[MUD-Dev] New Skill System

[John W Pierce]

 > Phil O'Donnell
 > Sent: Monday, December 25, 2000 2:08 PM
 >
 > Basically, it uses the classless, raceless system of giving points
 > to abilities as you complete certain actions, and using these
 > points to determine how skilled a character is in a certain
 > ability. However, my twist on it, is that, withut practice, you
 > abilities actually decrease over time.

This is a good, and fairly common, idea. The problem I've seen with
all efforts to implement it (including my own ca 1992 on The Marches
of Antan), has been to find a good way to implement it. I didn't
accomplish that, nor have I seen another computer-based system that
has.

It turns out that this has all been worked out in detail by some
paper-and-pen gamers under the name "Alternate Realities". The general
idea is that if you allow a skill's "scale" to run from positive to
negative infinity with zero representing an "average" skill level
(whatever that means in context), then the inverse arctan function
(with minor modifications) works very nicely. See

	http://etymon.net/AR/prg/

for the details.

Implementing this is relatively easy with any MUD system. A few years
ago I coded and tested it for several skills, including a combat
system, using the DGD driver. It was quite simple to plug it into the
mudlib I already had, and it worked very nicely (meaning, of course,
that it gave the results *I* think it should). Unfortunately, I never
generated a full working MUD that uses this, and won't until I get the
driver finished, so I don't have a demo for people to play with.

-- John W Pierce, R2 Systems, San Diego
   jwp at r2systems.com


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