[MUD-Dev] New Bartle article

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Martin <amsm2 at cam.ac.uk>

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Brian Hook" <bwh at wksoftware.com>

>> While "thinking outside the box" (a phrase that is practically
>> meaningless now) is laudable, people do happen to like things
>> they're familiar with, be it class names, archetypes or just "being
>> like that guy in that book".  People know and understand elves.
>> Now move on to a universe that is far more alien -- Jorune comes to
>> mind -- and people balk because they don't necessarily want to
>> relearn all their fundamental assumptions.  While part of this can
>> be attributed to their unwillingness to think outside the box, part
>> of it is just a desire to play the game without subjecting yourself
>> to a huge "unlearning" process followed by a massive reeducation
>> period, only to lose interest in the new universe after about 2
>> hours.

> Is this perhaps a large part of why LOTR starts out in a very
> recognisably pastoral England-like Shire? Why the WOT books start
> out in a plain small village, thus giving the reader a gentle
> introduction and a chance to pick things up slowly as they go along,
> rather than suddenly having to be aware and understanding of the
> important facts about an entire new world.

That's exactly why.  Look at "Willow" and "Dungeons & Dragons" (the
movie that just came out).  Both tell fairly similar stories,
over-all, but Willow leads you into the fanastic slowly, D&D, the
opening scene has a dragon being controlled by a wand just created by
the villain, then breaking that control and being killed, the blood
from which sets the river on fire.  None of which is explained, even I
had to carefully think about what I saw to figure out what exactly had
happened, and as a reformed munchkin, I *still* have all of the D&D
source material running around in my head.

The initial reaction from the audience was "You've got to be kidding".
As it became apparent they weren't kidding (sometime around when the
river caught fire) the audience was laughing at it.  It was just too
much, too soon.  From then on, the drama came across as camp, the
menace as farce.

Willow, on the other hand, starts out pretty mundane, and the inital
introduction of actual *magic* is non-threatening (a little pixie, as
I recall).  By the time they introduce offensive magic, people are
comfortable with the idea of magic, and the villain has already been
shown to be a "bad guy".

In DAoC, we deliberately made the Albion realm comfortable and
"generic fantasy".  People come in, and there's no confusion.  Simple
choice of "race" (all humans, Big [Highlander], Smart [Avalonian],
Quick [Saracen], and Average [Briton]), simple choice of "class"
(Fighter, Rogue, Mage, and Cleric).  Green highlights for where you
might want to put your discretionary stat points.  Name generator
button.  Choice of face, hair, and overall size (+/- 10% of nominal).
A short page describing what your choices mean in simple language.
You drop into the world, your trainer is right there talking to you.
You run out into the countryside, things to kill are right there.  You
don't even have to equip your weapon, we did that for you when the
character was created.

*Later*, we start adding complexity.  At 2nd level, you start needing
armor, if you're hunting Skeletons they conveniently drop some.  3rd
level, level 0 NPC's stop giving xp, you need to find another hunting
place.  Level 4, your newbie weapon is completely inadequate, you need
to buy a new one.  Level 5, it's time to choose your "Guild"
(sub-classing, essentially).  And so on, complexity is introduced
*slowly*, so that the player is not confronted with the whole
feature-set of the game at once.  And the background is so instantly
familiar it's almost cliche.

Compare this to EQ, where it took me (a pretty veteran player of both
online and single-player games) an hour and a freaking half to find my
way out of South Qeynos.  To this day, Kelethin (tree city) rains
newbies.  I've talked to players in their teens and 20's that didn't
know where to find their Guildmaster, or that they even would want to.

Now, if Albion was our only realm, this "Simplicity above all"
approach would be pretty patronizing and annoying to veteran players
later, it would lack depth and "width" (a phrase I use to describe
providing alternate playing modes), and basicly be a rehash of what
players have seen before.  But since we have 2 other realms, we have
the opportunity to do entirely different things with the other realms.
Norse have a fundamentally different class structure (all magic-users
are Clerical casters, for example), a different melee skill structure,
even their weapons groups are defined differently (Swords, Axes,
Hammers, and Spears rather than "One Handed Slash", etc.).  Not to
mention, you have non-human races (Trolls and Kobolds, Dwarves are
arguably simply very small humans).  And the background is familiar
enough to strike a chord with the user, but different enough (and in
many ways obscure enough) to be interesting and potentially
surprising.

And then in the Hibernian realm, we can go an entirely *different*
direction, working from an entirely different background that is
*also* familiar, inviting, and yet rarely covered with any depth.  In
content-development terms, each realm is actually a different game,
little more related than two GURPS backgrounds developed by the same
person.

Each realm is also a different community, something some would fault
it for, but I'm not sure that's meaningful.  Once you pass the
critical mass threshold (around 1000 players peak population) I don't
see another meaningful line to draw short of 10,000, if there, and
every *shard* of a game is just as completely cut off (more so, at
least you can fight the other two realms) from every other shard
(barring rare events like server splits and mergings).  I don't think
division is a bad thing, any population subdivides, we're just
"preloading" some of the divisions.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it is possible to be *both*
familiar *and* innovative, if you finesse it.

--Dave Rickey

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