[MUD-Dev] Report: MUD-Dev dinner of 10 June 2000

[Jessica Mulligan]

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Raph Koster [mailto:rkoster at austin.rr.com]
>> Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2000 7:35 PM
>> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
>> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Report: MUD-Dev dinner of 10 June 2000

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> J C Lawrence
> Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2000 7:42 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Report: MUD-Dev dinner of 10 June 2000
>

>   How Never Winter Nights maps very well to the old D&D style
> players of a small group of friends who got together of an evening
> to run a campaign one of them GMed, how much fun that basic concept
> was, what we've lost in ignoring that activity in our MUD designs
> (outside of MUSHes), and some reference to the impacts of this on
> player stories and player's awareness of their own stories and
> scope.

>> An interesting quote from the Lum site review of Vampire: the Masquerade:

>> "Imagine if you were trying to run an improv interactive theater with
>> audience participation.  Now imagine if the audience was encouraged just
to
>> walk in and out of 400 other similar plays.  This gives you an idea of
the
>> magnitude of the problem faced by those wishing to run a game... The only
>> games that seemed to be running were frag fests, where the "storyteller"
>> would throw down monsters for players to kill."

>> Given the massive success that WoD has had on MUSHes, this is rather
>> disappointing; it also raises the spectre of whether, given Neverwinter
>> Nights, most people will run Diablo-with-better-graphics servers.

The problem with depending on the player base to provide compelling stories
is, of course, that most of them don't have the skills, talent and/or
training to do this effectively.  I'm not ragging on the players; it's just
a simple fact that not everyone is a good DM, GM or storyteller, and most of
those who *could* be are missing some critical training.  We shouldn't be
surprised to see these NWN and D2 become "Diablo-with-better-graphics."

We discussed this when I was in charge of online services at Interplay in
early 1995, while we were still in development of our first AD&D title.  The
current NWN concept was born then, with two main differences from how
BioWare and Interplay are doing it now:

A) We had a budget planned for contracting with 15 to 20 experienced
storytellers to write scenarios, run them online and then make them
available for the player base to mess around with and modify, and;

B) We had a budget for setting up a free Storyteller University, with paid
instructors, to train interested players/DMs in the game tools, the general
concepts of good scenario design, GMing in the online world, etc.

We were going to try to support the free portions of the model via a certain
number of sanctioned, for-pay online scenarios on our servers (with some
speculation on doing these as RPGA events, too), corporate or advertiser
sponsored events, shipping low-cost add-on disks with new multiplay
scenarios on a regular basis and shipping new AD&D SKUs every 6 to 12
months.

I suspect the first publisher to run with A) and B) will see a higher
quality of player-generaated stories overall and a much longer life-time for
the product.  Considering the explosion in online subscribers, however,
you'd probably need more like 30 to 40 contract storytellers and a whole
boat-load of instructors, both paid and volunteer.  It may not be
economically feasible for most companies.









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