[MUD-Dev] Re: regulating player-created objects

[Dan Shiovitz]

On Tue, 5 May 1998, Nathan F Yospe wrote:
[..]
> Templates for objects tie to construction skills, use resources that fit an
> acceptable specification for components. Builders can create new templates,
> but there is no reasonable way to allow, say, a smith to invent, without an
> existing template, a helicopter. (An inventer is a person with a chance for
> sudden addition of a new template while exercizing related forms... there's
> going to be a lot of templates that are not actually in the game or learned
> from any non player source; inventers are people with high enough scores in
> intuition, creativity, and specified knowledge to suddenly gain possession,
> and if they are smart, a patent (OK, that one isn't game supported) of that

Heh. Cool. Have you thought about handling spells the same way? It
occurs to me that a really nice way to encourage traditional wizard
styles would be to say that there's virtually no existing spells for
the higher levels, so wizards would have to spend research time in the
labs/libraries/pentagrams if they want to advance past a certain
level. The problem is that it's not very interesting for characters to
sit around typing "research. research. research." over and over
again. 

So what if we were to assume that's what mages are doing when they're
not logged on? It seems to me that it would encourage a very nice
dynamic if a character got more powerful for every day they didn't 
log on (until a certain point; clearly you need to test out your
theories every so often [and it's no good encouraging people to start
up chars and then not play them for a month {ISTR it was good to be 
old in original diku, so people would make a character and then come
back to them later when they were the right age}]. For newbies, you
probably get a testable insight often enough that there's no real
benefit for staying logged out more than you usually would. But for
high-level wizards, it might be they do best to only log on every few
days or even once a week). Result? High level wizards are rare and
mysterious and spend most of their time locked in their towers (and
they need to *defend* those towers so nobody comes in bothering
them!), but when they do come out, they're powerful. 

This also encourages people to have a couple characters of different
professions, which to my mind is a Good Thing.

(On a vaguely related note, what are the people who are planning on
non-disappearing characters (ie, when you quit, your characters stays
in the game world) doing about telling the player what went on since
they were last there? I guess if you support the database-replay thing
you could just print out exactly what happened, but that might be a
lot of screen scroll if they were gone for a long time. Maybe some way
to summarize the info? "While you were gone, nothing much
happened. You continued your research into Air Magic." or "While you
were gone, a bunch of angry orcs invaded your tower and burned it to
the ground. You barely escaped with your life, went to a tavern to
drown your sorrows, and the next thing you knew you were in bed with a
tavern wench and a nasty case of VD.")

> Nathan F. Yospe - Aimed High, Crashed Hard, In the Hanger, Back Flying Soon
> yospe#hawaii.edu nyospe#premier.mhpcc.af.mil http://www2.hawaii.edu/~yospe/
--
(Dan Shiovitz) (dbs at cs.wisc.edu) (look, I have a new e-mail address)
(http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbs) (and a new web page also)
(the content, of course, is the same)



--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.