[MUD-Dev] Advancement considered harmful (long)

[Travis Nixon]

-----Original Message-----
From: John Buehler <johnbue at email.msn.com>
To: MUD-Dev <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Tuesday, May 30, 2000 9:36 PM
Subject: FW: [MUD-Dev] Advancement considered harmful (long)


>  So to get back to the notion of the game world progressing regard-
>less of player activity, it is the gamemasters who ensure that a
>cohesive world exists.  It cannot be torn down by the players.  'Torn
>down' means that players cannot derail whatever the macro plans of
>the gamemasters are.  It does not mean preventing a physical tearing
>down of the virtual world.  The technique that gamemasters would then
>rely on would be 'sandboxing'.  This technique says that players get
>to do whatever they want with the tools that they have available, and
>that the net result is that they are unable to affect the gamemaster's
>plans at the macro level.


But this is part of the problem.  If players cannot, by design, affect the
gamemaster's plans, then the immersion is fleeting, at best.  If you have a
storyline that plays out, I think that most players want to be participants,
not observers.  To feel that their actions are actually MAKING a difference,
that things would have had the possibility of turning out differently if
they had acted differently.  If the players do a good job of defending the
town, then by damn the town should be saved, not destroyed anyway, because
it was how a GM decided things would be.  :)

>  For many players and, I'm assuming, many on this list this premise
>is fundamentally problematic.  Players expect to be able to become
>kings, lords and mighty warriors that dominate the world's activities.
>In short, they expect to become powerful.  Power implies control over
>others, and that is anathema to quality of service.  'Control over
>others' to me means control over other players.  The greater the
>control one player has in a game world, the more that player becomes
>a gamemaster, producing a problem where lack of cohesion in the macro
>activity of the world results.


I'm not sure I agree with your statements about power implying control over
other players, as that's more a function of what "power" itself means in the
game world, but I do wholly agree with your comments about personal power.
Personal power is seriously overboard in EQ.  Well, ok, that's not quite
fair.  For the types of worlds I want to create, a power system like the one
EQ uses would be seriously flawed.  :)  I don't necessarily have a problem
with a 50th level character having 50 times as many hit points, but I do
have a problem with all the other things that go along with that.  I fully
believe that 50 level 1 characters should be able to take down a level 50.
Of course, since EQ is wholly anti-pvp, that's pretty irrelevant for them.

Basically what it all boils down to is that I agree we can't trust the
players to make a "good" environment, but I very strongly disagree with the
implication that they shouldn't have the power to affect the world, either.
And somewhere, in the middle ground between absolute power to affect
everything (which would likely make for a very fun game for a very small
number of people and a horrible game for everybody else), and the ability to
affect nothing (which makes a good game for those who don't care, and a
fairly quickly shelved game for everybody else), there lies nirvana.

My own personal inclinations here are leaning towards some sort of system
where the players have to "earn" that power, by being given a little, and
not giving them more if they abuse it.  Or maybe by "proving" themselves
through some sort of player voting system.  Obviously there are a lot of
problems with any sort of scheme where players can give "roleplaying points"
or whatever you want to call them to other players, but if those problems
could be solved or worked around, it might just work.

What I'm thinking of is along these lines: you might have certain NPCs or
positions that have certain powers.  Say, for example, a captain of the
border guard.  It might be well within the powers of this captain to send
excursions into enemy territory (be they orcs or demons or even another
nation of the same race), and he obviously would have under his control a
number of guards.  With some sort of "earned power" system, it would be
possible to either give the player the option to control that NPC, or
possibly even have their own character elevated to the position, at which
point the player gains control of the guards.  Obviously this is a lot of
power to be placed in the hands of a player, and this would not be an "entry
level" position in the earned power scheme. :)  Now, at this point, the
player is in charge of a squad of border guards, and basically can do
whatever they want with them.  Attack the enemy, protect the citizens, send
a detachment of guards to track down those nasty mass murderers that seem to
keep popping up, whatever.  :)  Imagine this a few levels higher, and it
would be possible for a player to declare war on the enemy (whose leader may
be yet another player), and put the resources of the kingdom behind that
declaration.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're saying you would never
ever want something like this to happen?  I mean, a war is a pretty major
event to put in the hands of a player.

Yes, if you allow these kinds of things, eventually somebody is going to
abuse the power given to them, no matter how many checks and balances you
put into it.  But is this really a bad thing?  A tyrant somehow manages to
take power.  What happens?  Well, a few possibilities.  One, people living
there think "THIS SUX" and quit the game.  Two, people living there accept
it and try to ignore him, probably eventually leaving the area.  Three,
people living there band together and oust the tyrant.  Maybe a GM steps in
here and causes a portion of the guards to defect against the evil tyrant.

I honestly believe that the only way the first would happen, that people
would just flat out quit the game, is if they didn't think they had any
power to change things.  And either of the other two have interesting
possibilities, although chances are pretty good that the second would
eventually turn into the third.

But to really drive this home, I feel I need to say that in this scenario, I
imagine the "tyrant" as a player, and the taking of power something not
concieved of and executed by a gm, but by a group of players.

Reading back through there, it all sounds jumbled and disjointed, and you'll
have to forgive me, because I'm of two minds here.  Part of me says that
players don't, in fact, even want to entertain themselves, that they want to
be entertained, that something like this would never happen as a player
instigated event even if it were possible.  Yet there's a slowly growing
part of me that is starting to see a lot of potential here.  I've been
reading a lot of things lately that indicate that players actually do want
this sort of control, and that they're attempting to do things like this
even in games where the mechanics are 100% un-supportive.

Maybe the GMs shouldn't be telling a story.  Maybe they shouldn't be
deciding in advance what the outcome of an event is going to be.  Maybe they
should be winging it.

In my early years as a paper and pencil GM (and, I'm ashamed to admit, at
various intervals even after doing it for a while), I often tried to create
stories for the players.  It almost always failed.  The people I played with
didn't want to be told a story, they wanted to make one.  They wanted to be
a participant, not an observer.  They wanted to determine the future
sequence of events, not have it determined for them.  Of course, then my
problem became that I simply couldn't create enough things at the level of
detail that I wanted to, and still be able to accomodate odd requests from
the players.  I never did get very good at winging it, because I'm a
premeditated person for the most part (for example, I generally prefer
communicating via email as opposed to telephones -which are the spawn of
satan-), but I did at least realize that's what it would take, and
apparently did at least well enough at it that they kept inviting me back.
: )

Anyway, I don't really have a good closing point, and probably not much of a
point at all.  You've just been subjected to some of the random ramblings of
my mind.  Premeditated random ramblings, but random ramblings nonetheless.

Searching for Nirvana (the state of being, not the horrid grunge music
group) :),
Travis Nixon





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