even blink.
> 
> You *should* receive both. First, he knocks the shit out of you, then he 
> tells you what you did wrong. After five or six times through this, you 
> learn not to do that. Then he does something different. In a fighting 
> situation, it has to be instinct. Which means listening to some guy say 
> 'here is how you do it' just plain isn't enough -- you need to practice, 
> and not against some guy who's going to be good and let you get your 
> bearings, but against someone who not only WILL hurt you if you get it 
> wrong, but DOES. You learn a lot faster that way. A teacher will tell you 
> what you did wrong, and THAT is the main benefit. The real combat opponent 
> will just happily pound your face in, and let you continue trying to work 
> it out on your own.

I still think he probably was not fighting at his full abililty.  Otherwise
you probably would have been unconscious within 30 seconds in the first several
lessons, which I don't think is beneficial.  Point taken, however.

Back to the original issue, though: on my mud, going out and wrestling
with a bear won't teach you much more than just wrestling with the
corner bully if you don't know anything about wrestling, and it will likely
get you killed.  Simply picking the hardest possible opponent you can
fight and jumping them is not the best way to learn.  By the same token,
it's easier to learn to pick locks by starting with one of moderate
difficult instead of the most complex lock ever made.  Or climbing: you
start on a short bluff, then move up to sheer rock-faces.  Or swimming:
you start by paddling around in the shallows of a lake, then move to
a slow-moving river, then go into the ocean, and finally you could try
to swim across the shark-infested waters of Tsunami Bay.

> > Dunno if you caught the earlier thread with me griping about this, as
> > well as my many examples about how to avoid this sort of thing.
> 
> Oh, I did. And I agree wholeheartedly. When the player dies, it has to be 
> FAIR. He has to have a chance to avoid it.

See my talk about fairness, above.  I'm interested in getting rid of
instantaneous occurances with no warning, which I suppose makes it more
'fair'.  People will still die or otherwise be hurt due to 'unfair'
situations.  I just dislike turning to look at the clock and then looking
back to see that my character is dead.  I'd rather turn to look at the
clock, look back to see that my character is in trouble, panic for a while
and try to escape, then possibly die anyways.  The important thing is
that you never feel boxed in, like there are just no options, nothing for
you to even try.  At the very least I want to be able to bite off the
ear of that guy who's trying to crack my spine, even if that doesn't
save my life.