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

[J. Coleman]

the_logos at www.achaea.com wrote:
 
> On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, John Buehler wrote:
 
>> 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.

> Yes, exactly! The casual player's ability to suspend disbelief only
> goes so far! When Lancelot the Knight tells Bill the Priest the
> secret, and the game refuse to recognize that Bill has been told the
> secret, Bill is going to have trouble suspending his disbelief, as
> he clearly knows the secret (and I don't just mean he the person. I
> mean he the character.).

> My entire point here is that your method requires a massive
> suspension of disbelief, whereas mine (if you call my opposition to
> your method a method) requires none at all.

I think this all depends on exactly *how* you model character
knowledge, not *if* you do.

If you have, say, a flag that indicates a particular quest has been
done, I agree that there should be a way for the character to
communicate information about that quest to another character. What I
think is unreasonable is allowing the *player*, using the character as
a mouthpiece, to tell information about the quest to another player,
using his character as an ear.

Why not provide an in-game mechanism for knowledge transfer? Perhaps a
bit of special-case code in the communications parser that lets
someone type "tell bubba about orc_quest", and thus the game knows to
set the flag indicating that Bubba has the information.

Or even better, physical knowledge modeling. If the quest requires you
to say the password to the right NPC, then simply have the password
given to the character on a slip of paper instead of telling him. That
way he can let others copy the paper, who would then have the correct
password. Sure, this might require some quest-rewriting, but it would
solve both problems - keeping knowledge transfer in-game, as well as
still allowing someone to give information to friends. Even better -
use a generic note item as the password item, and let the character
choose whether or not to give the correct password to others by
writing false passwords.
 
>>> 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.

Isn't the (in-game) discovering supposed to be part of the fun? If
players can just get the quest information from a website, that what's
the point of doing the quest? Just have an NPC that the players can
walk up to and say "I went to <website>" and the NPC just gives them
the quest reward. There's no point in doing the quest if you're going
to cheat about it - that's like taking a test with all the answers
written on your shoe.

>> Obviously a major point in why we disagree. <SNIP> "They can deal
>> with dragons and magic, so why not characters that magically
>> discover secrets?"

> What I'm concerned with is the player experience. I don't see which
> group of players your method of doing things appeals to. Certainly
> not roleplayers, and certainly not GoP players. GoP players will
> just think it's silly to worry about in-character vs. ooc knowledge,
> and roleplayers will want to know why, when their character DOES
> know something (because he's been told by 50 other characters who
> have already done the quest), the game tells them the character
> doesn't. It's taking single-player mechanics and pretending that
> you're still playing a single player game.

Has anyone *really* created "multi-player mechanics" yet? I know
there's been some discussion here about fixing the single-player quest
problem for multiplayer games, but has anyone actually done it yet? 
Obviously, I can't speak for anyone else, but I would LOVE to play a
MUD/POW/MMORPG/etc that has truly multi-player quests, and not just
one that has single-player quests that can be redone over and over.

I think this is a good example of one of the things that will define
the next generation of MOGs - truly multiplayer content.

>>> 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.

> What you want is hardcore roleplaying it sounds like, which by
> definition is not for the casual player.

I agree here - this is not for the casual player. It also seems like
something we won't see in the next 5 years or so, if we ever
do. Having a computer roleplaying game is one thing, but a computer
roleplayer?  This is going to require (IMHO) nearly a full Turing
machine to do properly. By the time we get such high-quality AI, we
could just use it to run the NPCs and get a much higher
return-on-investment.


>>> 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'.

> And when said character is talking to another character and suddenly
> magically knows how to add? The thing is, people who want to
> roleplay that badly (and you're talking about really hardcore
> roleplayers if they're going to pretend they can't even add
> properly), then I don't think you need to code in all those
> restrictions. They only work against a good roleplayer, because they
> won't manage to stay consistent with the character he has devised
> for hiself.

Personally, I think this is picking nits. There are always going to be
things the player can do that the character cannot. I don't think it's
at all unreasonable that all values be shown to a player as many or
few if they have no skill in math.

Players are always going to "game" the environment, whether or not
it's intentional. Unless you go to the trouble of filtering
*everything* the player sees, including say, gossip, and emote
channels, there are going to be gaps. There may well be gaps anyway -
look at the profanity filter on EverQuest. Simple enough to get
around, you can say @$$ (not something the filter will catch) and
everyone who sees/hears that will know what you said.

>>> 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.

> Do you understand what I'm saying? You don't seem to from your
> responses.

> What I'm mainly interested in hearing is:

> What type of player does modeling character knowledge in this
> inconsistent manner appeal to? It certainly doesn't appeal to
> GoPers, it isn't going to appeal to hardcore roleplayers (anyone who
> says otherwise, come talk to me after you've beaten your head
> against a wall after the game consistently actively denies the
> experiences your character HAS had).

That, I think, is the whole point of this discussion - who says it has
to be inconsistent? If you have "some special command" for
transferring knowledge, then the game *is* modeling the character's
knowledge. Players can and will attempt to circumvent the system if at
all possible - looking on web sites, telling players (via say or
gossip) the secret password, etc etc etc. If anything, it's the
players who are being inconsistent here, not the game world. "General
communications", in my experience (feel free to point out
counter-examples), is used for OOC topics more often than not. In any
instance where it *is* being used for in-game information, the players
are obviously (again, IMHO) immersed in the world to the point where
it's perfectly reasonable that they would use whatever means are
available to communicate knowledge. If the players are interested in
passing information on to another person, then they should use the
game's mechanism for doing so.

There is absolutely no reason not to attempt knowledge modeling in a
game. Once it is attempted, there is no reason not to use it. Simply
because "it hasn't been done before" is not a reason it shouldn't be
done now - to borrow a phrase, doing something new is hard. I, for
one, would be willing to put a little (or a lot) of extra effort into
a project, if it would even slow the rampant spoiler website culture.

I don't have anything against hints / spoilers / walkthroughs - in a
single-player game, or even a multi-player game with no significant
persistence, like Quake X. I *DO* have a problem with people all over
the world knowing the "secret" password to get into the thieves guild
of Sometown, without having exerted any in-game effort to find out.

This applies to anything in online gaming - if something is
significant in the game world, it should take significant effort or
skill *in that game world* for someone to obtain.

     -Justin

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