[MUD-Dev] "Doing a dungeon" (was: Permadeath or Not?)

[John Buehler]

Brian Hook writes:

> Your solutions all presume that static encounters are repeatable.
> While it's not practical to generate effectively depletable content
> for every individual in the world, I think that's probably the
> theoretical goal for any adventure oriented world.

> This avoids the "wash-rinse-repeat" camping cycle; item harvesting;
> egregious twinking; etc. and all the problems associated with those
> phenomena.  And I don't think it's necessarily a completely
> unattainable goal.  Of course, "use once" content has its own set of
> problems when it comes to community building and it also tends to
> frustrate some players that, for whatever reason (and not all bad),
> would like to repeat encounters.

> Beyond that, just about any heuristic used for "situational encounter
> balancing" will tend to be defeatable, abusable and/or capricious.

I agree with you about the negative side of static encounters.  This
is why I'd like to see many variables contributing to the outcome of a
situation.  Situations can be revisited, but the outcome is never the
same twice.  A small change in skills, items, number of opponents,
condition of the ground, condition of the player characters, etc, can
all have a significant impact on the outcome of the encounter.  I also
cite simulation techniques in hopes of producing a broad spectrum of
outcomes from those many variables.  Not necessarily a simulation of
reality, but some involvement of simulation techniques.

Conditional to all that is that game system quantities can't be
displayed to the players.  Qualitative, yes.  Quantitative, no.  So
when my character swings a sword at an opponent, I should be able to
see an indication of how effective the swing was, and possibly even
get a vague 'quantitative' indicator to show me that I really did hit
my opponent (in case I missed the animation due to viewing angle or
some such thing).  The vague indicator might be a color patch that
flashes at the point of contact.  The better the hit, the brighter the
swatch of color.  That color patch would show regardless of the
viewing angle - and might not even be displayed at the point of
contact.

JB


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