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

[John Buehler]

Kevin Littlejohn writes:

> How do you deal with characters _not_ knowing things they could
> realistically be expected to - like the location of all the places
> nearby their home town, the toughness of most creatures, the names
> of all the people they've grown up with, the history and fabric of
> the world?

How do you deal with characters _knowing_ everything about a game
world when they are supposedly a recently-adventurous 20 year old from
the village of Frimble?  This happens when the player already knows
everything.

> This may be a hard point to make - but one of the most jarring
> points in starting a new game is stumbling into a stupid situation,
> getting completely worked over (either by being killed, or by
> flubbing a conversation with an NPC, or stumbling too far from town
> and getting lost, or whatever), and thinking "but my character would
> really have known that if they grew up here".

If that is true, then I would expect the game to start the character
with knowledge appropriate to their area.  This is semi-dangerous
because players would just start cranking out characters in every
location, attempting to become as familiar with the world as they can.
Not all character knowledge is private to the character.  Things like
maps are accessible to the player.  So if the newbie character at
least knows everyone in their home town and the immediate area around
that town, then starting newbies in every town would give a player a
lot of knowledge.

Of course there's no stopping players in any case, because once
information is in the hands of one player, it is in the hands of all
players.  It might be best to just publish all newbie information and
let players pick the starting point they like most.  This would tend
to mean that newbie starting locations would be fairly remote.  Nobody
starts in an important town, with all the connections and knowledge of
important things already in the character's knowledge.

> The ability to go research stuff on the web makes up for that to
> some extent - it also helps balance bugs in the game (example: EQ
> has an Iksar quest that involves walking around 10 troopers getting
> them to sign a restraining order.  The second trooper demands a
> quill to sign with - yet I cannot find the quill, and if I hand the
> paper over without the quill, he acts as tho he got the quill.  The
> bug isn't mentioned anywhere that I found, but I found a website
> that lists items - search for quill, and none of the results appear
> to match the requested item.  Ergo, I presume a bug, and try it out
> without - and pass. If I hadn't had the web resources available, I
> would have spent hours swearing at the game and it's designers
> trying to find the non-existant quill), as well as providing a sense
> of community (and acknowledging that no matter what, people _will_
> share information in the manner that's easiest to them - if that's
> web boards, then so be it).

I won't refute the value of the web for *players*.  I don't want the
web being a source that significantly impacts the way that
*characters* behave in the game world.  To use Paul Schwanz's extreme
example, I don't want players visiting the Kung Fu web site to learn
how to do Kung Fu and then hop into my game and suddently their
character knows how to use Kung Fu.

> Basically, until you can instill a player with all the knowledge
> they should have within the game as they start, the outside areas of
> knowledge gain (even down to strategy guides and similar) are a
> valuable offset.  I don't believe you'll find a way to solve that
> one for casual gamers - there's no way they're going to want to
> learn up your religion system, your politics, your world, before
> they play - and if they don't, they could easily gaff on these
> details, unless you make all those details devoid of
> application/meaning in your world.

Okay, now I'm *really* confused.  I want to represent game knowledge
in the game world using the character.  So a casual gamer gets help
from their character in understanding what's going on the game world.
The character interprets the game world using its own knowledge.  So
if the character recognizes a certain item as being representative of
god X, then the character can convey that information to the player.
The player then double-clicks on the underlined word "god X" and finds
out what the character knows about that god.  Seems like a pretty good
way to work with a casual user to me.  Follows the rule of progressive
disclosure, which are critical to any good software application.

> Incidentally, my SO, Susan, pointed out the other day that various
> people on here are struggling to put disincentives in front of
> people for communicating - in what is essentially a communication
> forum.  Perhaps you should be _encouraging_ people to share and
> build community that way?

I hope they communicate their brains out.  But by putting informatoin
into the game context, they won't be inclined to communicate outside
of the game for in-game gain.  There are plenty of entertainment
venues for that very thing: such as single player games, hobbies,
charitable causes, etc.  They are all real world activities for which
the web permits communication.  One goal of these games is to permit
people to enjoy the fantasy of being a character in a different
setting for a little while.  Single player games permit this, but
multiplayer games permit the character environment to be more engaging
and dynamic.

JB


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