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

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:

>> So, why bother?  To insure that it is Matt the _character_ who is
>> passing information and not Matt the _player_.

> Why is that important? It's only going to matter to serious
> roleplayers, and serious roleplayers are serious enough not to need
> rather unsophisticated crutches like tokens.

If the password can only be disseminated using an in-game mechanism,
it will matter to everyone.  The start of all this, as I recall, was
the Asheron's Call magic system and how it didn't survive contact with
the players.  No secrets.

Consider another way of doing the magic system.  Scatter the recipes
for spells around the world, but don't let the players know the
recipes.  The characters know them.  There might be components to
various spells and those will be known to the player and will be
published.  But without the full recipe, which involves character
gestures and spoken words (which a player cannot get his character to
manufacture correctly), the components are of no value.

When that happens, characters have to interact before a spell can be
transferred.  The actual transfer process can be diddled with.
Perhaps you understand the recipe correctly and maybe you don't.
Obviously, the introduction of side-effects to misunderstanding would
be a possibility there.

Because characters have to interact, it means that not all spells can
be known by everyone.  If the world is geographically huge and there
is no instantaneous travel, spells could be isolated (generally) to a
certain part of the world.  Characters that don't speak the same
language can have difficulty learning from each other as well.

You could have more fun with the recipe approach if duplication of
written spells was not a trivial or free task.  The creation of a new
copy of a spell recipe might be so arcane a skill or so expensive in
some resource as to naturally limit the number of copies of spells in
the world.  So when you find a spell, you don't just willy-nilly copy
it to all your buddies.  Nor do your buddies just go to the NPC to
Xerox a copy from him either.  Maybe you had to buy the original copy
for a significant amount of money.

And so on.  The entire scenario is predicated on the characters
learning things and the players not learning them.  And it has a
definite impact on the way that the game is played by all players.  As
I said, I'm no roleplayer.

The down side to this is that players don't get to solve the puzzle of
what a given spell combination is.  If a game wants to make that part
of its entertainment, it assuredly should not believe or claim that
those puzzles are part of the ongoing entertainment of the game.  The
puzzles of spell recipes are like repeatable quests.  Once figured
out, they are documented and 'gamed'.  I prefer to avoid those kinds
of entertainment for my mythical game.

JB

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