[MUD-Dev] Re: Suggested theme, was Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[Dan Shiovitz]

On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, Richard Woolcock wrote:
> Dan Shiovitz wrote:
> > 
[..]
> > get more skilled. But what if we assume a very small city (or town, or
> > village, or whatever) in the center of a massively hostile world? I'm
> > imagining a base in the middle of frozen wolf-infested tundra, but
> > there are other lots of other variants: SwampWorld, OuterSpaceWorld
> > (don't forget your space suit!), etc. The similarity between all these
> 
> Ever read Deathgate by Weis and Hickman?  The Patryn trapped within the
> labyrith would fit into this sort of theme very well.

I haven't read them, but I've heard about them. Yeah, this is a pretty
similar thing, I think. 

[..]
> > breached and everyone will die. Eventually, the hope is that the brave
> > inhabitants will manage to clear enough area around the city to make
> > it relatively safe. Of course, the bulging population will make
> > resources scarcer and scarcer, and eventually it'll be time to set off
> > on a dangerous caravan trip across the demon plains in the hopes of
> > making a new colony someplace else. If you survive the trip, that is.
> 
> Why not just constantly expand the city walls?

Doesn't work geometrically. The larger the city gets, the more
resources you need, but you can only safely control resources within a
constant distance of the city walls (so you can run back to
shelter). The population's going to increase faster than the zone of
control does. You can expand the city to a certain point (and that's
probably what's going to happen in the beginning of the game) but
eventually you need to find a new place in the center of some untapped
resources. 

> > The idea here, of course, is to attempt to unify the players by
> > creating a constant threat that they can't overcome individually.
> 
> The trouble is it only takes a small number of players to disrupt the
> game for everyone else, unless you're very careful.  I do think that the
> idea of pitting the players against the mud is a very good one though.

Yeah, that's true, and especially at the beginning, deaths are going
to be high. I think eventually you get into a _The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress_ type situation: everyone is very polite to each other, and
troublemakers get cast into the void at the first sign of trouble, no
exceptions. 

> > Furthermore, everyone is needed: the brave high level characters can't
[..]
> > And not just warriors, neither. There's an obvious need for healers,
> > tailors, blacksmiths, and so on, because someone's got to repair the
> > swords and heal the wounded.
> 
> The trick here would be to make all of the roles fun.  Perhaps everyone
> is 'fairly okay' at combat, but also has an additional skill to add to
> the city?

Yeah, that's a good point. One idea is to let players do things like
farming and blacksmithing during their logged-out time and run 'em as
NPCs. There'd be the possibility of getting killed during this time,
though, so it might not be worth doing. Hmm. 

> > WolfWorld isn't for everyone: I'm not sure exactly how much I'd like
> > it myself. It seems to me like it requires a few changes from the
> > standard diku model (but not stuff we haven't discussed already):
> 
> It would require even less changes to my diku...I'd just have to add the
> outside threat.  The trouble is it wouldn't really fit in with my theme
> (WoD), unless I used Sabbat vs Camarilla (warring sects), perhaps both
> based in different parts of the world - but that wouldn't really be the
> same thing as you are talking about.

Yeah. I think this'd work better if it was the only theme on the mud.. 
WolfWorld plus vampires struggling for control is probably too much.
 
> > relatively small distinctions between high and low level characters,
> 
> This is something I am trying to do, and I think is a very good idea.  It
> is important to let players have ways to advance their characters, but this
> sort of system could make characters expand 'outwards' rather than 'upwards',
> gaining new abilities without really becoming 'better' overall than anyone 
> else.  My method of doing this is to allow players to spend a number
> of points on abilities at creation time, allowing them to 'max out'
> in areas they feel are of great importance (so yes, you can start
> off knowing that nobody is any better at melee than you, for example).

Hmm, interesting (vaguely reminiscent of the Amber character gen system). 
The idea being that people who buy skills at character creation are
always going to be better at them than people who buy them during the game? 

[..]
> > dangerous (oh, and outposts provide a convenient thing to do with
> > playerkillers: exile the buggers))
> 
> Even more interesting is what happens when a poor colony decides to wage
> war on a richer colony, literally pitting armies of players against each
> other.

Yeah. That's the thing about penal colonies, of course: they almost
always eventually get tired of being a penal colony and sever
relations with the parent city.

