FW: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[the_logos at www.achaea.com]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, John Buehler wrote:

> Matt Mihaly writes:
 
>> It doesn't matter to me whether you want to pretend the character
>> and player are different or not, but how can you know the character
>> doesn't know something? How do you know he's never overheard this
>> 'secret' information, or that no one has ever told it to him. Your
>> code doesn't and can't know that. Again, in role or out of role,
>> it's just making players jump through hoops for the sake of it in
>> my opinion.

> Just model character knowledge fer cryin out loud.  EverQuest does a
> form of this with its No Drop items, except that you can't clone
> them to hand them to other people.  If talking to an NPC gave your
> *character* knowledge, and you were then able to give that knowledge
> to another character (a copy), we could rely on an in-game mechanism
> to spread rumors, have passwords and such.  There is no way to
> transfer the actual in-game knowledge between characters outside of
> the game.  Players can know it, but if their character doesn't, it
> does them no good.

Achaea already lets characters pass knowledge to each other. It's
called 'say', 'tell', 'messages', 'newsboards', 'channels', 'shouts',
and so on. The idea that I should have to pass knowledge to another
character (and apparently only in certain circumstances) via some
special command seems silly. Telling another character something
through any communication method is sufficient for that character to
know something. You just want to make people jump through hoops by
pretending that a character doesn't know something when clearly he or
she already does.

Further, frankly, I don't see that it matters whether a character gets
that information from another character or from a totally
out-of-character method like a website. Are you advocating cracking
down on players expressing, say, modern political ideas such as
liberty and justice for all? Clearly in a fantasy setting, such ideas
do not fit and how could a character have learned about them? And what
about things like simple addition? Do you have a way of ensuring a
character can add? Probably not. It's not needed, of course, because
characters know a lot more than what you can track.

> Personally, I think that in-game knowledge is going to present
> interesting opportunities in the future, just as I believe that
> character perceptions present opportunities.  Character knowledge
> adds to the value of a character to the player without necessarily
> having that character be powerful.

In-game knowledge is not trackeable without the use of AI way beyond
what we have now. All that can be done now is mock up a system to make
users jump through hoops. Until you have a system that knows whether
my character knows something (instead of pretending that the only way
to gain a piece of knowledge is via some special command as opposed to
general communications), then you're not modeling in-game
knowledge. You're mocking it.

--matt

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