[MUD-Dev] The Best Guy on the Mud Thing

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam Wiggins [mailto:adam at angel.com]
> Sent: Thursday, September 16, 1999 12:31 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] The Best Guy on the Mud Thing 
> 
> Now, this raises the question - why would Bubba the mage, 
> being the nice
> kinda guy he is, not want to loan his spellbook to Boffo the 
> mage, so that
> they could both have all the spells at their disposal?  This led me
> to the idea that JC's scenario reminded me of: making the 
> spell's power
> be relative to the number of times it has been cast recently. 
[snip]
> At this point it would be in his or her best interest to keep 
> the spell
> entirely to themselves, in order that it might retain its 
> maximum amount of
> power.  As soon as he or she shares it, the power of the spell quickly
> becomes 'diluted' - perhaps to the point that the spell 
> becomes completely
> worthless and everyone discards it, until a while later when it has
> 'recharged' and the whole process starts all over again...

So Asheron's Call has this spell language, whereby you combine gestures to
make spells. The combos are actually predesigned, it's not literally a spell
language. And they made it so that the more spells are cast, the weaker they
get.

The end result during beta testing appears to be that all the spells suck,
because all the combos were disseminated and now everyone has them. People
value the standing of delivering a complete spell FAQ more than they value
the ability to actually cast the spell.

A link with discussion of this from a beta tester's perspective:

http://www.acvault.com/features/i_mages_edit.shtml

-Raph


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