[MUD-Dev] No Exp? (was: Exploration Exp)

[John Buehler]

Corey Crawford writes:

> How do we justify the time an adventurer spends EXPLORING the world?
> For the player himself: sure he gets the see the world, see what's
> in it, know what's where, etc.. but the character? How can we reward
> the character for exploring? John says knowledge of geography,
> wildlife, and the world itself (etc.).. but how does that
> "knowledge" reflect in the game? How does the game know how versed
> the character is in the ways of the world?

Let the game draw conclusions on behalf of the character and show that
to the player.  For example, maps.  If the character has been to
points A, B and C, they relate geographically in some way.  Let the
character's mental map be literally visible to the player.  How good
is that map?  That depends on the orienteering skills of the
character.  If the skills are low, the locations of A, B and C
relative to each other are going to be approximated.  As the character
spends more time exploring and doing the orienteering thing (a skill),
the mental maps become more and more accurate.  Want to give explorers
a role in the world?  Let them convert their mental maps into paper
maps that other players can look at.  That's another skill, requiring
materials.  Low skill gives poor translation of the mental map to a
paper map.  High skill makes the map faithful to the mental map of the
character.

Is that potentially a lot of data?  Depending on how you structure
your world, it certainly can be.

As explorers go wandering, they will also see various animals and
such.  If they spend the time to examine animals (from a distance),
they should slowly build up the ability to gain more information about
those animals.  A warrior sees an animal and kills it.  The explorer
sees an animal and finds out that it's an aggressive female with a
fine fur coat guarding her den.  Such examinations can't be
instantaneous, else players will simply macro it - but that's true of
all skill usage.

The brief form of this is that the skills that you use bring you more
entertainment, and that entertainment is in line with what you're
doing.  Like to kill things?  Fine, the killing process gets more and
more entertaining.  Different weapons, different armor, new moves, and
so on.  The process with magical skills is equally obvious.  Exploring
consists of some other kinds of skills as I've suggested above.
Socializers spend time communicating, so they try to communicate with
people that they've never spoken to before, using new languages.  They
may also have the ability to glean more information about other
people, as with Asheron's Call's 'appraisal' skills.

Figure out what each type of player does in your games and make those
actions more entertaining.  This has been done in spades for the
achievers and the killers.  But the socializers and explorers have
been given the short end of the stick.  Making games entertaining for
them will not be done cheaply.  There are no shortcuts here.  As much
time and energy that went into making the killers and achievers happy
has to go into a game in order to make the explorers and socializers
happy.

A challenge to keep the explorers happy is generating enough
interesting content.  I don't believe that hand-building content is
the way to go.  I'm playing with algorithmic content creation tools
now (fractal terrain, algorithmic cave system generation, etc).

A challenge to keep the socializers happy is to give them enough stuff
to do that they can talk about it and speculate on it in detail.  That
means depth of experience - or not having all the information.  One
suggestion here is to elimate the numeric displays from the game,
except where numeric information is applicable.  For example, objects
weigh X pounds in the real world, but when you stick a knife in
someone you don't know that you did 34 points of damage to them.  You
only have qualitative senses for that sort of thing.

JB


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