[MUD-Dev] Re: Levels versus Skills

[Vladimir Prelovac]

[Quzah]

>Anyway, the whole point was that combat was very leathal, very final,
>damn fast, and loads of fun. I hope to bring this aspect to MERC,
>because combat takes far too long. There is no way I should be hacking
>some one with a sword for 50 hits. One good hit is all it takes.


Then you will have trouble with clerics being obsolete, having no time to
cast healing spells; most of offensive skills useless (you have no time to
react); player killing depending on who first typed "kill Bubba"; and chance
of you getting killed greatly depending on how much you lag.  And can it be
fun, lasting only a second or two? Maybe you have in mind other ways of
gathering exp? :)
If you put armors that would absorb damage, you would return to having long
combats. I did this, and players like it (most of players were angry with
diku-mud based armor that lowers the probabilty of you getting hit not the
actual damage done to you). I also did split a player body to four regions
(head, body, arms, legs) and did an aproximation of this with NPC-s. Head
damage goes x2, body armor is multiplied with 1.5 before substracted from
damage. Simple and fast model can in many situatutions prove to be a better
one then a detailed and slow one.

Vladimir