[MUD-Dev] The Relationship between pkers and monster AI?

[Travis Casey]

On Tuesday, September 21, 1999, Greg Miller wrote:
> Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:

>> Ever try to play D&D by yourself?

> I don't see the connection. Yes, muds and D&D involve social interaction
> normally--but since when does social interaction require role-playing?

I think you're going backwards -- Caliban is interested in
role-playing, and while it's *possible* to role-play without social
interaction, it's much more interesting if you have others to interact
with.

>>
>> Speaking from my own experience, roleplaying is a *cooperative* exercise,
>> and if the rest of the players don't *cooperate* then roleplaying is not
>> fun. When you step into a room on a MUD and say "What ho, my good men! How
>> go things?" and they respond "What level are you?", that ruins the fun.

> For me, some of the fun would be ruined when you started off with "what
> ho"... I prefer to be able to socialize directly with the other players.
> That seems to be extremely common.

What's preventing you?  The fact that some players want to talk
in-character doesn't stop you from talking out-of-character to other
players -- or even to those players, if they're agreeable to it.  If
you want *all* socialization to be direct, why bother having
"characters" at all?

>> ruins the fun. When roleplaying is worthless in the game, then it is not
>> fun. And when nobody else is roleplaying, then roleplaying is worthless;
>> all it does is make you an outcast and a weirdo.

> And why does this happen? Because most people don't roleplay. I believe
> that, in turn, stems from the fact that they simply don't find it fun.
> I can't speak for why that is for them, but for me it's because playing
> a character means I don't make friends with the other players--to do so
> would be acting in an OOC manner.

In my own experience, most mud players have never *tried* roleplaying.
Thus, they can't know whether it would be fun for them or not.

Also, there is no requirement that states, "If you are roleplaying,
you can never act out of character."  You can make friends with other
players while roleplaying.  You can even kibbitz about the game, make
jokes, talk about real-world stuff, etc.

Now, there do seem to be some mud roleplayers who believe that you're
only roleplaying if 100% of what you do is roleplaying -- but I'm not
one of them, and I believe that those who do think so are silly.
Tabletop gamers have managed to roleplay just fine since the mid-'70's
without having OOC channels or such, and without hand signals or
anything like that to distinguish "in-character" from
"out-of-character" speech.  At least ninety percent of the time, it's
obvious whether someone's speaking in or out of character.  When it's
not, you can always ask.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)





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