[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft

[Michael.Willey at abnamro.com]

     ____________________Reply Separator____________________
     Subject:  [MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft
     Author:   mud-dev at kanga.nu ("Brandon J. Rickman"
     <ashes at pc4.zennet.com>)
     Date:          9/24/98 7:52 PM

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[SNIP]
>Some thought should go into how numbers are important
>to the game, not to the CPU.  Player stats ranging into
>the thousands would be irritating, stats in the millions
>incomprehensible.  A player walking around with 2^31 coins
>in her pocket is still a bug, even if the code is bulletproof.

That's dependent on your game system.  I'm currently working
on a complete rewrite of our game system, and one of my
prime tenets is to avoid the haggard problem of players
"maxxing out" all of their vital statistics by making all
of the numbers open-ended.  A little playing with the math
gives me a couple of options for letting the numbers roll
up into insane values but keeping their effects on a leash.

The two systems I'm considering both use natural logarithms
to reduce insane numbers into reasonable values - one
option allows the numbers on a player's "sheet" to escalate
rapidly, but takes the LN of that number to get an
effective value (I'm using a multiple dice vs. target #
system ala Shadowrun, Vampire, et al.  The effective value
would become the number of chances to hit the target).
The other option is to use the effective values as
statistics, and the difficulty of advancement is based
on e^(current stat value).  (Of course, if players can't
see actual numbers on their "sheet", this doesn't matter.)

The "zero, one, and many" axiom applies just as well to
game design as to programming concerns.  How many game
design problems are the result of "magic numbers" that
are far too easy to butt up against?