[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 10:58:48 -0700, Trump <trump at vividvideo.com> wrote:

> So, instead of saying what *I* would do.  Let me ask what *you*
> would do to make your RPG more of an RPG and not just an Adventure
> game?

Make the numbers real. You have to *have* numbers, and hiding them
doesn't work too well. So make them something that doesn't abstract
the quantities in question.

  Example 1: Instead of one person, have a platoon or fleet. That
  way, instead of attacking the enemy and taking damage, you engage
  the enemy and take casualties. So rather than a fighter with 35
  hit points who takes 12 damage, you have a fighting platoon with
  35 people that takes 12 casualties. That's a real number with real
  meaning that you could see in the real world.

  Example 2: Use percentages. Everyone understands percentages; we
  just use the grades we got in school as a reference. We always
  show hit points as 35/35 or 23/35 as per the above, just go ahead
  and do the division to take you from 100% to 66% -- the underlying
  numbers are the same, but now it maps to the real world. We refer
  to the severity of burns and the capacity of badly injured limbs
  with percentages, so using it for damage is perfectly sensible.

Characters must be as simple as possible. Don't worry about skills,
worry about actions. Anything else is to be avoided if at all
possible.  Attach actions to objects, not characters. Not "Bob can
throw fireballs", but "fireballs can be thrown" and "Bob has a
fireball".  Ideally, the character should consist of a name and an
inventory.  Everything else should be devoted to the player's
game-irrelevant customisation of Bob, such as descriptions and
portraits and allegiances. Bob's player should see Bob's inventory
at all times. Other players should see Bob's appearance.

Items must be only as numerous as necessary. When I'm going around
desperately looking for something interesting to do, and some other
guy is standing across the town square SMOKING POT using an in-game
system of some evident complexity involving a "pipe" object and a
"weed" object, it really pisses me off. The game's developers have
apparently invested work in that system; work which I would really
rather see directed toward giving *me* something interesting to
do. Smoking pot in the town square does not qualify as
"interesting", and would be more precisely defined as "childish".

Concentrate on building an interesting WORLD. All the races and
classes and skills and items you can make up will just not hold a
candle to a world in which people want to explore and interact. You
can make a damn good game with only a single character type and a
few dozen items, provided you have a well-designed world.

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