[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Travis Casey]

Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> On Fri, 08 Jun 2001 09:09:55 -0400, Travis Casey
> <efindel at earthlink.net> wrote:

>> In the same way, you can play a game where you'll eventually lose
>> your character for fun -- and if you know you want to play for a
>> certain amount of time, you can ration your risk.

> It's still not a fair comparison.

I think it is.  I'll readily admit that *most* people won't want to
play such a game -- which I think probably brings us into agreement.
My only beef was that the way your original messages were stated, it
seemed to me that you and others were saying that *no one* would
want to play such games.

>> All I'm saying is that the consequences of character death are
>> acceptable to some players.  Indeed, some players will tell you,
>> and honestly believe, that the game is less fun without the
>> possibility of losing their character.

> Yes, that's true. And there are people who jump out of helicopters
> on mountain bikes, too. That doesn't mean you can run an effective
> business that drops people on mountain bikes out of helicopters.

Actually, I believe there are some businesses which do just
that... that may not be the *only* thing they do, but they do that.
Personally, I find almost any serious risk to my actual life in the
name of "fun" to be too much -- I won't do bungee jumping or
anything else like that. But there are enough people who *do* like
that sort of thing that there are businesses that cater to them.

A permadeath mud, even of the sort that I'm talking about where not
*every* death is permanent, will be too high-risk for a lot of
players. But I think it can be viable as a niche mud -- especially
for those of us who want to run free muds, and therefore don't care
about whether or not it's possible to make money doing it.

>>>  This may be offset almost completely with a PERMANENT character
>>>  identification, separate from the character's name.

>> Which already exists -- the player's real name and background
>> info.

> Which is none of anyone's business.

I never said that anyone should be required to give those -- I
merely gave examples of how some people already use them to
establish continuity between different characters of theirs.

>> Not true.  In Galaga, you could gain the second ship and keep it
>> -- making your character more powerful.  Across the genre as a
>> whole, many video games have "powerups" of various sorts.

> All of which are lost in a matter of minutes.

If it's just minutes for you, you're not very good at the game in
question.  :-)

> It's a false comparison: a game which is designed to be played for
> a few minutes is not the same as a game designed to be played for
> several weeks.

I didn't say it was the same -- I was simply using that genre of
games to show that people will spend time and money on games in
which they have nothing "real" to show for the time and money.

>> Further, one could say the same of some muds -- in a MOO-style
>> mud, for example, there's often no character advancement of any
>> kind.

> And generally no death, either. Once again, false comparison.

I didn't mention it as a comparison.

>> Permadeath does not leave out the possibility of multiple lives
>> -- it only implies that a final death is possible.

> Actually, it IMPLIES that a final death is LIKELY. It outright
> *states* that they're possible.

The latter I'll grant; my mistake in phrasing.  The former, however,
need not be true -- at least, not for reasonable values of "likely".

>> Paper D&D, for example, has the ability for characters to come
>> back from the dead, but also has permanent death.

> ...and a human being in charge of keeping things "fair". False
> comparison.

A mud can also have human beings in charge of keeping things "fair." 
Most current ones don't, but it is not a requirement of the genre.

>>>  , and gameplay is a single skill which is easily learned.

>> One could argue that the same thing is true in many RPGs, and
>> even moreso in many muds.  Your knowledge of what works well and
>> where things are doesn't go away because your character died.

> But the availability of those things often does. I may know that I
> can kill the dragon with the green sword, and that the green sword
> is on the top floor of the ruined tower, but without the ability
> to climb the tower that information is effectively useless.

You can, and people have proposed here, create a mud in which
character ability does not increase with time.  In such a mud, you'd
decide up front whether or not you wanted to have such ability.

>>>  Furthermore, the ONLY way you could lose a life would be if YOU
>>>  made a mistake.

>> Supposing a perfect environment, yes.  In the real world, though,
>> I've often lost lives in video games because someone bumped me,
>> or I suddenly had to sneeze or cough, or a loud noise distracted
>> me for a second. These sorts of things are part of why many
>> people don't like "twitch games".

> These sorts of things are also "mistakes". They can be guarded
> against and usually prevented.

I do not agree that they are "mistakes".  They are accidents, which
is a different thing.  They can be guarded against, but preventing
them is impossible.

>> For that matter, in some games, it's possible to get into
>> situations where it's simply not possible to survive.

> Also a mistake. Avoid the situation.

Avoiding the situation is not always possible.

>> As I mentioned above, permadeath does not have to mean that there
>> is *no* access to resurrection, just that it isn't automatic.
>> The fact that your character *can* die permanently doesn't mean
>> that *every* death has to be permanent.

> Then it's not really death, is it?

Huh?  If a death is only a death if it's permanent, then the term
"permadeath" makes no sense -- we'd just be talking about "death".

Many existing games have multiple kinds of "death" -- e.g., in AD&D,
a character may die many times before dieing a final death, but
every death has a chance of being final (if the character fails the
resurrection survival roll).

>>>  and that character can be trashed forever by a single bad
>>>  result from a random number generator.

