[MUD-Dev] Permadeath or Not?

[Travis Casey]

Tuesday, December 12, 2000, 3:14:02 AM, Madrona Tree
<madronatree at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> This is one reason that I favor the small power range for
>> characters.  It means that the investment in all dungeons is
>> roughly available to all player characters.  This, as opposed to
>> EverQuest, where dungeons are rated for various levels of player
>> characters.  Until you make the 20s, don't go near Castle
>> Mistmoore.  Verant does a pretty good job, however, of ramping the
>> difficulty of areas and dungeons so that the farther in you go, the
>> more difficult the areas become.

> I think some of their design philosophies and their goals are in
> conflict with each other -- this being one major case in point.

> Brad stated elsewhere in this thread that they want people to "go
> through" a dungeon.  Problem being that you can't, really... because
> when the mobs at the beginning are blue/white to you, the mobs in
> the middle are Red... and conversely, when the mobs at the end are
> the "right" level for you to fight, the mobs at the beginning are so
> low that they don't attack you.  So what happens is people find a
> spot that is right for them, and sit there and wait for mobs to
> spawn.

You're making assumptions about the design of "dungeons" here -- that
they must be designed so that there is an extremely large disparity in
power between the "easy" and "hard" parts, and that the "easy" parts
have to come first.  While "classical" FRP dungeons were designed that
way, there's no reason why dungeons have to.  (And dungeons in paper
RPGs generally aren't, unless they're explicitly meant to be a single
place for campaign play -- in which case the easier parts get cleared,
so you don't have to fight those same monsters again and again.)

The idea I got from Brad's statement wasn't that they wanted to do
old-style dungeons, but rather that the designers expected that the
players would go looking for things to fight, rather than camping out
waiting for things to fight.  This may well happen even without
old-style dungeons -- many people feel that "a bird in the hand is
worth two in the bush" and would rather camp out for a known "goodie"
than go looking for what might be out there.

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


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