[MUD-Dev] The grass is always greener in the other field

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 26 Nov 1999 15:51:16 -0500 
Jon A Lambert <jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>>  From: pluto151t at aol.com (Pluto151t)
>> 
>> People who hoard items don't affect you at all. Maybe backup
>> times take longer, but if they had not had 5th grade programmers
>> when they created the game, this would NOT have been an issue.
>> 
>> When you spend $50-60 on the game, and $10 a month to PLAY the
>> game, you should beable to hoard items if that is what you
>> ENJOY...  I hoarded items when I played. I enjoyed going to a
>> dungeon, fighting dragons, hoarding loot. I didn't pk, I didn't
>> steal from people, I didn't loot corpses.. I enjoyed collecting
>> items. As much as I hate to admit it, Raph Koster was MUCH better
>> for UO than the new guy.

> This is interesting because it is how I often attempted to play
> the questy-style HnS games.  

Quite.  The problem with most attempted solutions for the hoarder is
that they are out-of-game (eg rent) and are therefore not
susceptible to -in-game amnipulation.  UOL is rather unusual this
regard in placing them in-game (houses) which raises the possibility
(guarantee in UOL's case) of other's being able to discover/raid the
stash.  Its rather sad that UOL's limited world size and population
density simply prevent hiding of objects in obscure locations.

Storage locations would seem to cover:

  -- production (for created/dug/tertiary_effect locations)

  -- identification (initially, and in attempting to locate other's)

  -- manipulation (access, constraints, methods, limits, transport,
     special features)

  -- destruction (which can be part oc manipulation/access in the
     case of breaking the lock, or simple destruction in the case of
     an open case mine in the area of a buried object)

Its something that's hardly been looked at that I can see, and
varely rarely to ever with any imagination.  'Tis a shame.  There
are more than enough interesting storage objects in SF&F to make the
field rich for copying.

> Is anybody running or planning on an adventure game that allows
> characters all sorts of options in hiding their loot?  Like
> vaults, treasure chests, buried, pirate ships, etc.

Magic sacks that are really teleport objects to remote storage
locations, mag-lev cannons that place objects into recoverable low
orbits, invisibility, shrinkage (consider the case of the wizard
with the magic pebbles related earlier), distraction (no-one really
*wants* to see it), misdirection (looks like something else but
isn't) -- the field is constrained only by how much you reveal to
the subject player.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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