[MUD-Dev] Re: Marion's Tailor Problem

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 11:05 PM 8/25/98 -0400, I personally witnessed Travis Casey jumping up
to say:
>On 18 August 1998, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
>
>> Roleplaying is impossible to code,
>
>Roleplaying is impossible to code -- however, it is possible to
>encourage or discourage roleplaying through both world background and
>what you code.

And through initial introduction! If your players are introduced to the
world through things that whack you in the face with THIS IS A GAME, then
you're not going to have the same mindset as if you go through something
like a lifepath generator (R. Talsorian's "CyberPunk 2020" has been a great
starting point for my efforts in this). The key is to give the player a
perception that his character is not a playing piece, but a REAL person
with real goals, skills, and background. MUSH style gaming often does this
by requiring you to write a detailed background for approval by one of the
staff. I find that this works really well, but is very labor-intensive for
the staff.

>As I've said before, my
>definition of roleplaying is playing a character as if it were a real
>being existing in a real world, instead of simply a playing piece in a
>game.

I'd agree here, but...

>Thus, from my point of view, increasing the "realism" of the game
>automatically encourages roleplaying.  

I have to take exception here. There are a lot of things that are realistic
(hunger, thirst, bathrooms, disease, crime, procreation) but are NOT FUN
and therefore distract from the true effort of playing the game. The player
ends up *fighting* the system instead of working with it, and eventually
has to resort to the sort of activities (scripting, triggers, etc.) that
encourage viewing the character as property rather than as a separate
living creature. 

>> and *ongoing*
>> problem solving is very difficult to code. 
>
>Possibly.  No one's done it yet (that I've seen, at least), but that
>doesn't mean it can't be done.  

Precisely why I called it "very difficult". Arguably, computer chess is an
ongoing problem solving game... of course, if I wanted to play chess, it
completely eludes me why I would choose to play it online against a
computer. If I want to play online, I probably want a human opponent, and
if I want to play a computer, I probably want to do it locally. 


I just had a weird thought. Imagine the computer playing multiple opponents
at random. Consider: five people are wandering around the chess tower. The
computer, in the background, makes a move on a chessboard, and then pops up
the board in front of a random player. The player makes a move. The board
disappears. If the computer has been checkmated, the person who made the
last move gets some sort of reward. If the computer mates the player, the
last player to make a move gets some sort of punishment. Likewise, you can
have rewards and punishments for taking and losing pieces during the game. 

That's a truly twisted idea. I should play with that some more, but I was
never very good at chess, so I wouldn't enjoy this sort of puzzle at all.
That, in my mind, makes me the wrong person to implement something like
this. So anyone who likes this concept, feel free to steal the idea if you
want.

>Combat, to me, is a subclass of problem solving -- killing something
>is simply a way of solving some problems.

>Limiting the scope of what you're doing always
>makes it easier -- the trick is in knowing what's broad enough to stay
>interesting for a good length of time while still being small enough
>to be easy to implement.

Yeah, that's the hard part, isn't it? We're all basically shooting in the
dark on this, when push comes to shove. :)

---
=+[ caliban at darklock.com ]=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=[ http://www.darklock.com/ ]+=
"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more 
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a 
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by 
the preservation of the old institution, and merely lukewarm defenders in 
those who would gain by the new one."              -- Niccolo Machiavelli
=+=+[ FREE KEVIN * http://www.kevinmitnick.com/ * IT COULD BE YOU ]+=+=+=