[..]
> > Oh, and one more while I'm at it. Anyone thought about doing arc games
> > that it's possible to win? F'instance, the point of the game is to
> > defeat the Dread Lord Bob. When he's dead, or has taken control of the
> 
> Ack no!  All the players would say "well, thats it, I've won...time to
> find a new game".  How many linear games have you gone back to after
> completing them?  I know some people play Doom/etc over and over, but its
> just not the same the second time around...

Doesn't have to be the same the second time around. Once Bob is dead,
you retire all the characters, write epic songs about the heroes and
villains involved, and start a new game. Ideally, in the same timeline
but a couple hundred years later, so the old characters are
half-remembered legends.

[..]
> One of the things I am trying to work out how to code at the moment is
> mud-run plots.  The idea is that the mud will run a number of plots and
> sub-plots, which can be tied in to various NPC's, players, objects, etc.
> In order to do this I'll probably require players to select a number of
> 'story hook' options at creation time, to help the mud out.  Your example
> above, with Dread Lord Bob, might be catered for like:
> 
> Sub-plot:
>    Goal: Kill the bad-guy.
>    Appeals to: good guys, people who hate King Bubba (Bob's King, and part
>       of the plot which this sub-plot runs under), people who own chickens 
>       (Bob likes to sacrifice them).
>    Difficulty: medium.
>    Location: Create a small castle for him, near location 850x/900y.
>    Main characters: Dread Lord Bob.
>    Sub characters: the Black Knights, the prince/ss in distress, the
>       strange old hermit.
>    Objects: the map to Bob's castle, some hacked-up corpses.
> 
> Then you sort of...erm...mix them all up and...well...can anyone give me
> a hand here? ;)  I think I've bitten off more than I can chew this time...

These are kinda tricky to get right, yeah. It's popular on current
dikus to have a tremendously simplified version of this: the
questmaster tells you either "<object> has been stolen by <monster>!
retrieve it!" or "<monster> is a wanted criminal! kill it!" and you
either have to get the object back or kill the monster. Of course, the
object is chosenly randomly from one of six quest objects ("what, you
lost the Sceptre of Foobar *again*?") and the monster is chosen
randomly from the whole game ("The Angel of Light and Purity is a
wanted criminal! kill it!"), so you quickly get into ridiculous
situations. 

Even your system has the potential to fall into that sort of thing,
although it's not going to be nearly as bad. I can see stuff like
"What? The Dread Lord X has appeared and is threatening the citizenry?
I better go find the mysterious hermit who will give me the map to his
castle!". On the other hand, there are lots of random variations you
could put into this. You can randomize the names, obviously (although
it gets silly fast when names get re-used). You can also alter the
goals of the Dread Lord (looting, pillaging, trying to take over a
castle, trying to find a lost artifact ..), and who tells you about
him, and even sometimes have the hermit be a traitor who leads you
into a trap. It might be even better to take the plot apart, and weave
whole plots together out of random sub-plots (the Antagonist who looks
for Treasure, the Guide, the Betrayal, the Natural Disaster)... Hmm. This
is starting to sound like Joseph Campbell or the 36 basic plots. Which
is probably the right level to take this at. Anything more specific
and I think it'll be too obvious the plots are random.

Here's a longish article from a friend of mine about the 36 plots in IF:
(url split onto two lines)

http://www-db.informatik.uni-hannover.de/dbis/lehre/sopra95/lit/ 
info/authorship-guide
(it lists them midway through, as well as discussing how to use them)

Here's a shorter one by Loren Miller about the 36 plots in RPGs:
http://www.io.com/~jlockett/RPG/HEGGA/Stuff/frp-plots.html

And here's one about heroic archetypes, more in the Campbell line:
http://bragg.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~iborchar/Arcane/heroes.html
(this might be a bit too abstract. I'm not sure.)

Even with all this, the larger quests are probably going to have to be
hand-made, but there's no reason you can't use these as sub-quests or
side quests.

> KaVir.
--
Dan Shiovitz || dbs at cs.wisc.edu || http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbs 
"...Incensed by some crack he had made about modern enlightened
thought, modern enlightened thought being practically a personal buddy
of hers, Florence gave him the swift heave-ho and--much against my
will, but she seemed to wish it--became betrothed to me." - PGW, J.a.t.F.S.