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

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 08:46 PM 9/25/98 -0700, I personally witnessed Andy Cink jumping up to say:
>
>That is, you start a typical mud with
>25-35 hp or thereabouts. At level 10, how many do you have? Probably
>80-100? And at 20th? 200? 250? How does a level 1 have 25hp when a
>level 20 has 250hp? You made an extremely valid point, a body cannot
>take more than a certain amount of damage before dying.

Some time ago in my AD&D career, I did away with the "standard" notion of
hit points. I start everyone out with their constitution in hit points,
which is where they start being physically *damaged*. Everything else is
nothing serious or life-threatening. So when you have 400 hit points and
someone does thirty points of damage with their mighty sword of gruesome
death, you haven't been mightily gashed across the belly as some people
would imagine -- you've just been hit, and hit hard, pushed closer to being
really physically hurt. You certainly don't have your guts spilling out all
over the floor while you continue to fight. ("'Grat is not nice.")

I've used hit points for several years not as a representation of the
amount of damage you can physically take, but as a representation of your
ability to avoid SERIOUS damage. As you gain experience, you get better at
this. So yeah, a gunshot to the head, that's pretty obviously near-certain
death (house rule: "no character will ever be killed without being offered
some possibility of survival, no matter how slim" -- and an additional rule
I use, "no character will ever be placed in a position to lose his or her
life without reasonable evidence of comparable personal culpability,"
pretty much invalidates any NPC doing this to a character unless the player
REALLY screws up). But a gunshot from a distance, considering this is
heroic fiction, gives you some split second of time to avoid being really
physically hurt -- the bullet passes through a shoulder, perhaps, doing
lots of damage but mainly because your arm hurts and distracts you. Hit
points represent a certain amount of subconscious skill and reflex, of
endurance and training and just being able to work through the pain. 

>While this is certainly possible, if you're going to debate
>gunshots.. I'd say even a skilled fighter is going to have
>to be very VERY good to dodge a bullet.

Something that people tend to neglect in the AD&D milieu is that having a
character class at ALL places you in an entirely different league than 99%
of the population. A level 1 fighter is in the top 1% before even
*planning* his first adventure, and a level 10 fighter is much, much higher
-- according to the provided guidelines, level 9 or 10 is when you have
literally worked your way into the nobility, and your deeds and abilities
are the stuff of legends. The AD&D rules are intended to place every player
character in a completely different class (pardon the pun) from the rest of
the world; these are not just folks in the crowd, a player character is
almost by definition a hero and should be treated with a certain amount of
special privilege because of that. 
>Levels can be a useful abstraction, but there's more out there of

>interest than just levels :) I'm not going to argue about it, I
>was only trying to show the other side of the coin.

As another aside (and it may be obvious to people by this point that my
AD&D campaign literally rewrites the entire rulebook), I have a "classless"
character available who does not gain levels. Instead, he piles up
proficiency slots at an ungodly rate, allowing him to do many things much
better than a standard character with a class -- but placing a great many
abilities forever out of his reach. (In addition, the classless character
is restricted in the relative level of his skills -- they may not exceed
each other by more than a certain amount, so when he has few skills he may
get very good at them, but with many skills he is forced to leave his
higher-level skills alone until the lower-level skills catch up. The jack
of all trades is thus by *definition* a master of none.) My point in
mentioning this is to indicate that it is indeed possible for a class/level
system to coexist side by side with a classless skill-based system, without
utterly destroying game balance.

>When I took stock
>code and started removing level from it, only then did I realize
>how pervasively that level factors into diku type muds.

You do NOT want to know how much of the AD&D rules had to be rewritten to
accommodate the classless character. Suffice to say it was second only to
the amount of rewriting necessary to do away with separate to-hit/damage
rolls and replace them with a single roll.

>I'm all for intelligent discussion, but let's not get into
>a holy war here. Codebase vs codebase is bad enough, let's
>not go into levels vs leveless, it was never my intent. I
>only wanted to expand the topics at hand.

There are a lot of things that can be done with levels *and* with levelless
systems. They're also not as contradictory as you might think. :)



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Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>   | "I'm not sorry or 
Darklock Communications <http://www.darklock.com/> |  ashamed of who I 
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