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

[msew]

At 12:13 02/22/2001 -0800, Brian Hook wrote:

>> for any encounter you design, at some difficulty level that takes a
>> certain amount of power to overcome, the players will always just
>> bring more power with them.
 
> 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.

Yes and no.  Take the set of encounters/mobs and you can partition
that set into classes of difficulty.

The players will view any dynamic encounter as a specific class of
encounter, for which that class has a specified power level needed to
beat.  And in their eyes that is a "static" type of encounter.

eg:

    we are going against a god-like creature -> use strategy smack the
    god down

    we are going against a king-like creature -> use the strategy
    smack the king down


*how the players find out what "type" of creature they are up against
might be interesting but they WILL find out that info and then smack
it down.


So, from the player's point of view the mobs are of a static class of
mob.  Whether this maps to the same exact mob with same exact stats or
not doesn't really matter.  Certainly, specific mobs will have
strengths and weaknesses but basically just need the correct power
level to smack them down.  (as we are talking about this semi
abstractly :-) )

I think designing a game based on dynamic content is a superb thing!
And I think just from that one decision you will lose item based
camping and possibly area based camping.

I think for it to work the world needs to have a lot more little
warrens and caves and forts for the mobs to inhabit.  You kill the
mobs in cave #434 and it will take a while for that cave to get new
inhabitants.  (this has been discussed in the past on here in great
detail :-) )


With that type of world geography and population mechanism, "doing a
dungeon" is 100% possible and should be quite fun!



msew

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