[MUD-Dev] RE: Baking Bread

[John Buehler]

Lord Ashon writes:

>   How do we make it uncomplicated but at the same time non-repetitive?
>   How do we make it so that the bakers are significantly diverse?
>   How do we keep players from flooding the market?

> These are questions that I feel need to be answered but I have never
> seen any satisfactory answer to them.  It has been debated by game
> designers, but as you point out there is no multi-player game that
> exist that successfully entices the bakers.  If you could share your
> thoughts on this it would be much appreciated.

The solution is to ensure that the process of baking bread appeals to
afficianados of bread baking.  Running a bakery is the real
entertainment, not just that of baking loaf after loaf of wheat bread.
Mental exercise: start from scratch and create a game about running a
bakery.  You have to manage your supplies.  Maybe you have to pay
taxes.  You might have an NPC staff to help you (to be augmented by
player characters as available).  You need to figure out what people
are eating so that you have enough food at the right times of the day.
You may have special requests for your items.  You might find out
about a new baked good coming from another province and you have to
add that to your inventory.  But what are the ingredients?  One of
your ovens has developed cracks over time and it's time to bring in a
worker to rebuild one of the walls with bricks.  A thief has pilfered
some bread and you need to get the town guards to find him - or you
chase him yourself.  Oh, and you bake bread too.  You pick the
recipes, mix the incredients and so on.  People who are interested in
baking will enjoy doing these things.  It must not be a click-fest.
Rather, the player handles the higher-order decision-making and the
character completes the actual tasks.  Player involvement should be
valuable every five seconds or so.

"How do we make it uncomplicated?"  Why should it be uncomplicated?
Why should running a bakery be any less mentally challenging than
combat?  I'm not suggesting that running a bakery should be
arbitrarily complicated, but it should be left as challenging as it
is.  Being a contributor at the town's bakery is something that people
will want to do sometimes.  Other times they'll want to go fishing.
Let an experience be true to some idealization of what it really was
like and let those who enjoy that experience get into it.

"How do we make it so that the bakers are significantly diverse?"  How
do we make combatants and magicians diverse?  My personal belief is
that it will happen all by itself when there are no goals built into
the game.  There are no high levels and maximum power potentials
calling out to the players.  If you want to powergame your way into
being a master swordsman, go for it.  But the net result is that once
you get there nobody will care.  Because you're not a master magician,
a master swimmer, a master archer - or a master baker.  Because nobody
can be a master of all things simultaneously in the real world, so it
should be true in the game world.  How that is accomplished is subject
to debate.  The point here is that when players choose their own goals
and when many, many goals are viable, it will be more a matter of
taste as to what sort of a baker each player will be.  If you cannot
be a master of all tasks, then you must pick some mix of skills
suitable to your personal goals in the game.

"How do we keep players from flooding the market?"  How do we keep
players from killing each other all the time?  How do we keep players
from doing all the other nasty things that they want to do?  By using
realistic consequences in order to discourage these things.  That will
inhibit those who want to play the game, but never the spoiler players
of course.  Nothing stops them except real world consequences.  The
real world consequences of flooding a market are that prices drop like
a rock.  And because it takes time to make those items (no
instantaneous trades, thank you), they are using their realtime
activity for trivial gain the game world.  The only folks who will
want to flood the market after that are spoiler players.

I believe that this approach will appeal more to us old fogies more
than the kids - especially if the kewl d00ds never show up.  I think
that the people interested in trades are interested in a little
quieter experience much of the time.  We're a little more social, a
little more casual, just looking for some casual, social
entertainment.

We'll go off to the wars another day.  But first, we fish.

JB


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