[MUD-Dev] There can be.. only ONE!

[Richard Woolcock]

Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> 
> On 15 Apr 98 at 19:28, Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
> > Richard Woolcock wrote:
> > >
> > > Just imagine the chaos you could cause if each player/team had their own
> > > 'version' of the map ;)  You could also have things like deathtrap rooms,
> > > anti-gravity rooms (fall upwards), pits (fall downwards), teleportation
> > > rooms, and so on...depends how obscure you want the world to be.
> >
> > But the question is, do you really want the world do be SO obscure? What
> > is a point? Once again, IMHO it should be predictable enough to motivate
> > the exploration - well, probably the things you're talking about just
> > shouldn't be accessible for newbies, because it may just repel them (you
> > get tired quickly, if you don't feel you're in control or at least have
> > a clue of what's going on).
> >
> 
> In general, exploration has tended to be highly over-valued as a game
> design direction on this list.  In Matt's proposed mud, I would think
> the desire for exploration would merely be a side-effect of trying to
> gain a small tactical advantage and be of relatively short duration
> and usefulness.

Okay suppose the world was made up of blocks of rooms - say 8x8?  You
could then have the mud work like one of those old childrens puzzles,
with the world made up of 5x5 blocks, with one block missing (you
could have the gap as a void, killing anyone careless enough to step 
into it), and all the other blocks slowly shifting around within the 5x5 
grid (maybe until the mud solved the puzzle?  Or perhaps the players 
could shift the rooms themselves?).  In addition to that, the rooms 
within each block might have walls which appear or vanish every so often, 
meaning that you could - over time - learn *roughly* what the world was 
like...dunno if it would work in practice, but it would definately be a 
new approach.

KaVir.