[MUD-Dev] Self-Sufficient Worlds

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Lee Sheldon wrote:

> Here are my 3 rules for story delivery in a persistent world:
> 
> 1.  The story must be compelling enough to justify the world.  (Do we really
> need yet another "There was a great conflict in the past, the evil was
> defeated - but not destroyed - now it is rising again" fantasy world?)

Hmm. How do you incorporate this with the idea of primal myths? Take the
hero's journey, for instance. I think people, clearly, find that to be an
exceptionally compelling story, even when told over and over and over
again (albeit in a different context every time). 

You've thought about storytelling so much more than I have that I feel a
bit hesitant to even assert this point, but are there not some fairly
well-accepted theories stating that there are really, fundamentally, only
a limited number of compelling stories. You can add window dressing on top
of them to make them seem different, of course, but they are still
fundamentally the same. I mean, you've written for a soap opera. They do
the same stories over and over, just substituting characters and settings
really. 

I, for instance, happen to really like the "evil that was not quite
destroyed in the past coming back to mess with the world" story. I realize
it's completely formulaic (but then, mass entertainment is nothing if not
formulaic) but it taps into something primal in my psyche.
 
> 2.  The story must be constructed as an integral part of the world.  (And
> not feel like an imposition or an afterthought.)

Again, I'm not sure I agree. From a storyteller's point of view, I agree
that the "strange aliens we've never heard of invade" plot (ie a clearly
slapped-on afterthought)  is completely weak, but people seem to enjoy it
in sci fi books and movies.


> 3.  The story must be told to the players.  (If people are running around
> either confused about the story, or ignoring it, you have wasted a lot of
> time on 1 and 2.)

Yes, definitely. I've found that when running plots in Achaea, it's almost
essential to ensure that the players are getting the information. And you
have to feed it to them, not just let them discover it, or depend on
word-of-mouth.

In our last plot, a Tsol'dasi, (Tsol'dasi are the long-lost cousins of the
Tsol'aa player race. They  dwell in a sort of "lost land" (minus
dinosaurs) setting, came south to contact the other mortal races for the
first time since around the birth of the human race as this one (Pryla'ka)
had seen a threat to life, etc etc. I thought it was cool as hell. I won't
go into the plot, but over the space of the three weeks that the plot took
to play out, I realized that some of the participants had no idea who
Pryla'ka was, what the significance of her being a Tsol'dasi was, or why
they should care about her. 

--matt




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