[MUD-Dev] PvP Systems

[John Buehler]

Jon Lambert writes:

> What do you do when players' characters act joyous in an angry town.
> Oppress them?  Seriously though, if players are coming to play a
> *game* you will get GoPers.  GoPers simply do not care about
> atmosphere other than... "Hey that's cool, can I get any cheese from
> that?  No? Let's move on then!".

The difference in our approaches is (I think) that you'd have your
roleplayers try to convince the GoPer that that's not the way we'd
like the world to work.  In my version, I try to educate all players
to a more modest form of roleplaying, which is to encourage them to
'play along' with the ambient atmosphere.  Or to at least respect it.

Note that roleplayers will be welcome in my world, but they'll be
limited in what roles they can play - just as PvPers will be limited
in how *they* can play as well.

>> If I want my gamemasters to run a story and provide entertainment
>> to my players, I'd have to convince and/or recruit roleplayers to
>> play the parts that I need.  That's no way to run a business where
>> I'm providing a paid entertainment experience to my customers.

> Are you sure about that?  I'm convinced that people will pay money
> for just about anything.

My goal is not to make money.  My goal is to find a great source of
entertainment for people, and to amuse myself in the process.  The
money would be nice to have, but I'm financially set.

Regardless, my observation was that I'm trying to provide a very
specific kind of entertainment, and I can't do that if I have to
convince the player actor's guild each time I want to change things.

>> Player to player interaction takes place independent of the NPCs.
>> For example, the assault on the orc village.  Players roleplay and
>> plot and plan and then assault the village, hopefully for
>> roleplaying reasons (although we know it'll be "for the hell of
>> it").

> Yes but why "hopefully"?  Is this just a game where role-playing is
> not supported, yet not discouraged.

Fitting into the game world atmosphere will most definitely be
encouraged, which I think of as a modest form of roleplaying.
Cheese-collectors (per your prior example) will be discouraged.
Everything about my game will encourage players to enjoy the here and
now.  The entertainment of 'doing' will be paramount.  The
entertainment of 'achieving' will be dramatically chopped back so that
it is roughly commensurate with whatever form of 'here and now'
entertainment I can achieve using the PC experience.

I'd love to have a bunch of roleplayers running around in my world.
The only problem is that, like PvP, roleplaying takes energy, and not
all players have the energy to roleplay all the time.  Some players
are simply not capable of roleplaying.  I want the NPCs in there
serving as a crutch to encourage players to remember to do the
roleplaying that they're capable of each day.

>> The NPC wrangler who runs that area of the world will cause the
>> orcs to react in some way so that there is an element of real
>> intelligence in the encounter, not just mindless force on force.
>> I'm primarily concerned with consistent quality of service, and
>> roleplayers don't provide it.

> Employee NPC wranglers are not going to any more consistent about
> quality than dedicated player/volunteers.  I think the employee
> vs. volunteer topic was probably discussed to death in all it's many
> angles.  That's my 2 cents.

We can go that route again if you like.  You use the term 'dedicated'
when you refer to the comparison of employees and volunteers.  There's
no question that a dedicated volunteer is equal to, if not superior
to, an employee.  Because that's what an employee is supposed to be -
dedicated.  The point is that a volunteer knows that they are
volunteering, and after a while they wonder why they're not getting
paid, as with AOL.  That, or they wonder why they're not getting
accolades.  Or any one of a number of perfectly reasonable reasons for
being unhappy with being so dedicated without compensation other than
the satisfaction of knowing that they are doing a good job.  And those
reasons include a change of priorities - such as needing to make some
money.  Payment is the compensation for being dedicated, and it
provides a viable lifestyle for the wrangler.

>> Second, I very definitely want players to react to the world.  Many
>> folks are far more interested in having the players control the
>> world.

> This is true.  I don't think reaction is enough for immersion.
> Players want to affect the world.  Players want "attention". This is
> true of most players regardless of their style.

If players want attention, they should address their relationship with
their parents and the rest of their family.  I'm sorry, but I'm not
creating a game in order to cater to a variety of unhealthy behaviors
that people want to sate.  I'm only interested in providing a light
form of hobby-like entertainment that players will play for perhaps an
hour or two a day or for a few hours on a weekend.

You're absolutely right that players of many of these games want
attention.  But the personality of the players that I'm after is a
fairly staid and stolid group.  They play on Microsoft's game zone
playing chess, checkers and other social games where they can: get in,
play a little bit and then get out.  The game is not a massive
undertaking for them - and they sure don't have to worry about
somebody coming along and turning over the tables.  For all I know,
all I need to do is put together a couple taverns with chess and
checker boards on the tables, give players characters and have them go
at it.

I'd like to do far more than just that trivial treatment, of course,
but I'm not after a hardcore player of any variety.

>> That only works for a limited population of players who are of a
>> like mind.  I'm after a paradigm that works for massive playerbases
>> (tens of thousands).  It's a far more vanilla experience than most
>> roleplaying enthusiasts will be interested in.

> Certainly there are tens of thousands of role-players out there.
> Prolly quite a bit more that aren't mudding.  Where are your 10000
> coming from, and what happens happens if only 100 players show up?

I was going to import them from Mexico.

My 10,000 are visiting Colonial Williamsburg.  They are hobby
enthusiasts who never get a chance to blacksmith.  They are the folks
who read about Lewis & Clark and want to go on an expedition
themselves.  They are the people who play chess, checkers and go over
on The Gaming Zone.  They are the people who visit Disneyworld.

