[MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]

[Vadim Tkachenko]

Travis S. Casey wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 8 Apr 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
> > Travis Casey<efindel at polaris.net> wrote:
> >
[skipped]

> > Congratulations!  First kid?
> 
> Yep... we practiced parenting on our two cats first.  We're expecting
> our new arrival at the end of August, and have no plans to find out
> the baby's sex until it's born.

Get some sleep upfront, 'cause after that you may forget about this for
decades :-)

[skipped]

> Some paper RPers prefer to develop characters in play rather than
> generating them at the start.  The idea is that the player may not
> know enough about the gameworld when the game starts to be able to
> generate exactly the kind of character he/she would want.  Thus,
> some aspects of character generation are delayed.
> 
> A more concrete example of this is to give the players the ability
> to "hold back" a few attribute/skill/whatever points and assign them
> when they want to.

Bad implementation may allow characters to change their stats right
before they know they will need ones - say, I'm about to run for a quest
which requires an enormous physical strength, so I just roll all my
stats into strength... I believe, all those attempts should have a cost
to them so it would be difficult to abuse that without suffering.

> Of course, some muds already use a variation on this sort of system --
> allowing players to choose such things as guilds after their characters
> have entered play.

And also to be banned from the guild?

Next flamebite, what is a definition of a guild? Why it is there? What
for? (I ask not because I don't know but because I want to analyze,
decompose and generalize that).

One of the best implementations (in my opinion) is Ultima Underworld I &
II (didn't play other Ultimas, maybe they're the same) - you start
[almost] flat, and then you decide for yourself who and what you want to
be.

>        |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
>  ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
>       |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'  Keeper of the rec.games.design FAQ:
>      '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)      http://www.io.com/~efindel/design.html

--
Still alive and smile stays on,
Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>
--
UNIX _is_ user friendly, he's just very picky about who his friends are