[MUD-Dev] Re: UBE/high: Re: FW: UBE/high: Re: W IRED: Kilers

[Travis Casey]

On 21 August 1998, Brandon J. Rickman wrote:

> I have been avoiding this topic [for months] because there seems to be
> little prospect of progress for what is now the pro-tailor/anti-fighter
> camp.  Well, time to throw my hat in the ring (as opposed to throwing down
> my glove, a decidedly aggressive gesture).  There are too many wanna-be
> computer science majors raised on "traditional" role-playing games trying
> to develop muds, leading to an overwhelming emphasis on aggression and
> combat as _fundamental_ elements for muds.

By "traditional" RPGs, do you mean pencil-and-paper ones, or computer
ones?  I don't have much experience with computer RPGs, but I'd say
that muds overall tend to be much more focused on combat than most
modern paper RPGs.

Of course, most people who play paper RPGs never play anything but
xD&D, but that's another story...

> When games are geared so that
> it is easy and profitable to be a fighter there should be no surprise when
> that particular activity is dominant.  Even though there is no need to
> defend the "fun of being a fighter", fighter activity is constantly being
> defended in this thread with no explicit justification.  Solutions that
> make the game less fun [for fighters] or make the game less realistic [for
> fighters] are rejected out of hand.

This is something that I said for quite a while on the rec.games.mud
groups before I left them:

  People tend to do whatever they are rewarded for doing.

Thus, if your mud is set up to reward players for killing things,
they'll kill things.  If they're rewarded for killing other players,
they'll do that.  This is really just basic psychology: if people are
rewarded for a behavior, they become more likely to repeat it.  If
they are punished for it, they become less likely to repeat it.

Problems come in from two things:

 - Different people consider different things to be rewards and
   punishments.  If you try to punish someone with something they
   consider to be a reward, or vice-versa, you're not going to get
   what you expect.

 - Some rewards and punishments are not under your control.  If player
   A only does PK because of the extra experience points his/her
   character gets, taking that bonus away will likely stop player A
   from doing PK.  However, if player B PKs because he/she likes
   the feeling of power he/she gets from it, it's pretty much
   impossible for you to take that away without simply disallowing PK.

The moral, to the extent that there is one, is that you should
decide up front what you want players to do in your mud, then design
the mud to encourage doing that.  If there are things you don't want
done, then design the mud to discourage doing those things.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
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