[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[John Buehler]

> Koster, Raph
> Sent: Friday, August 25, 2000 9:22 PM

> Of course, this is all a silly rhetorical question. There's a ton of muds
> out there already which don't have character advancement. :)

Okay, so why did you ask?  Are you attempting to bring up a contrasting
viewpoint that says that we could construct these games such that they truly
are like chess?  Everyone gets a standard character and pursues their goals by
employing the standard skills of their 'piece'.

As in chess, the standard characters might be differentiated.  Warrior,
priest, magician, artisan, and so on.

My goal of character advancement is to permit players to pick the type of
specialized character that they want by doing things.  I'm not interested in
the vast power differential implied by many character advancement systems.  I
want a newbie to be Joe Average, capable of doing most things, simply not very
well.  He is a novice at everything - warrior, priest, mage, etc.  From there,
he specializes into whatever skills he wants, with appropriate checks and
balances (subtle and many) to ensure that particularly dangerous combinations
of skills do not come into being.  The classic is 'master of all'.

I like player-defined specialization because it offers the opportunity to make
the game less gameable.  If characters truly don't alter their efficiency in
skills (including items, spells, etc), then the permutations of interactions
between characters would seem to be fairly well fixed.  Optimal strategies
would seem to come to the fore fairly quickly.  I don't have experience with
existing 'non-advancement' systems.  Perhaps someone who has played one
extensively can chime in with a description of how things actually play out.

I also like player-defined specialization because it is much like controlling
what color and style of clothing the player wears.  Or, in Ultima Online, what
items are found in my home.  It gives the player a sense of ownership of the
character.  That sense of ownership can be developed in many ways.

Again, why ask the question?

JB





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