[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Brian Hook]

At 09:17 PM 6/4/01 -0400, Travis Casey wrote:

> This leads to another point -- namely, that min-maxing is not a
> bad thing, so long as it's not taken to excess.  People really do
> these things in real life: they choose careers that line up with
> their natural abilities, they choose what skills to learn based on
> what they see others around them succeeding with, and so on.
> Warriors throughout history have chosen their weapons based on
> what was most effective in battle.  And so on.

The obvious difference is that we don't get to choose who we are in
real life.  This is the argument used for "real" role-playing where
you're given a random character.  Hell, there's no point in giving
point allocation, because the real world doesn't operate that way.

As much as I abhor that concept (it fundamentally poo-poos the
concept of balance because, hey, life isn't fair), it DOES force you
to role-play quite a bit more.  If your average ability score is 10
and you're a halfling warrior, well, personality and RP is about all
you have going for you =)

> When min-maxing really becomes a problem is when min-maxed
> characters are considerably more powerful than non-min-maxed ones.

Even "slightly" more powerful, where the additional power is for
free, causes a huge skew in the player population towards certain
race/class combinations.  I saw this with BG2 -- human kensai/mage
and half-ogre fighter/cleric were incredibly popular combinations.
Of course, you could argue that those two combinations were very
powerful, but even having a simple +1 DEX or 19 STR is enough to
select some combinations.

What happens is that your entire player population starts to go to
hell and true diversity isn't there.  Female dwarven/gnomish
warriors?  Erudite shadow knight or paladin?  You see those only
when someone is being particularly saucy in EQ.  They are very rare.

And even worse, they're at a disadvantage because the min/maxers are
going to get the available slots for adventuring.  Would you rather
have a troll warrior or high elf warrior in your party, all else
being equal?

Brian Hook

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