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

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Thu, 24 Sep 1998 Michael.Willey at abnamro.com wrote:
>      ____________________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
> ---------------------------------
> [SNIP]
> 
> 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?

Is that a design problem, the magic numbers are too low?  (Assume
that the magic numbers have been correctly coded as user configurable
constants.)  No, someone just needs to raise the numbers, tune the code.
The older and popular codebases suck because they can't be tuned, they are
badly designed.

At least you got me to stop talking about MAXINT.

Natural log is a nice curve.  I like to modulate it with a sine wave, so
you get some bumps in the curve.  You get local plateaus, where
the rate of advancement slows down, raising a skill becomes more
difficult, and then increases rather quickly for a while.

Even with the "zero, one, and many" rule of thumb, you still have to
design the numbers with some individual care.  How many hit points does
the weakest monster get?  If a fly has 10 hit points, but a pea shooter
only does 1 point of damage, the fly takes 10 hits to kill.  It isn't the
maximum values (or lack thereof) that are important, but the granularity
of the "usable" range of values.  There may not be a monster weaker than a
fly in the game, but you are allowed to conceive of such a thing, a
monster that is a mere fraction of a fly's fortitude.  But with a 1d1 pea
shooter there is no room below, no weapon can be worse and still be
effective.  This is why you start butting up against the too-low magic
numbers, because the small values aren't, er, small enough.  The max limit
is still within a "usable" range, it is a high-traffic number.

Anyway, I lose interest in a game if the only goal is to max out my
skills.  Shouldn't there be fun things to do after I have I a buff
character?

- Brandon
ashes at zennet.com