[MUD-Dev] "Mud-school", character-gen and role-playing

[Greg Miller]

  Adam wrote:

> Your mother:
>  a) was an extrodinarily wise and caring parent
>  b) was a mighty warrior who died in battle
>  c) was a respected leader in your community
>  d) gave you up for adoption when you were born
> Your father:
>  a) was an extrodinarily wise and caring parent
>  b) was a mighty warrior who died in battle
>  c) was a respected leader in your community
>  d) left home when you were young

[lots snipped]

> This was inspired (although some might say "ripped off") from the
> character creation for one of Owen Emlen's early muds.

Actually, this is still the default on new EmlenMUDs. The one thing that 
bothers me is that it includes a random factor, so autorollers are a 
standard tool. I'd rather see each question result in specific modifiers 
to a set of base numbers.

> I'd like to expand this system quite a bit but it's on the just-haven't-gotten-
> around-to-it-yet list.  (FWIW, there's also an "advanced" creation mode
> for experienced players that just want to set up their character directly.)

How does this work? Like the Aturion Dynasty system of assigning points?

> In a nutshell: you choose virtues like "You have giant blood, and are much
> larger and stronger than a normal human" or "You have a careful personality,
> all Botch skill rolls get a bonus of +2" and flaws like "You are bad at
> communicating spells and get a -4 to all communication rolls" or "You have
> a big nose that people find commical".  Each one has a score, with flaws being
> negative and virtues being positive.  You choose as many flaws and virtues
> as you like, but you must end up at some constant (like say, 0).

Kind of like advantages and disadvantages in GURPS? My understanding of 
the D&D 3E "feats" system is that it's designed to allow more or less 
this sort of personalization, although the mechanic is different (all 
positives, with a limit to how many you can choose, as I recall). 
Someone else (Travis?) mentioned 3E on the list, perhaps someone who's 
paid more attention to it could detail WotC's system.


> This would be especially interesting to implement on a mud, because you
> could make a dynamic "economy" of character traits.  Each time a trait
> is chosen, its cost raises by some tiny amount (say, 0.01).  Each time
> a trait is present and not chosen (or, alternately, if the trait is not
> chosen at all within a 24 hour period) its cost goes down by 0.01.  Only
> whole numbers are displayed to players.
> 
> This means that the most "popular" character traits will quickly become
> inflated, and people will start shopping amongst the more uncommon traits.
> Which is a desired effect as far as I am concerned.

Neat. Definately gotta file this message for my "cool ideas" folder.
--
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Smarter than God? No, but I'm smarter than he was when he was my age.
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