[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc - Combat

[James Wilson]

On Tue, 05 Jan 1999, Nathan F Yospe wrote:

[JCL's original quote snipped]

>On Tue, 5 Jan 1999, James Wilson wrote:

>:I'm curious - has anyone implemented a system allowing variable levels of 
>:combat detail ('brief-mode' vs 'verbose-mode', for instance)? 



>The client has two levels of information screening: server detail level,
>and display detail level. The first relates to bandwidth, but the second
>is for exactly this sort of thing. Certain information will be described
>in 7 modes: "minimal", "sparse", "simplified", "standard", "interested",
>"detailed", and "exacting". These modes are autoscaled by attention, and
>tend to focus rather highly on combat when it is first person; a fight a
>character is endangered by goes up to exacting instantly... but this can
>be manually overridden. I'm not sure what changes I'm going to make with
>the manual override... I don't care for it much... but this is one thing
>that makes me consider leaving it.

I should have been more clear... I know that many muds allow different levels
of detail in DISPLAYING combat (several people have already piped up saying
that their muds do this) but what I was interested in was JCL's original
problem, namely that some players would like to have a great deal of detailed
control over combat. This is a problem not only in that providing that detailed,
interesting combat system is naturally difficult, but also in that many players
aren't interested in the details of combat and WOULD like to type 'kill
Bob' and be done with it.

James