[MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

[John Bertoglio]

> Christopher Allen
> Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 4:03 PM
>  
> Travis S. Casey wrote:
> > To me, it seems ridiculous -- no real squirrel or rat is likely to
> > inflict significant harm on a normal, healthy, awake & aware adult
> > human even *without* armor and weapons.
> 
> This is true for game purposes, but I've had an incident with a 
> coon who ate a
> hole through our roof into my closet, and another incident with 
> pesky opossums
> that were ripping holes in PVC pipes under my house to get to 
> water. Both were
> quite frightening, in some ways the opossum's even more so as I 
> didn't think
> they would fight back so hard. Neither incident did I get harmed, 
> but in both I
> had to fight quite hard to keep from being hurt, and both 
> creatures have earned
> my respect as fighters.

Possums also have the advantage of being undead creatures (as far as 
I can tell). A large one was sneaking into our laundry room through 
an undiscovered portal. I finally caught it out in the open and shot 
it 3 times at about 15 feet with 22 cal hollow points. 
All hit. The damn thing just looked
up a me and trundled off. It never came back but I know believe those
critters have no vital organs. The smartest thing the possum lobby
ever did was hiring Disney to feature them in cartoons. They are not
cute and at close range quite scary. And they stink. 

> 
> So maybe this says that for beginning fighters that incidents with small
> creatures can be quite different when put into context of an 
> environment. A coon
> in my closet and opossums under my floor were both constrained 
> places, so enough
> realistic rats in a tight or constrained sewer would be an 
> interesting challenge
> for a new player.

Rats the size of full grown possums would scare anyone. 
The key is in how the fiction is developed. If you present the players
with challenges which are described as being trivial and they are killed
they feel stupid. Scale the description of the rats to match the 
perception of the Newbie. The Newbie will understand later when the 
rats he perceived as the size of dogs are, in fact, fully squashable 
by a small human foot. A sliding scale of perception would also 
provide an ample in game reasons for lowering experience granted to high
level PCs by killing vermin.

John A. Bertoglio 
  _____  

PulsePoll.com <http://www.pulsepoll.com/>  
| 503.781.3563
| jb at pulsepoll.com




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