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

[John Bertoglio]

-----Original Message-----
From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Tuesday, April 28, 1998 6:32 PM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: PK and my "Mobless MUD" idea


>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.

I would suggest a compromise. Build a world with general terrain
features...one which create a large number of natural enclaves separated by
terrain which is difficult to cross with out mounting a serious expedition.
Then turn people loose.

>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.

This should be done during the character creation process. Suggest that
people who are new to these kind of worlds might want to check the box
marked "Beginner". Then, something happens like the "newbie falls through
the trap door idea" presented in an earlier posting (I am sorry I forget
who).

>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.

Another method would be to have a daily lottery....Winner and his party,
guild or whatever could teleport to anywhere in the world with all the
tools and supplies they could carry. (not something which will be common
for non-wiz characters) Then they get there, they would be able to carve
out their own corner of the world. When a trade route is finally
established, players might be shocked to find a high level of building and
development, especially since after a probation period new players can
petition the founders of a new area for membership.

>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 kind of construct can be a lot of fun. I'm not a big fan of the
super-eq concept, but it would be a cool way to handle it if you used it.

>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.
>
In our construct, everyone is a builder...at least in terms of their own
corner of the world. Since everything is menu driven, we trade some of the
flexibilty of allowing people to write code for the advantages of rapid
construction from native materials.

John Bertoglio

>--
>MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.
>



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MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.