[MUD-Dev] Acting casual about casual gamers

[Travis Casey]

Wednesday, June 28, 2000, 7:29:13 PM, Michael Tresca <talien at toast.net> wrote:
> On Jun 26, 2000, Spin wrote:

>> Nearly every player is
>> striving to be the "hero/arch-villian" in the storybook of the mud
>> they are playing. Given that "heroes" are a one in a thousand find,
>> this requires a thousand "peasants" happy to plod along in their
>> daily grind, to support this hero. To put it another way,
>> "You need a lot of ordinary to make the extraordinary".

> I agree.  Except nobody wants to be a peasant.

Caveat here -- absolute statements are rarely true.  There are a few
odd people out there who do want to play peasants.  :-)  There are
also people who are happy with less than being world or kingdom-saving
heroes.

[some bits snipped from the stuff below]

> One major difference between multi-user games and role-playing games is that
> the role-playing game is insulated from the rest of the universe by the
> Gamemaster.  The Gamemaster can therefore cast first level characters as
> heroes in their universe, and surreptitiously up the stakes as they gain in
> power without making the characters seem unheroically weak from the start.

> With multi-user games, characters all exist in a shared universe, all of
> them in the role of heroes.  This generates a pecking order of sorts.  The
> situation isn't helped by level systems, wherein players often associate
> social status with level.

> This mindset gets carried over to game designers who played those games.
> New players aren't just new to the game, they're weak, because they're not
> as heroic as the 100th level guy.  In fact, if they're first level, not only
> are they not as heroic, the 100th level guy is ONE HUNDRED TIMES MORE heroic
> than they are.

> Game designers who cater to this mindset give players demeaning tasks.
> Newbies, who are really only new players, are transformed into children.
> They are given simple tasks, they are told to kill "easy things" like
> chickens, cows, and butterflies.  Everything they do is made out to be
> insignificant, weak, and ultimately, a little ridiculous if you consider the
> context of a heroic fantasy (or heroic whatever) game.

Sometimes more than a little ridiculous -- I remember one mud where
someone decided to give newbies a way to get some free starting
equipment.  What equipment were they given?  A cooking pot (to use as
a helmet), a rubber knife (so they wouldn't hurt themselves by
accident), and an "I'm a newbie" T-shirt (for armor).  The knife, by
the way, actually had (so you won't hurt yourself) as part of the
description.

In about six months of playing on that game after that "newbie kit"
was introduced, I never saw anyone actually take advantage of the
equipment it offered.  Newbies would come in, get their kit, see what
it was, and drop it.  The equipment wasn't even halfway decent as far
as stats went.  So what was the point?  As far as I could tell, the
only point was to belittle the newbies.

> I submit that new players should NOT be treated this way.  New players
> should kill dragons, battle fierce demons, perform heroic quests, and they
> should be able to do it all at first level.  So what if the dragon dies in
> five blows instead of 30?  If the player can't see the statistics of the
> dragon, and if he or she is new, that person will feel just as much of an
> achievement. And the higher level folks?  Those players who are going to
> play for a longer period of time can still be challenged -- now they have to
> kill the Dragon King instead of a Dragon Lord -- without new players being
> demeaned.

I agree with the principle that newbies should have more significant
things to do, but I disagree with your statements here.  If any new
adventurer can battle demons and kill dragons, how powerful can they
be?  How can this be reconciled with tough city guards and/or
shopkeepers?  And if you get rid of the tough city guards or
shopkeepers, what's to keep newbies from looting in the cities?  (Of
course, you can make it simply impossible for them to do so, but that
limits the roles they can take on greatly).

There are all sorts of significant things that can be done short of
killing dragons and demons -- hunting down murderers, fighting off
bandits, battling orcs and goblins, rescuing items from
zombie-infested graveyards, and so on.  There's no good reason to
belittle newbies or have them out battling squirrels and chickens, but
that doesn't mean we have to go to the other extreme and have dragons
and demons that newbies can take out.

Someone need not save the kingdom to be a hero; there's room for
heroes who protect villages, hunt down bandits, and rescue princes or
princesses as well.  IMHO, becoming too powerful too quickly can turn
people off of games as well.

> This is the fallacy of Newbie Schools. The last thing anybody wants is to
> log into a multi-user game and find out that they are being sent back to
> school to learn how to play a supposedly fun game.  Sometimes, the most
> difficult obstacles in gaining new players who aren't gamers by nature is
> the nature of the game itself.

Most of the better games that I've seen don't have any sort of newbie
school; instead, newbies are given a brief intro to the common
commands, told how to invoke the help system, and started off in an
area suited for them -- that is, one where there are things they can
fight with their starting equipment (if any), not a "school".

SWmud had (and probably still has) a planet called Newbieway.  When
newbies log in, they're given instructions on how to get there.  Once
there, there's no "school" -- just an area where challenges are suited
to newbies, while not being insulting (specifically, the "dangerous"
area is the site of a battle with pirates, where there are still
pirate stragglers who have to be hunted down).  There's a convenient
"safe" area (a town), where there's a store, access to healing, and
guild halls.  Non-newbies can't enter the area, so newbies don't have
to worry about others taking out the area easily.  A nice,
non-insulting, newbie-friendly place.

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





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