[MUD-Dev] Gender and Mud Development (back on topic, some)

[Jon A. Lambert]

On 9 Jun 99,, Katrina McClelan wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> 
> Just a note.  I alluded to an all female game being different, and it is.

Oh, my mistake. I thought you meant mixed, but female-dominated.
Obviously I don't have experience in an all female rpg game, but would
have loved to be a fly on the wall. :)

> But that isn't to say that an all-female group doesn't enjoy hunting down
> monsters and exploring dungeons.  It is just handled quite differently.
> Instead of dwarven warriors, and invokers and brute strength in terms of
> numbers and game mechanics that you tend to find in the makeup of a male
> group, you'll find a lot of gnome illusionists, elven enchanters, bards,
> an priests and such in a female group.  Generally the all female group
> will delight in solving puzzles, and creatively handling monsters, where
> as the male group will tend to have a makeup of at least some characters
> that will tend towards a berserker mentality.

This sounds like my mostly male, but mixed group.  When just the men play
things are a bit more brutal and conversation is, well, cruder.  We have 
one member who always plays beserker/barbarian types, but the funny thing 
is so does his wife.  Anyway, I'm usually the gnome illusionist.   

Aside: I've just purchased a scanner and have been scanning and 
translating all my old campaign material.  Anyways I DLed an OCR program 
called FineReader which works great on old typewritten pages.  Does 
anyone know of a program that can recognize handwriting well?  I've got 
loads of notes written in very legible block printing, but I haven't 
been able to train FineReader successfully.  

>  Bringing it back to a mud
> level, when is the last time you saw a mud let you use illusions, traps,
> and tactical combat for handling monsters instead of brute force?  And by
> tactical, I mean making use of the terrain, as well as skills. 

Aye.  This tactical inner-room movement is something I want to do.
Not just for combat mind you.  When a king holds a feast and dance, for 
instance, both seating arrangments are important and allowing 
participants to cluster into groups within rooms for conversation and 
games.

This looks great (and easy?) on graphical games like UO and Furcadia, but 
I'm trying to stick to a useable text representation.

> In one
> game we used a charmed enemy, and an illusion (both spells availible to
> new characters) to lure a pair of ogres into a castle courtyard, and then
> droped the portcullis, and picked them off with arrows and spells from our
> perches atop the towers.  Very creative and tactical, but not something
> that you can accomplish with most mud engines (mine included). The room
> layout typical of most muds does not lend to this for starters (noting
> that the discussions in this circle present ways to improve this vastly),
> but even with a reasonable representation of terrain, handling such things
> is not a simple problem for a computer.  I'd love to hear ideas on it from
> the gallery.

Nod.  On another thread a few days ago, I posited a difficult scenario 
that leads me to also believe that the room concept may be less than 
suitable for this type of play.

> Another note is that a lot of muds, you go out and beat on monsters for
> the sake of beating on them.  Gamers I've played with are all for hunting
> down the ogres that have been terrorizing the locals, but not for hunting
> down a pair of ogres that are minding their own business.  I've been in
> groups where we've actually befriended some of the "random" encounters and
> built allies out of them. 

I think, It's the built-in goal system.  Even a lot of table-top FRPGs 
suffer from this.  Let the player make up their own goals.  

> I think it's somewhat of a misconception that
> women are turned off by the element of violence in an RPG.  It's the
> gratuitous(sp) violence that does it.  However, again, building a
> user-influenced story engine into a mud that is both versitile, and
> reasonable to configure for "story tellers" is not a simple problem.  
> Again ideas are welcome :)

I have another generalization. <gasp>  From my own observations, it would 
seem that women more enjoy observing such violent contests rather than 
direct participation.  One MUD I used to play, that had a fairly good 
gender balance, had an arena with a observation gallery.  The female 
players were more often found in the gallery watching, betting, cheering 
on and talking about a PK event than participating within the arena.
   

--
--*     Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD Email:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com             *--
--*     Mud Server Developer's Page <http://pw1.netcom.com/~jlsysinc>      *--
--* To fight the empire is to be infected by its derangement. Whosoever    *--
--* defeats part of the empire becomes the empire; it proliferates like a  *--
--* a virus... thereby it becomes its enemies." -- P.K. Dick               *--


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev