[MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 05:47 PM 4/28/98 -0700, I personally witnessed Jay Sax jumping up to say:
>
>Ha! thanks john, I love this one about junior monsters and so forth.
>It inspires me to share one of my ideas which I hope I, or some of
>the other fruitful-brainers among us can develop further at some
>point.
>
>I call this one "the mobless mud" (aka "the monsterless mud").

Hmmm. I was looking at this and thinking about it and I had this other
thought. Rather than have *all* the players come into a completely new
world with nothing done, where things are really boring at first, why not
have a period of time during which the players are given supreme cosmic
powers they can use to build huge constructs and design areas? Basically,
provide them with a completely different interface where they can dictate
-- in an almost featureless world -- what places look like and where things
fit together and what's in them. The thought here is that a group of
players would come in, probably a relatively small one, and build this big
world. After they've built this big world, they go out and tell people
'come look what I built', and advertise the place for you. Maybe you take
the first hundred or so players and give them powers like this, but they
have to pass a series of relatively difficult tests in order to actually
get to where they can do anything; something like the 'tutorial' a lot of
MUDs have, which always infuriates me because you start up a character and
you know what you're doing and how to do it and they still force you to go
through this annoying little series of rooms to pick up all your little
starting pieces of equipment. Hopefully a quiz like that would weed out the
easily bored, while the people who are excited by the concept sit there and
say 'Ooohh!' and keep going. Once you have your 'elite' class in place,
they're expected to take some form of important position in the world,
while the other players play by different rules. 

This has some definitely sticky social aspects that are not altogether
pleasant. This is why I think the 'elite' characters should play by
different rules; you certainly don't expect one of the Greek gods to be
complaining about his hemorrhoids, so the founding characters should be
likewise different from the rest of the player base. However, the Greek
gods also played by some rather sticky rules in their own world, and
wouldn't very well be able to do something like create a powerful monster
with no weakness or just blindly kill some person they didn't like. The
founders of the world would be expected to operate indirectly in several
respects, using various strange rules. Some of the suggested rules would be
like, Eldar the Everstrong creates the mighty Sword of Dragon Slaying,
which will decapitate any dragon with one swing! So he offers it to Bob the
Wimpy, only to receive the message "You cannot give an item of this power
directly to a player." So he goes, fine, I'll leave it somewhere and tell
Bob to come and get it! Then he goes to drop the mighty sword in a room,
and receives the message "This item is far too powerful to be left
unguarded." So he has to construct a big powerful monster to guard it,
which he does, and then drops the monster in the room. Cunningly, he then
tells the monster to leave, but the monster refuses -- he's on guard duty!
So Eldar tries to kill the monster, but is told that he cannot directly
assist in the destruction of his own guardians. And so on. And so forth. 

This would probably be an interesting (and harrowing) experiment. A
corollary might be, imagine if you let the first hundred people to log on
to your Diku have level 55, or gave the first hundred people to log onto
your TinyMUSH a wizbit. Basically, the people who join the MUD first get to
define the MUD's shape and direction. 


--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.