[MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, Schubert, Damion wrote:
> (a) If a player makes a friend the first day, he will log in the second 
> day. If a player logs in the second day and his friend is there, he is 
> very likely to stick around.
> (b) _Witnessing_ the death of a dragon has got to be more impressive
> than _killing_ giant rats with a newbie sword.  Even if you're just
> the drummer boy.
> (c) Tutorials suck.  They aren't effective.  Most people want to skip
> them.  They are usually easy to break.  They are condenscending.  A
> real person is a better teacher than a tutorial (most of the time).
> 
> QED: Pairing up a newbie with a high level character is a good thing.
> The trick is to make the high level character want to have the newbie
> around.

Which seems to suggest implementing gameplay to make the newbie useful,
even if as nothing more than dead weight.

I can think of one (accidental) instance of this.  The first mud I played
had a cap of 150k exp per kill for a top-level player.  For each extra
person in the group, this cap increased by 100k.  However, experience was
split by level, so two people in the group usually meant *less* experience
(there weren't too many creatures worth more than 200k or so).

I often took to dragging sub-10th level characters with me to the Abyss,
since I could solo most everything there, and I wanted the cap raised.
Needless to say, about one out of two didn't make it back alive, but the
ones that did had a hell of a ride and a boatload of experience to show for it.
(They were thrilled that they were getting 20k or so from each kill, while
I was raking in 200k+...)

In one instance, there was a very powerful NPC that was worth about 700k.
After figuring out how to use a few tricks (potions, mostly) to solo him,
I dragged six newbies along with me each time to reap the full amount of
experience.  And lest you think they were just cannon fodder, it was well
worth my while to try to keep them alive - after all, for each newbie
that died, I effectively lost 100k of experience.


One could envison less numbers-oriented gameplay mechanisms which would
achieve a similar effect.  For example: in order to defeat the evil dragon,
one must first steal his orb of invulnerability while he sleeps.  However,
the dragon instantly wakens whenever characters of 10th level or higher
enters the area...

Adam





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