FW: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:

> Achaea already lets characters pass knowledge to each other. It's
> called 'say', 'tell', 'messages', 'newsboards', 'channels',
> 'shouts', and so on. The idea that I should have to pass knowledge
> to another character (and apparently only in certain circumstances)
> via some special command seems silly. Telling another character
> something through any communication method is sufficient for that
> character to know something. You just want to make people jump
> through hoops by pretending that a character doesn't know something
> when clearly he or she already does.

Those 'hoops' are attempts at retaining the checks and balances that
we implicitly assume are in force in the game world.  Other examples
of 'hoops' are having to physically traverse the space between two
points when travelling.  Without that hoop, a world's size shrinks
dramatically.  This is why I am against teleportation.  Or, more
topically, another 'hoop' is that death have a effect on the player's
choices - consistent with the way the real world works when somebody
contemplates lethal courses of action.  When death is not a deterrent,
characters appear to act in insane ways, throwing themselves on the
swords of their enemies just to see the blood spout from their bodies.
This moves the balance point of checks and balances to a new location
that may be so disorienting to players that they will be alienated
from the game experience.

ANY game system - ANY set of checks and balances - can be played by a
player.  I've seen some doozies described here.  I don't believe that
they scale up to the casual player base.  The casual player's ability
to suspend disbelief only goes so far.  When their character gets an
in-game 'secret', they assume that means that it's a *secret*, with
all the implications that go along with it.  They assume that they can
tell it to others and that people who haven't been told the secret
don't know it.

> Further, frankly, I don't see that it matters whether a character
> gets that information from another character or from a totally
> out-of-character method like a website.

Obviously a major point in why we disagree.  You're either not
concerned with moving the checks and balances of implications for
character actions far from reality, or you figure that the players
will be able to deal with that new balance point.  "They can deal with
dragons and magic, so why not characters that magically discover
secrets?"

> Are you advocating cracking down on players expressing, say, modern
> political ideas such as liberty and justice for all? Clearly in a
> fantasy setting, such ideas do not fit and how could a character
> have learned about them?

Cracking down on it?  The ideal scenario is that a roleplayer is
running the character and I am telling the roleplayer what I want to
do.  The roleplayer would then act as a natural filter, refusing to do
things that aren't consistent with the character.  Such as discussing
the Yankees' roster.

I'm sure that many here would cringe at the idea of losing direct
control over their character, or having *it* decide that something was
inappropriate.  I think that a casual player would get a kick out of
it.

> And what about things like simple addition? Do you have a way of
> ensuring a character can add? Probably not. It's not needed, of
> course, because characters know a lot more than what you can track.

I can model a mathematics skill (or many subskills) and have tasks in
the game world that use that skill, so yes, I can model any number of
points of character knowledge.  If my character has the ability to aim
a cannon, then having the mathematics skill might come in handy.  A
character without the addition skill may always show quantities to its
player as 'many' or 'few'.

>> Personally, I think that in-game knowledge is going to present
>> interesting opportunities in the future, just as I believe that
>> character perceptions present opportunities.  Character knowledge
>> adds to the value of a character to the player without necessarily
>> having that character be powerful.

> In-game knowledge is not trackeable without the use of AI way beyond
> what we have now. All that can be done now is mock up a system to
> make users jump through hoops. Until you have a system that knows
> whether my character knows something (instead of pretending that the
> only way to gain a piece of knowledge is via some special command as
> opposed to general communications), then you're not modeling in-game
> knowledge. You're mocking it.

I'm not quite sure what to say in response to being accused of mocking
the modeling of in-game knowledge.

JB

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