[MUD-Dev] Toward a Craftier Dragon

[Andrew Reisse]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 01:24:28PM -0400, Paul Schwanz - Enterprise
Service's wrote:
 
> On the other hand, perhaps the dragon has simply been a bit too
> annoying to too many people.  A dragon should be more
> careful...and crafty.  It seems to me that the sort of dragon that
> survives to become extremely powerful (cunning, predatorial, and a
> bit paranoid) is precisely the sort of dragon I'd expect to meet
> in a fantasy setting.

I find it hard to imagine a dragon that has to be careful just to
survive.  But, if you let player characters destroy cities, you
might have to limit t he number of people that can play as them, as
the griefers would have a field day just breathing on everyone
else's homes. :)

Anyway, some real input:

  (1) If players have to prove themselves to the operators before
  they can play as dragons, maybe griefing would be discouraged just
  a little.  Most likely, the griefing would come back once they had
  proven themselv es, but no one has solved griefing yet, I sure
  can't do it.

  (2) If your power is determined by your hoard, as the initial post
  suggeste d, then it doesn't matter how strong you are if your
  treasure is stolen wh en you are out. You would be the best guard
  for your hoard, but you also w ant to collect more to get even
  stronger, so some thought about the locatio n of your hoard would
  be necessary. Maybe you dig a hole in a mountain and c over it
  with boulders (before you find out someone has a 'teleport'
  spell).

  (3) If 100+ people working together are needed to injure you, this
  might encourage teamplay more then 100 people fighting
  AI-controlled npcs. Ev er play quake and team up on someone who is
  much better than everyone else there? It feels REALLY good when
  you finally kill them.  (/me remembers a game where someone only
  got killed once in 30 minutes). It also probably feels bad when
  you get killed by a group of people that you can easily kill.

  (4) I would have permanent death for dragon players but not anyone
  else. You should have to do something pretty stupid to die playing
  a dragon, while someone playing a human might just get stepped
  on....

  (5) I don't know if dragons should be allowed to steal from other
  dragons.  It sounds illogical to restrict that, but many muds
  don't let you steal from other players, and if it is hard to
  defend your hoard against huma ns, it should be even harder to
  defend it against other dragons.

  (6) What happens when a dragon player is logged off? Is your hoard
  vulnerab le, or is it simply removed from the game like PCs in
  most muds? If the lat ter, this could be exploited by having a
  second character to spy out new pla ces to steal from, then
  quickly log on and steal some more treasure, then q uit when you
  are tired of patrolling. The former doesn't sound good either; how
  many current muds let you have your equipment stolen when you are
  offline?
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