>> Not likely, unless you're wandering into very high-danger areas.
>> And, as noted above, that's possible in some video games as well.

> Most games *force* you into high-danger areas at higher
> levels. It's like a constant "double or nothing" bet.

Most games, yes.  But what *most* games do has no bearing on whether
a permadeath mud *might* be feasible -- after all, there's no reason
why any *particular* mud has to do things the way *most* muds do.

>> IMHO, the problem here is not the possibility of permadeath --
>> it's the setup of the mud.

> See your "Galaga" example.

What about it?

>> I think you're presuming that a permadeath mud would have to have
>> the same emphasis on lethal combat that current muds do.  If
>> lethal combat is more rare, than permadeath would be easier to
>> deal with.

> That's true! If the chance of dying was one in a million, I'd be
> perfectly willing to accept that death was irreversible.

The chance of dieing in what time period?  Not trying to be
argumentative, just to establish what sort of chance you're really
talking about.

>>>>  You have won something -- the ability to say that you were
>>>>  good enough to get to where you could kill the dragon.

>>>  Then why do it? Why not just look at the dragon, say "I could
>>>  kill the dragon", and keep walking?

>> Because then you have no proof that you could.  Is the idea of
>> wanting to prove your ability so foreign to you?

> No. But I can prove it to myself without running out and showing
> people.  If the dragon has 48 hit points and I do 12 points of
> damage per strike, while I have 96 hit points and the dragon does
> 8 points of damage per strike -- I'd say the proof is there. I
> know the answer, so I don't have to go do it unless I have a
> better reason.

Maybe you don't... but there are other people who do like to prove
it to others.  And, for that matter, in a mud that's more using a
system more complex than 70's RPG mechanics, proving to yourself
that you can do it may be considerably more difficult without
actually trying it.

>> Sometimes success can be its own reward.  And one of the good
>> points of having a community in a game is that the game doesn't
>> have to provide all the rewards -- the community can provide
>> some.

> But if the community MUST provide the rewards, the game is
> incomplete and fundamentally flawed. Communities are never what
> you thought they would be.

If that were the case, then all paper RPGs would be fundamentally
flawed, since all of them rely on a community.  I don't accept that
argument.

>> Maybe that's your contract with a mud, but it's not mine.  Mine
>> is more like:

>>   I will have fun playing this game.

> That's what I said. I think what I described is fun. If I can't do
> that on a MUD, it's not a MUD I want to play.

That *you* want to play.  Other people, such as me, may have a
different idea of what's fun.

>> I can have fun playing in a game even with the possibility of
>> losing my character permanently.  Maybe it's the fact that I
>> played paper RPGs for twelve years before my first mud, and
>> permadeath was possible in all of those.

> How many of them were run by a computer?

All of them.  A human brain is nothing but an extremely complex
computer.  :-)

More seriously, I've played several paper RPGs where I *knew*, with
100% certainty, that my character was going to die -- yet I still
had fun playing them.

>>>  If you die in a game of Galaga, you lose a quarter and ten
>>>  minutes.

>> I haven't lost anything.  I paid a quarter to be entertained for
>> ten minutes.

> Perhaps I should say "spend" instead of "lose". Yes, you get
> something for what you spend, just like you get the fun of playing
> blackjack or whatever when you lose in Vegas. But it's still a
> question of *degree*.  When I make a large investment, I expect a
> large return. That's why I play MUDs instead of Quake in the first
> place.

That's one place where we differ -- I don't consider a mud to be a
large investment.  Or, to put it another way, if a mud requires a
large investment of time before you can start having fun, I won't
play that mud.

> But the entertainment has to remain entertaining. Most MUDs are
> BORING AS HELL until you get to a certain level. Then they become
> fun.

It's possible that most muds are like that -- I've played on about a
dozen muds, and played for a long time on four of those.  The ones
that I left, I generally left because I wasn't having much fun.

Personally, I'd say that if a mud isn't fun within the first couple
of hours of when you start playing, that mud is poorly designed.

Of course, it's also possible that we have different standards for
what's fun.  Do you consider playing first level AD&D characters to
be fun?  I do, but I also know people who don't consider AD&D to be
fun until their characters get to a higher level.

>> Now, this isn't *exactly* like a saved single-player game,

> My point exactly.

And my point is that X need not be exactly like Y in order to be an
acceptable substitute, for at least some of the population.  You can
have something enough like a "saved game" to be acceptable to many
players, without having something that's *exactly* like a "saved
game".



At any rate, going beyond the point-by-point stuff, I have three
major things to say:

  1 - There exist some people for whom a permadeath mud, even with
  something close to a current mud setup, would be at least
  acceptable. I'll readily admit that there aren't *many* such
  people, but I don't believe that fact has to be a bar to anyone
  who wants to create such a game.

  2 - A mud with permadeath need not be set up like a "typical" mud
  today is.  There's a broad range of modifications which could make
  the possibility of permadeath palatable to a broader range of
  people.

  3 - Permadeath need not mean that *every* death is permanent.  See
  AD&D for an example of a game which has permadeath, but in which
  it is often possible to recover from death.

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