[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Neil Brown]

--- Travis Casey <efindel at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I think you've got a hidden assumption in here -- that the game in
> question is using a D&D-style "damage capacity increases with
> experience" system.  For a game which uses fixed damage capacity,
> but varies damage according to how well an opponent hits, you can
> have both things -- damage colors that are constant, but are still
> meaningful across characters (as long as you have some idea of what
> the character's relative combat abilities are).

Ahh, correct you are.  Yes, I was assuming exactly that style, with
damage increasing over time based on some skills or raw experience.
With a more constant damage over the range of the game, the colors
become more meaningful as they can be consistently interpreted by a
player at any stage of his character's virtual career.

> Something else that could be done is visual overlays on
> characters...  Niven and Barnes' Dream Park mentions something along
> those lines -- when you stop to check your condition, moderately
> injured body parts are limned in yellow, severely injured in red,
> and ones that have become useless in black.  There's also mention a
> few times of a flickering effect being used to indicate borderline
> conditions -- e.g., red and black flickering together for a body
> part that's about to become useless, but can still be saved.

This logically leads to targeted attacks ( or at least a bunch of
whining by players that there SHOULD be targeted attacks so they can
concentrate on disabling that flashing yellow arm with the sword in it
).  I went over our thought processes regarding this in another post -
Suffice it to say that while I think it adds a lot of extra dimension
to combat, we're not considering it for our current project for
technical reasons.

-o-
Neil
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev