[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Travis Casey]

Brian Hook wrote:
> 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.

Well... that's a matter of opinion.  There are some religious groups
who hold that we *do* choose to be who we are in real life.

And while we may not get to choose who we are, many of us enjoy a
great deal of freedom in choosing what we *do* (please note that I
am *not* saying that everyone has total freedom to choose what they
will do).  I could have chosen to be a physicist... and indeed, I
originally intended to.  But I discovered in college that I was
better at computers than I was at physics, so I didn't do that.

> 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 =)

And you can still min-max in such a position.  Min-maxing is about
making the most advantageous choices that you can make.  As long as
players have *any* choices to make, min-maxing is possible.  (And if
players have no choices, you no longer have a game...)

Note here that min-maxing is not restricted to character creation.
When a player chooses to have his/her 10 Strength halfling warrior
wield a short sword because it's the "best" weapon that character
can use, that player is min-maxing.

*That's* what I mean in saying that min-maxing isn't always a bad
thing.  Indeed, min-maxing on the basis of what your *character*
knows is a part of role-playing.

>> 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.

I've never played BG2, so I don't know how much of an advantage
those combinations gave.

The example that I had in mind was the game Champions.  In
Champions, there's a lot of division in calculating secondary
attributes.  Those attributes are rounded off to the nearest whole
number (.5 is always rounded in favor of the player).  Because of
this, there are a lot of "breakpoints" -- points of optimum
efficiency for certain things.  There were also "power frameworks"
which allowed a player to buy his/her character a group of related
powers at a discounted price.

Someone who took advantage of this could easily save as many as
fifteen or twenty points compared to a player who didn't take
advantage of it, and sometimes as many as thirty or forty -- a
significant advantage in a game where players were given a budget of
100 points to build their characters.  Because of this, those who
weren't good at the math needed to min-max in the game, or who
didn't have the time to devote to figuring out the tricks, generally
wound up having their characters be second-class citizens in the
game.

I don't mind there being popular combinations -- there almost always
are, even when there are no variations in power, because people
either imagine variations that aren't there, or because people
consider one class or race to be "cooler" than others.  I don't even
mind when it's possible to min-max to be very good at one thing, at
the expense of being able to do a lot of other things.  In some
games, however, it's possible to min-max so that your character is
better at *lots* of things than that of someone who didn't min-max,
and isn't significantly worse at anything.  *That* I mind strongly.

> 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?

I don't play EQ, so I don't know.  :-)

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
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