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

[Travis S. Casey]

On Mon, 13 Apr 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
> Travis Casey<efindel at polaris.net> wrote:
> 
> > Well, I think we all know what a traditional mud guild is --
> > basically a D&D-style class that characters may join after starting
> > the game, and has the option of leaving.
> 
> > Now, what *should* a guild be... that's another question.  :-)
> 
> There is a more fundamental question that I raised the last time this 
> area came up:
> 
>   What problem in the game-universe is the guild an attempted solution 
> for?

Does it have to be a solution to a problem?  Or, rather, does it have to
be a solution to any problem other than the fact that humans like to
congregate together, and tend to do so with those like them?
 
> Turning this around: 
> 
>   If there were no guilds, but everything else in the game was the
> same, would the players form "guilds" even without any server or
> hardcoded support?  If so, why?  What survival threat in the
> game-world would the players be attempting to mitigate or prevent via
> guilds?

Not everything in the game has to revolve around the players -- if the
NPCs in your world would logically form themselves into groups, then those
groups should exist, whether or not the players would want to join them.

> Once you have the answer to that question you can approach designing
> your guilds in a way that is both acutally useful in your gameworld
> and doesn't have logical inconsistencies with the rest of the game
> world.

I agree... I'm just pointing out that guilds don't have to be a solution
to any problem that the players have in order to exist, and that they
don't necessarily have to "solve a problem" in the sense of helping
survival -- the "problems" they solve may be purely social/emotional in
nature.

(One could ask, for example, why people join groups that do things that
decrease their chances of survival -- like sky-diving or bungee-jumping
clubs.  Meeting an emotional need may be important enough to a person that
they're willing to slightly *decrease* their survival chances.)

--
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