[MUD-Dev] trade skill idea

[Travis Casey]

Tried to send this yesterday, but got an error message back saying:

<EdNote: Did you send it before 23:47 PST?  This is actually a fairly
significant/relevatory question>

Sunday, October 15, 2000, 10:29:41 AM, msew <msew at ev1.net> wrote:

> At 09:30 10/06/00 +0000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:

>> In the end, I think while non-epic games certainly have a large
>> audience, epicness will always capture the largest audience over
>> time.

> Yes, epicness, how famous you are, how you saved the world from the
> ultimate destruction are all vital. To a degree.

> The issue is that this gets WAY fricking boring***.  On some of the
> muds I have played to maxLevel on I would not even bother going on
> the most recent "save the world quest" because it was boring to me.
> And I would watch like the 2nd or 3rd tier players attempt to fight
> the uber bad guy and just get whacked.  And my guild/friends and I
> would just sit there laughing to ourselves thinking: "I wonder what
> great NPC hero the gods will bring in this time to beat the uber
> evil overlord this time."  In EQ the epicness of going to kill the
> gods or dragons has totally lost it's glimmer and those mobs are
> just viewed the same as a kobold for me; set up shop and whack them,
> loot corpse, NEXT!

> If you had to watch star wars EVERY week on TV you would get bored
> with it very quickly.  Now compare that to the various sitcoms:
> simpsons and seinfled are a key example that another reader
> (jszeder at roshambo.net ) brought up.  They are funny not so much for
> what the end result of the conflict is but HOW they overcome the
> conflict and how the characters react in the face of the conflict.

I think you're taking too narrow a view of what an "epic" is, and,
further, that most of the games you're talking about aren't truly
epic.  This is going to take a bit of explaining, and I tend to wander
anyways, so be patient with this message.  :-)

First off, let's tackle a few things that are not "epic" in and of
themselves:

  Epic isn't just high-powered.  The fact that characters fight
  demons, gods, or dragons doesn't make a game epic.

  Saving the world doesn't make an epic; you can have epics in which
  the goal is not to "save the world" and you can have stories in
  which people save the world that are not epic.

Let's consider some things that are epics: The Epic of Gilgamesh.  The
Iliad.  The Odyssey.  Beowulf.  None of these are about saving the
world.  All of them feature powerful heroes, yes, but they also have
considerable stretches where the heroes aren't killing dragons and
such.  Some of them even have portions where the heroes have to get
through by guile or strategy rather than through combat.

Note as well that all of these are long-term stories -- not "we
discovered the threat and two months later, we defeated it."  All of
them feature multiple episodes, over a span ranging from a year or so
to twenty years or more.

A true epic is suited to long-term use -- indeed, if a story is over
and done with quickly, then it's *not* an epic.  The original Star
Wars is not an epic, but the Star Wars trilogy is.  Epics can hold out
over the long term and be suitable for television series -- for
example, Babylon 5 was consciously planned as an epic series spanning
five TV seasons.  The TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer could be
considered an epic; each "monster of the season" is an episode within
the epic, and those "episodes" are further subdivided into the
episodes of a TV season.

The things that truly defines an "epic" are that it takes place over a
considerable period of time, and that it is of larger-than-life scale.
Nothing confines epics to things like saving the world, and, for that
matter, nothing confines them to adventuring, fantasy, or SF -- you
can have an epic love story, an epic war story, or an epic western.
There are epic prison movies, epic survival novels, epic TV romances,
epic horror novels, and epic histories.
  
In some parts of your message, it seems like you're getting at the
same thing that I'm trying to get at here -- that nothing says that
you have to fight things or save the world to have an interesting,
meaningful story.

I think people have gotten too caught up in the trappings of certain
epics and have forgotten that it's not the trappings that make those
stories epic -- it's the *story*.

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




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