[MUD-Dev] Balancing a Mud

[Mik Clarke]

Martin C Sweitzer wrote:

> When you have a mud you can have the best world, ideas, classes, skills,
> EQ, etc etc  but unless it is balanced the mud is garbage.
>
> Now of course, (well let us hope to god) that you have designed your mud
> to allow easy customization and tweaking of the variables you have.  How
> strong a class of sword is or how strong a specific artifact is.  Spell
> effects.  Tables are nice for this.
>
> If you don't have this then I would argue that your mud is not going to
> scale and going to just bust at the seams when you begin to add lots of
> things to it.  (ie add that new Spanky Class and watch your carefully
> balanced mud collapse under the refactoring you get to do now).
>
> So how do you balance a mud?

  Well, I don't have an answer to you whole question, but I'll tell you
something I've implemented on CthulhuMud.  We're Diku based and that has fields
where the builders can speicfy hit dice, damage dice, mana dice and armor
class.  I've replaced the whole lot with a 'nature' field, where you can
specify things like String, Dumb, Armoured, Tough etc...  These combine with
the Mobs level to produce stats, hits, AC etc... that are comperable with
player of the same
level.  It means that if the power of the players change, I just have to tweek
a few formulas in create_mob and the monsters are back on a par with the
players.

Mik



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