[MUD-Dev] Commercial value of RP

[Ling]

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Koster, Raph wrote:
> On Thursday, January 08, 1998 5:27 PM, Travis Casey wrote: 

> A note here is that skill systems are notoriously difficult to 
> balance, and thus end up with "ideal combos"--the better the skill 
> system is, the more of them it has, until there are enough that you 
> can't call any single one the "ideal." A phenomenon worth mentioning 
> there is the "accepted wisdom" trap many players fall into with 
> skill-based systems, whereby everyone thinks there is actually only 
> one ideal combo, when in fact there are many. It can be damnably 
> difficult to get variety when the game culture suggests there isn't 
> any!

A previous thought I had to combat the occurance of a 'best combo' was to
implement some sort of regular or irregular seasons phenomenon to keep
players on their toes.  A simple example would be the quality of ore
coming out of a certain mine will vary so the quality of armoury produced
using resources from that mine will also vary.  For magic, a certain kind
of magic might be stronger in region A than in region B at certain times
of the magical year.  Season everywhere and liberally and hopefully
something similar to a biorhythm will result. 

  |    Kilo Lima Lima Oscar dash Niner Four, over and out.        ---o
_O_O_  Electronic and Electrical Division, Loughborough Corp.    <+=+=+>