[MUD-Dev] Justifying twinking

[Christopher Allen]

John Bertoglio wrote:
> 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.

I concur with the undead evaluation, both from my personal "under the floors"
incident and from having run over several by accident late at night and having
them get up and waddle off. The fact that they are masters of "playing dead"
logically makes them masters of "waking from the dead" ;-)

In addition, they have HUGE mouths, much bigger then you'd think when they are
closed. My memory, which exaggerates the situation probably, has that opossums
mouth being 1/3 of the body length, the back of the jaw far behind the eyes. And
the mouth is full of what seems like a hundred nasty sharp little needle-like
teeth.

> Rats the size of full grown possums would scare anyone.

True, plus from my experience with ship rats, they really are no longer very
afraid of people.

>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.

I don't think it to "fix" the problem that just a matter of relative scale, or
perception (thought that might be useful). Instead, it is to give it context.

For instance, in Alvatia (a game we are working on) one of the central premises
is that a plague is going on, and in this type of situation having the general
populace killing rats makes a lot of sense. In this context, killing rats has
other kinds of danger associated with it where bravery, not skill, is required.
The fact that rats are not that hard to kill, and why that the government pays
good bounty for them is understandable in this context.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/649-4030  f510/649-4034 ..




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