[MUD-Dev] Re: Re[2]:[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc (long)

[Adam Wiggins]

On 18 Dec 1998, Michael Willey wrote:
> On 12/18/98 2:28 PM, adam at angel.com wrote:
> [SNIP]
> >> Buffy's next goal is probably to raise
> >> her mana maximum to 200 points, so she can
> >> change her insta-death script to
> >>
> >>   repeat 2 nuke boffo
> >>
> >> and be done with it.
> >
> >Actually I think your chill touch trick would *still* 
> >be better regardless of how much mana she got.
> 
> I'd have to disagree - killing Boffo instantly and 
> regenerating mana later is by far preferable to 
> conserving mana in combat.  The two nuke trick will 
> kill Boffo immediately, before he even has a chance to 
> respond.

True - if two nukes would kill Boffo *for sure*, and Buffy
started at full, and she had no one else to deal with afterwords,
I'd agree.  I was thinking more that two nukes would *usually*
kill Boffo, but might leave him with (say) 1 hitpoint, if he
happened to regen a point in between the two castings or whatever.
At this point Buffy would probably be screwed, as she'd be
totally drained.

Now that I think of it, a much better formula for mana regen would
be exponential at the bottom end.  That is to say, if you're at
-120 (or whatever your bottom limit is), you regen absolutely
*abyssmally*.  The idea being that players would try to never
get into that position, unless they were on a suicide mission.
Thus magical combat has a lot more to do with "how much of my
resources dare I commit to the current fight?" rather than
the old kill-em-as-quickly-as-possible routine which is
usually the best route for any combat on any mud.

> That's the real point at which your system's balance 
> breaks down - when one combatant can kill another 
> without needing to regenerate mana, the kill becomes 
> instant.

*nod*, this is no different from any existing mud.
Insta-kill techniques abound on any but the absolute
best-balanced of muds, despite the best efforts
of its creators.

> >Now with just one or two of these spells at his 
> >disposal, Boffo could make mincemeat of Buffy 
> >(presuming she was blindly trusting the 4*chill touch 
> >+ nuke script you mentioned above).
> 
> Sounds like meta-magic - something akin to mana judo, 
> altering the effects of opponents' spells to use 
> against them.

Ya - since the person who was originally posting the
comment about "no lag" combat was JC, and his system
is very much like this, that's why I was following this
line of thought.  I've never implemented something like
this, myself.

Search the archives for his posts about his magic/combat
system.

> With or without your mana resource 
> management setup, that would make a very interesting 
> tactical subgame.  Combining the two subgames is even 
> better.  I'll have to blatantly steal this idea, if 
> you don't mind.

Go for it, since it wasn't mine to begin with.  I just
boiled it down to the basics.

And of course, you can do a whole lot more than just
"mana" and "health" - there's all sorts of fun things
you can do with different sorts of magical energy,
some of which cancel each other out, some of which have
multiplicative effects on one another, thus causing
certain spells to behave totally differently depending
on when, where, and against whom they are used.

> >The point being that we've removed that annoying 
> >character lag (which players hate), made clients less 
> >important than wits, preserved the flow and pacing of 
> >combat, and in the meantime maybe made the combat
> >gameplay a little bit more fun and engaging for the 
> >players.
> 
> Now the trick becomes making a similar system to deal 
> with physical combat...  Substitute fatigue for mana, 
> have a list of combat maneuvers with advantages and 
> disadvantages for each situation, and go from there?

Actually, I have a lot more experience in this area.
The engine I wrote in college had a lot of stuff like this.

Now, to be fair, we did have "character delay" to a certain
extent.  We never kept you from entering commands; certain
ones (status commands, such as the equivilient of "score",
or system things such as setting your screen height) always
went through no matter what your condition.
Regardless, you could always interrupt your current action
to try to take on another, presuming you weren't tied down
or paralyzed or something.  However this accumulated something
we called "penalty."  Penalty caused every action you took
to have a greater chance of failing.  So, for example, if
you are defending attacks faster than you're really
capable of (say you're being attacked by two people at
once and parrying with a single weapon) you may be able
to keep it up for a little while, but as your penalty
accumulates your chance to slip up grows higher and higher.
A very nice side effect of this is that it causes combat
to happen in flurries: the combatants close, exchange a
half-dozen blows in as many seconds, and then back off
in order to clear out their penalty points.

Search for posts by Orion Henry or myself on the topic
of "combat", "penalty", or "tasks" if you'd like an
exhaustive description of all of this.

> Another problem:  How do you protect players from the 
> ravages of real lag?  Wouldn't that leave their 
> characters as drooling idiots, standing around being 
> punching bags for their opponents?

We've gone over this one again and again, and I stand by
my original feeling on the matter: you can't.  A better
link makes it easier to play the game, and when two
otherwise equally matched players meet up, I'll bet on the
one with the better link.

Now, you can *assist* the players protect themselves from
lag.  I've discussed this in great detail in the past;
basically it breaks down to allowing the player to set
various 'default' actions on their character, so that
they aren't totally useless if you momentarily can't
control them.  For example, standing up when you get
knocked down, retrieving your weapon if you get disarmed,
making attacks when there is an obvious opening, choosing
a reasonable defence when attacked.  But this will never
be a substitute for quick thinking and quick action to
respond to the subtlies of a given situation.

Adam W.