[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface

[Adam Wiggins]

[Caliban:]
> On Wednesday, September 24, 1997 4:48 AM, Maddy [SMTP:maddy at fysh.org] 
> > What do you class as "no real reason".  If you
> > were playing an orc and I were playing a dwarf, it would make perfect 
> sense
> > for me to kill you.  You're a vile scum sucking orc, a spawn of evil
> > etc..etc..
> 
> It also makes perfect sense for anyone in your game world to randomly catch 
> fatal diseases, so why not implement that?

Why, thank you.  We have.  Actually, most of them aren't necessarily fatal,
but many of them can be.

> > There could be a religion that requires its members to kill
> > anyone with blond hair.
> 
> There could be all sorts of things. What exactly does this religion add to 
> the game? Ummm... pissed off players and roving groups of antisocial dorks. 
> Maybe we should do something different.

You seem to be opposed to killing in general.  It doesn't bother me, but
I do think it's been done to death.  Why not get rid of it altogether?
I'm not being sarcastic at all, BTW.  I'd love to see a mud with a totally
different focus.  (Needs to still have game mechanics of some sort, though,
so talkers aren't quite what I mean.)  Go for something totally abstract -
AIs in a Technocore, an alien race along the lines of Niven's puppetmasters
who are completely afraid of personal danger and risk and instead spend
all their time manipulating other races into doing things for them, or
even a simple capitalism-based mud where everyone is just out to make the
most money.

> > Well the problem is, is that all your balance problems seem to be based 
> upon
> > XP/Level based systems and they don't really make sense if you don't have
> > either of them.  I'm sure that I'll have loads of balance problems to 
> start
> > with, which is why I'm going to take most of my system from an already
> > stable PnP system.
> 
> I'm basing my examples on level/XP based systems because it's relatively 
> certain that we all understand how those work. I could always base it on 
> the attribute/skill based system White Wolf uses, but that's very MUSHlike 
> and people would complain. I could also base it on Amber diceless, but 

I disagree.  I think you'll find that the vast majority of the active members
with servers in development have some sort of skill-based system, or at the
very least nothing at all related to levels, classes, or experience.  What
we're talking about is a system which uses a lot of specialized resources to
get a more detailed and exact representation of your character, instead of
the gross overgeneralization that is 'level'.  Methinks you'd have more luck
just talking about a general skill/attribute system along the lines of
existing muds (ie Legend or YaMUD) or along the lines of PnP games (ie WW
or Runequest).

> people would still complain. I could base it on Man, Myth, and Magic which 
> had a dozen nationalities and a hundred odd skills and sixty some classes, 
> but I don't think anyone here has any experience with it. What *should* I 

I'm not fond of classes, but I do know what they are.  I also know what
skills are, of course.  If you'd like to talk about that go right ahead -
I bet you'll have better luck than talking about D&D.

> target toward? 'Level' is a generic term we all understand. Race, class, 

Yes, but it's TOO generic.  You like to say 'high-level character' by which
you mean an experienced character that has been playing the mud for some
time and has aquired some sort of 'power'.  This doesn't give me much
info though - a master fencer, a skilled wrestler, a really good chef, a
great woodsman, and an experienced herbalist can all be considered 'high level',
yet they are all completely different characters.  The chef, the woodsman,
and the herbalist may have no more defence against physical attacks than
any other newbie, although they are probably better able to steer clear of
any such encounters.

> experience, spell, we all understand what these mean. There IS an 
> equivalent in your system, regardless of how you classify it. Ars Magica 
> doesn't really *need* a canned spellbook; you can do anything you like, 
> magic is infinitely mutable, and really a 'spell' ought to be a foreign 
> concept under this system. But there ARE established 'standard' magic uses, 
> because people demanded them -- thus, they are spells just like any other 
> game might have.

Right.  Here's the deal: we, as humans, like to classify things.  It makes the
world much easier to deal with.  Our games are no different.  Early games
had mechanics for specifically dividing up character types: you were forced
to pick a class at the begining, which effectively limited what you could
and couldn't do.  Lots of artifical mechanics got pasted over the top later
on, which made things more and more kludgey.  Now we seek better, finer
classifications - our 300-something skills are each a classification, but
obviously allow for much more flexibility and, IMO, more interesting characters.
We're also trying to make use of this system to get rid of artificial
limitations without making it possible to get supercharacters.  Naturally this
is much more difficult in a less discrete system, but we've chosen to tackle
it.  Even when talking about it, however, we tend to make generalizations -
see my four character examples above.  When I say 'woodsman' it could mean a
lot of different things.  Not only that, but saying woodsman doesn't
necessarily mean that she doesn't have any combat skills, any magic, any
theological knowledge, any smithing skills, etc etc.  It is just a
generalization which tells her main field of interest.  The way our skill tree
works further enhances these classifications, since it's much easier to learn
a bunch of related skills than a bunch of completely unrelated ones.

Thus, saying 'high level character' is too general for what we're talking
about.  Saying 'a descent swordsman' or 'a great chef' is a little more
useful.  Also, making assumptions about how the 'experience' system (meaning,
of course, character development) can cause problems.  For instance when
you said that a low-level character fighting a high-level NPC somehow
causes the low-level character to have unnatural advancement.  I doubt this
is as effective as you seem to think it is on any well-balanced skill or
attribute based system.

> > > I have that problem on occasion myself. I mean, really, you can emote
> > > about anything, and I see people who pose such ludicrous things you 
> feel
> > > like demanding to see their character sheets. Building a house of 
> cards,
> > > no problem. Balancing a dagger on the top? Hold on a second here,
> > > Houdini! Make a roll for that one...
> >
> > A good reason to get rid of emotes?
> 
> Baby and bathwater.

Agreed on that.  All you can do is decide what's more important for the
kind of game you have, and decide.

> > Well think about the situation.  You're walking along and you see this 
> guy
> > walking towards you with a sword.  At that stage I'd give the guy a wide
> > berth as will all the NPCs walking about too.  What if you were walking
> > along and a mobile/NPC killed you?  There isn't really that much 
> difference,
> > you're still dead.
> 
> There are vastly different power levels in the game.

What is 'the game', pray tell?  One of the main themes on this list has
been reducing the power gap.  Naturally there are still differences - a good
herbalist is just going to have a lot better chance of being able to concoct
a good headache cure than is someone that doesn't know what they are doing.

> I may be walking 
> around with some decent armor and a hefty weapon, but some other guy will 
> have no armor or weaponry at all, and someone else may be wearing all but 
> impregnable armor and some vastly damaging weapon that ignores all physical 
> armor worn by the opponent.

Ick.  I think the Monty Haul thing has been taken as far as it can go by
current muds.  I'm not saying that's bad - it's fun, certainly - but I, and
I think others, want to go back the other way.  Thus I doubt the above is
highly applicable example.  Again I'm not trying to overgeneralize, and I know
that there are less vocal members on the list that may be doing more
'conventional' muds, but I know for myself and many of the active members this
is true.

> If I can take twelve sword hits on average...

...then you're one TOUGH dude.  Holy cow.

> that weapon does as much damage as *twenty* sword hits on the average, it's 
> a one shot.

Yes, generally a yard of steel through your insides tends to require little
extra help in order to put you into a state closer to death than life.

> Even without any weaponry, if he's significantly stronger and 
> faster and more skilled than I am, he's going to win. Period.

If he's a better fighter than you, he'll win.  Is that a problem?

> And I *do* have the same problem with mobs, incidentally.

If there's no difference between NPCs and PCs as far as the system is
concerned, than everything we're discussing applies equally to both, so I take
the above statement as implict.