[MUD-Dev] Re: CGDC, a summary

[Chris Gray]

[Holly Sommer:]
:The mud school which ships with Merc derivitives is great for what it 
:does - namely, that listed above. If you don't want any remaining 
:vestages of Midgaard, that's fine - use whatever you want for a central 
:city, if that floats your boat - but to make negative comments about a 
:learning center seems... myopic, IMO. Why would newbies hate a mud 
:school? It lets them collect their wits, and prepare for the rest of the 
:game. I can't see anything wrong with that, as a concept, nor with the 
:functionality of the "original" mud school itself.

Well, seeing as I have almost no experience on MUDs outside my own (very
peculiar and unhealthy, I know), I actually remember the first (almost only)
time I went through one. I think it was a DIKU variant. It was very useful
for me, since it helped me to remember the peculiarities of that particular
system (which commands did what, etc.), and it helped me get a starting
set of equipment. Re-inforcing the commands through repetition works. Also,
not knowing where else to get any equipment (if you go in completely blind,
you don't know *anything* about the world), it was very nice to have at least
some stuff. I suspect it would have been very unfun to have to wander around
without any equipment, and be completely vulnerable to players and NPC's.
That can be OK if you are looking for it, but I'm into exploring - I like
to see what is out there, and getting killed early would not be fun for me.

The setup I have in my scenario seems to work fairly well - the main part of
the town is non-combat, and you get a big warning when you go into the
combat area ("Proving Grounds"). I gather this is what a lot of systems do,
and I think it makes sense - let the raw newbies (like me!) find their legs
before subjecting them to the big bad world. In a combat MUD, the school is
a lot like that - somewhere where they can fight, but it isn't terribly
dangerous, and you don't have to be mapping at the same time as you are
learning the ropes.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA


--
MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.