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

[Travis Nixon]

the_logos at www.achaea.com wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, John Buehler wrote:

>> I submit to you that all players will be able to deal with this
>> general mechanism.  It's purely a matter of presentation.  The
>> concepts behind it are not as unappealing as you so vehemently
>> claim.

> Well, ok, put it in a game. I bet the first thing players are going
> to ask is "What, my character can't talk to another character?"

You know, at one point a friend and I were attempting to conceive of a
tree-based dialogue system where you didn't actually type anything to
anybody, not even to other players.  Instead, you'd use a sort of
tree-based conversation system, constructing dialogue through a series
of menus, similar to (but obviously much more complex than) what many
games do now for npc conversations.  Originally I wanted it as a way
to blur the lines between PCs and NPCs, and a way to encourage staying
in character, because the ability to ask "So how about that nasty drop
in the stock market yesterday" would not be able to be constructed,
unless of course the game had a stock market. :) Such a system would
do exactly what I think John is trying to, because if the character
did not know the password, they could not construct a conversation
containing it.

To try to clarify what the actual system I'd been thinking about is,
here's a quick example:

  Matt tells Paul that he's found the key to the Garden of the Holy
  Lemon Tree, and Paul wants to ask where the key is.  So, Paul brings
  up the dialogue menu, selects "Question", then "location of", and
  finally "Key to the Garden of the Holy Lemon Tree", which appears on
  the list of things to be asked about because Matt told him about the
  key, so he knows it exists.  And so Paul makes his selections, and
  the conversation output shows "Where is the key to the Garden of the
  Holy Lemon Tree?"

Now before you start laughing, just let me say that I've come to the
conclusion that such a system would almost certainly be a bad idea,
for numerous reasons.

First of all, it would be nightmarishly difficult to design and
implement.  Even that very simple example is extremely contrived, and
although questions can fairly easily be constructed, there are very
few other elements of dialogue that are so easy to construct.  For
example, I have trouble conceiving a sequence of menu choices that
would lead into Matt telling Paul about the Garden.

Second, it would require absolutely monstrous amounts of data to be
kept for each character, representing the character's knowledge.  How
many things do you see every day that you might someday want to ask
somebody about, or tell somebody about?  Keep in mind I wasn't
considering using this just for "quest" information, but for every bit
of communication you would ever do, whether it be talking to an NPC or
talking to another player.  To ask, "where are the chickens kept", you
would have to know that there were chickens (or at least that there
was the possibility of having chickens).  The bonus here is that if
you're talking to an npc, you don't have to ask "Where is the chicken
coop?" and when that doesn't work, "Where is MacDonald's Farm?" and
when that doesn't work, "Where are the chickens?", and "Have you seen
any chickens?" and "Tell me where you keep the goddamned chickens that
I'm supposed to find because the inn I'm working for is serving
chicken tonight!", because they would immediately know what you were
talking about, and either they could tell you where to go, or that
they didn't know and maybe point you to somebody who might know.
Anyway, the point here is that creating this huge knowledge base and
keeping it updated would be a task the size of which I don't even like
to contemplate, not to mention how much disk space it would require.

Third, and I think probably most importantly, is that I couldn't
figure out a way for it to not be more cumbersome than just typing.
Maybe the wannabe hardcore roleplayer crowd would appreciate it.
People who really want to roleplay and really want to stay in
character, but don't have the ability or don't want to expend the
effort.  The true hardcore roleplayers would hate it because they
don't generally have trouble staying in character, and could most
certainly come up with more interesting dialogue than what the
constructor could.  But overall, it would just distance the players
from each other, which is definately not something I would ever want
to do.  I don't want a game where there are lots of people playing but
nobody connects with anybody else.  I want a game where all those
people are playing together, making friendships, having adventures
together.  I want to play the game against the players, throwing
curveballs and whatnot, but I want them to win, and I want them to do
it through teamwork and a sense of community.  Putting a barrier on
communication, so that it's hard to say "Hi Joe, what have you been up
to since I saw you last", and hard to formulate the answer, is the
last thing I want to do.

While the first two problems can certainly be overcome, I'm not sure
the third can be solved, without having a system so advanced that
you're just typing what you want to say into it anyway, at which point
the whole dialog construction concept becomes moot.

For what John is trying to do, though, the system wouldn't have the
second problem, and it would only have a little of the first.
Reducing the system so that it only applied to certain things, such as
the password to get the statue to move, makes it almost a trivial
system, meaning that any competent programmer could implement it right
now, without having to think too much about what to do and how to do
it.  But you'd still have the evil number 3.  It would still be
cumbersome.  And if you only use it for certain things, then I have to
agree when Matt says you're destroying suspension of disbelief.  Of
course, change the password into something that can't be communicated,
like a physical object, and you've solved the problem, but then you're
very limited in your choices of how to set things up in the first
place.

Of course, in my ideal world, all of this is irrelevant, because Matt
could tell Paul the password to move the statue, but the key would no
longer be there.  Matt has it.

Let me just take this opportunity to say that I am not currently
working on an online game, but that if anybody has a spare few million
dollars and a development staff burning a hole in their pocket, I'd be
more than happy to take them off your hands. :)

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