[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle writes:

>> This presupposes that the game system in question would tie all of
>> your assets to your character, so that when the character goes, so
>> does all of your "advancement".

> You certainly won't have lost any of your personal (as a player)
> skill.  As a rule of thumb, if someone dies at level X it should
> take them half as long to get back to level X as it did to reach it
> in the first place.

That's an odd statement to make.  And it's one predicated on taking
things away from a player.  Why remove an accomplishment from a player
when the reason that they're playing the game is to accomplish things?
That statement is only true of games where achievements are the major
entertainment, but it seems to cover most current games.

If an achiever reaches a certain point in the game, and having reached
that point in the game permits them to get involved with new and
different entertainment, why in Heaven's name would you have a
mechanism to take that achievement away?  The only thing that will
happen is that the player will 'work' intensively to get that
achievement back.  This produces the powergaming effect.

If achieving is the entertainment, then the doing typically isn't all
that entertaining.  The maze isn't fun, just getting the cheese.  If
the maze wasn't fun the first time, and the cheese is the same, the
player isn't going to derive much of any entertainment in repeating
what they did.  As you suggest, players not only tend to return to
their achievement in half the time, but they do it because there's
nothing entertaining in repeating that achievement.  They powergame.

In return, I'll offer my death model so you can point out its
problems: temporary game ejection upon character death.  Assume that
the world doesn't require extreme chances and lots of killing in order
to enjoy the world.  That extreme chances are essentially superfluous
because the world isn't predicated on providing entertainment through
achievement.  In such a world, death can be avoided if you're willing
to *not* push things to the absolute limit (and the gain is modest in
any case).  But if you push too hard, your character dies.  When it
dies, it drops where it is and cannot be played for some number of
days.  No penalties, no resurrections, no jumping off to a temple,
nothing.  Temporary permadeath.  The number of days of game ejection
is commensurate with the circumstances of death.  Dragon breathed on
you?  You're very dead.  Many days of ejection.  Fall and break your
neck?  One day.  Cut in half by a large warrior opponent?  Several
days.

You can still play your other character(s), but you cannot play the
one that died.  I am only suspending entertainment through that one
character, but I am doing it for some number of days in order to serve
as a reminder that the player is doing something that is particularly
hazardous.  Note that I *do* consider that systems would have to exist
to let buddies drag your body off, place it on a horse, whatever.  To
permit you to keep up with the group.  Assuming anybody survived.

Central to this idea is that death is not a deterrent to achievement.
Death is a deterrent only to certain scenarios of entertainment.  Want
to go on a dragon hunt?  That's inherently dangerous and your
character could die.  You don't get thousands of gold pieces from the
kill, nor do you get the Sword of Doom.  You get to go on a dragon
hunt.  The unique nature of the entertainment is the draw.  The maze
is the fun part.  But in that particular scenario, there is a strong
possibility of death.  Why have this type of death at all, you might
ask.  So that the illusion of lethal activities remains, and so
various scenarios play out in a reasonable fashion.  I don't want
resurrections being done on players at high speed in order to get
folks back in time to continue the fight, leading to dragons having to
battle a never-ending stream of player characters.  This can be dealt
with by using other mechanisms to slow down resurrections and so on.
I'm not interested in doing those things because I believe that just
having temporary permadeath satisfies the practical requirements of
scenarios that involve character death quite well.

JB


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