[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2001 09:57:40 +0200, Vincent Archer
<archer at nevrax.com> wrote:

> All you derived from the game was in your own skills (yeah yeah, I
> know).

Another useful point: out of game skills are great for maintaining
player interest. If you get to keep certain things you gained during
the game and bring them back, people are less annoyed by starting
over. The obvious way to do this is with crap. "Oh, you had X amount
of money when you died, you can keep half of it." (See the memory
boxes in "Brave Fencer Musashi".) Unfortunately, without keeping
everything ELSE, that's pretty contrived and doesn't really work
because you may be in an atypical state at the time -- perhaps you
spent all your money on something important, and now you restart to
find that it's gone and you still have no money.

A concept I once thought of entailed quizzing the player on various
aspects of the game world during character creation, asking a series
of ten questions with increasing difficulty, sort of like:

  How many character races are available?
  Which race cannot multiclass?
  Which race is worst with magic?
  etc.

You would keep track of both the highest correct answer and the
number of correct answers, then calculate the proper level for the
character with:

    percentage = number_correct;
    if ( percentage != 0 ) 
    {
        percentage += highest_correct * 10;
    }
    level = max_level * percentage / 100;
    if ( level == 0 ) level = 1;

This would never actually work today, because in a matter of days
people would have the answers posted online. But the concept is
reasonably sound.

"Starflight II" did well with this. While you might have to restart
(the game often corrupted itself and had to be reinitialised), you
would amass a vast series of notes on things like where the alien
races where and what they sold and what they bought and where you
could find suitable colony planets. After finding a series of
colonisable planets, you could run out into the universe and suck
down half a million in cash over the course of a few hours, which
enabled you to upgrade your ship and crew to a good level. Then you
could pick up right where you left off.

Unfortunately, multiplayer environments come with their own special
qualities that make this impractical. since the resources do not
reset when you start a new character (perhaps that could be done
somehow...  hmm), once a resource is exhausted -- it remains
exhausted. Furthermore, equal access to resources by all players
means that an exhaustable resource is exhausted rapidly, and a new
source must be found. Such outside information becomes useless
almost as soon as it is acquired.

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