[MUD-Dev] defeating twinking through game mechanics

[Travis S. Casey]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, S. Patrick Gallaty wrote:

> One of the design failures IMO in everquest is that it follows the old
> 'weaponcode' model of weapon damage.  I.e. one hits for the 'max
> damage' of the weapon rather than any sort of measure of player skill.  
> This means the weapon is tantamount.  Nothing matters except for the
> weapon stats, in the end.  With armor the same way, you have created a
> game where heavy twinking is inevitable.

> I'll throw out an alternative system here, and let you guys kick it
> around.  We did something like this on EOTL, but I think it could have
> been better.  The best system I have seen was on the shattered worlds
> mudlib, all praise Dredd!
> 
> The basic idea is to have weapon archetypes, and then bonuses.  The
> bonuses reflect magical power, fine weapons, artifacts.  The
> limitation to twinking here is that a poor player won't be able to
> exploit the benefits of more powerful weapons such that each weapon
> would have several factors (speed, damage, weight, accuracy) and
> modifiers.
> 
> Your basic rusty newbie weapon might be (-speed,--damage,-accuracy),
> and that newbie would benefit from a weapon with no minuses.  however
> a (+speed, +damage) weapon would not benefit them since at their
> _skill_ level they cannot exploit the bonuses.

I'm not sure how this is meant to be implemented -- do you mean that skill
level should act as a limit on how good a weapon's ratings can effectively
be?  Or that skill level should act as a limit on how much better than a
normal weapon of its type a weapon can be?  Or something else?

On SWmud, we did something similar to this -- melee weapons and
lightsabers had damage values, but their effective damage values were
limited by the level of the character using them (level as a mercenary for
normal melee weapons, as a jedi for lightsabers).  Thus, while giving a
newbie a super-weapon would help him/her, there was a limit to how much it
could help.
 
Several paper RPGs use a system where damage depends not just on the
weapon used, but also on the skill of the wielder -- e.g., in Torg, damage
done by a hit equals the number of points you rolled above what you needed
to hit plus the weapon's base damage.  Again, this means that while a more
powerful weapon can help, it's still less powerful in the hands of a less
skilled character.

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