[MUD-Dev] OOC functionality (was: I Want to Forge Swords. [Another letter to game designers])

[John Buehler]

Greg Munt writes:

> The solution (which isn't really a solution at all, to my mind) is
> to have an OOC area. This is like the "halfway between connected and
> disconnected" state that someone else has referred to on this
> list. Basically, you connect to the server. At this time, you are
> not in any kind of 'world', as such.  You can do all kinds of OOC
> things here. You can access community newsgroups, chat to other
> players directly, stuff like that. I'm imagining an IRCish place,
> with a heavy talker influence. You can also choose to enter a
> world. (Of which there may potentially be several.) Or you could
> play any number of (multiplayer) OOC games.

> Once in a world, you can't access OOC commands directly. You can't
> communicate directly to players. The only form of communication
> available is that offered by the world you are in. This may include
> horrible, horrible hacks like telepathy-tells. You want to do some
> OOC stuff? Come out of the world, back into the OOC
> area. Potentially, you could have shortcuts that can access OOC
> commands without exiting the world you are in, but I'd try to resist
> that. The reason for this is to force the player into switching
> context whenever they want to do OOC stuff - so that the world and
> OOC are kept seperate in their mind.

The rule that has been illustrated to me many times is that if players
can communicate, they will.  Players *want* to communicate, so we
should be facilitating it.  I posted my thoughts on this earlier.  I
believe that the OOC communication should be supported while the
player is running a character in the game world, but that the
mechanism should be clearly OOC.  And I don't mean using a separate
channel between characters.  I mean using mechanism that requires you
to know the identity of the player - as defined by the game.

Consider an ICQ profile.  It establishes an identity for a real person
with as much information as the individual cares to share with the
world.  Such a profile should exist for a player of your game.  While
in the game world, if I want to talk to my buddy Dave, I use the
player communication mechanism and indicate that I want to talk to
player Dave.  The goal is to support player community separate from
character community.  Keep all the character communication mechanisms
in the game world.  You can shout as loud as you like, but the virtual
world distances rule how far that sound will carry.

Conceivably, this player communication mechanism could be quite
advanced, and would take us back to the days of paper and pencil D&D
games, with a bunch of people who know each other running around in
the game world, talking constantly about what their character is up
to.

JB

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