When 100 players show up, I clap my hands gleefully because that's my
first goal.  There's no way that I'm going to be able to go from zero
to 10,000 players overnight.  And I don't mean that from a technology
standpoint.  I mean that from proving out the experience of gameplay.
With 100 players, how many NPCs do I need to ensure that they
understand what the environment is all about?  How many support calls
am I getting from those 100 players?  How difficult is wrangling NPCs
really going to be such that it's effective entertainment?  Do I want
to hinge the entertainment of 10,000 paying customers on that learning
experience?  Of course not.

And I have no intention of trying to pull off some kind of three month
beta test period.  That's inane.  I may never leave beta and just let
friends and friends of friends go adventuring in the game world until
we figure out how to make the derned thing really work.

>> I really think that some game publisher needs to hire roleplayers
>> to actually run NPCs at minimum wage or some such thing.  That's
>> really what roleplayers want to do.  They want to *act*.

> Bingo.  There you go.  They even do it for free. ;-)

Nope.  Everything must be for pay.  There must be interviews,
training, contracts and the like.  I do not believe in sustained
volunteerism for paid services.  I say this partly because running
NPCs will not be fun.  It will be a job with ups and downs, and the
actors will be required to tolerate those ups and downs gracefully, so
as not to detract from the gamplay of the paying park guests.  I
intend to take the experience of my guests very seriously.

>> I don't want my players to roleplay beyond functional roleplaying.
>> I want them to enjoy the world.  What I want to avoid is players
>> who do things that are very counter to the atmosphere of the game
>> world.

> There are a lot of goals that are at odds here.  You want immersion
> in the world and then you want casual gamers.  You want to encourage
> roleplaying via atmosphere, though I cannot figure out quite why you
> don't want to provide any in-game support for it.  Role-players are
> by their very nature not only actors, but are content creators.  In
> order to establish a game conducive to role-play, it must be
> participatory, not passive and reactive.  So you just want
> functional roleplay from players merely in order not to disturb the
> atmosphere and theme of the game?

I do not want significant immersion and I do not want significant PvP.  Both
lead to players losing their sense of reality.  And a sense of reality is
needed because the game world is full of real people interacting.  That
makes it personal, regardless of how good a roleplaying you are.  It's
dangerous to mix fantasy and reality, which is what these games do.

Consider the effect of Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean.  Last
time I was there, the group in the boat with me started "argh"ing and
"yo-ho-ho"ing as we went.  The atmosphere encouraged them to behave a
certain way.  I'm just trying to get players to play along with the
way the game world works.  They take their cues from the world.
Roleplayers will be able to do this far more capably than others, and
they will be able to embellish that atmosphere by their actions.

Tell me what tools roleplayers want to have and I'll tell you how much
of that set would work in my world.  I can give roleplayers leeway,
but not to the point of controlling the experience of other players.
If roleplayers want to do that, have them apply for a job with my
mythical game company.  I pay good mythical money.  :)

> Now I've seen such games.  What you get is players whispering to
> each other in hushed tones and offline about how to game the game.
> It's sort of like a guy who designs a model train layout, shows it
> off to people, and says "Don't touch anything".

I hope we can assume I'm not talking about such an experience.

>> The NPCs serve as a reminder that your character is in a medieval
>> town.  Or in a futuristic town.  Whatever.  Non-roleplayers need
>> the props as reminders.  A cast of extras to run the NPCs would be
>> great, but I'd never rely on a cadre of volunteers.  I'd have to
>> produce high level scripts and have the actors figure out how to
>> present that script.  I'd have terrible security problems of
>> keeping any information about the script secret, etc.  Blech.

> Ok this is like putting on a show.  Once players realize their
> participation is limited to being an audience member this will get
> old real fast.  This extends to both GoPers and RPers.

We should speak in terms of actual examples.  I want my players to go
adventuring and wipe out the orc village that has been plaguing the
town, and when they return to the town, the NPC citizens of the town
throw a brief, 'impromptu' celebration.  I want my players going to
the front lines of the war and pushing to move the front lines this
way and that.  I want my players forming NPC-potentate-sanctioned
guilds and such in order to train each other, help newbies, undertake
potentate-requested actions and so on.  The same sorts of activities
that you want I probably want, but their effect on other players
*must* be tempered with moderation.  'Unbounded' is *not* the hallmark
of my game.

>> Yup.  Where ya gonna find the roleplayers that are willing to
>> provide consistent quality of service to the rest of the
>> playerbase?

> Well there does exist troupes of experienced role-players that
> actually run games and scenes for cash.

And that's fine by me.  I'm perfectly willing to hire actors.  I'll
give them the approximate script and desired outcomes and they can
work it out from there.  It's a contractual agreement that is
targetted at providing a specific game experience to my guests.  I
said to my guests that things would be a certain way and they are
paying to get that certain way.

> Well I know Children of the Moon is around 2500 or so they claim.  I
> believe Cajun Nights may be larger.  Does it really matter?  None of
> them are commercial ventures so there really isn't any marketing
> going on.  Therefore there isn't any real way a measuring their
> viability or potential success as a business.  It's my theory that a
> few thousand well-placed dollars will buy you 500 players even if
> you are selling crap.

My goal is not to make money.  My goal is to provide entertainment.
So if there is a large MUD out there that attracts lots and lots of
players and they're happy to start roleplaying, that would be a good
sign.  But if the only MUDs out there with roleplayers are the ones
that attract people who are already roleplayers, then I still don't
have the indicators that I want to see in order to believe the
statement 'everyone can be a roleplayer'.

JB

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