[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 12 Feb 1999 11:38:45 -0800 
Caliban Tiresias Darklock<caliban at darklock.com> wrote:

> I mean, aren't we all basically agreed that level as a measure of
> player quality is pretty worthless? If not, why? What does having
> level X really say about the player behind the character? What do we
> expect it to say? What do we wish it would say?

Ouch.

I don't know.  I largely view the concept of a "level" as a catch-all
metric of a character that is so simplistic in the extreme that it
mandates simplistic thinking about the problems of advancement, game
design, and character and player development (which are different
things).  Lose "level", at least in your design and thinking process,
and you can start to create interesting systems and problems.  

You can always patch and band-aide it back on over the top later as a
derived stat if you want to give your players a familiar crutch.

> It occurs to me that on many MUDs, people use the level as a sort of
> double-edged sword. Wouldn't it be more efficient to use two swords?
> Has anyone thought about having two levels -- player and character?
> Anyone done this? I know several folks here were talking about
> separating the player from the character on a basic level,
> i.e. login to a player and thence to a character.

I split stats into three:

  body -- all the physical stuff

  character -- all the mental, talent, skill bits (minus physical
capability which remains with the body)

  account -- karma, sin, high order probability fields, other similar
long term/subtle effects.

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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