[MUD-Dev] AI not worth doing in our games?

[Travis Casey]

On Saturday 14 December 2002 7:37, Matt Mihaly wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, David H. Loeser Jr. wrote:

>> It may have been a despised feature of the game but all the same
>> I think that it is believable... Given all that we know about
>> dark elves... if you choose to play a dark elf, shouldn't you
>> expect some adversity?

> You'd think so, but nearly everybody who plays roleplaying games
> seems to have minimal interest in pretending to actually be
> something else. Mainly they want pointed ears, or blue skin or cat
> fur, and leave it at that.

I'd modify that a bit.  In general, most people seem to have no
interest in roleplaying anything that actually gives them a serious
disadvantage.  They'll either ignore it, or do everything they can
to work around it.

The first behavior from players is extremely annoying -- especially
when they've *chosen* the class/race/whatever that carries the
disadvantage.  "If you didn't want to have the disadvantage, why did
you choose that?"

The typical reason, of course, is "because I get all these other
cool bennies for choosing that!"  People want to take the
advantages, but ignore the disadvantages.

The second behavior at least pays attention to the disadvantage, but
is still annoying when done too much.  If every dark elf in the
world is using magic/makeup/whatever to hide the fact that they're a
dark elf, it gets rather silly.  Especially if there are many of
them.  And, of course, players will almost universally insist that
their characters disadvantages should be easy to work around.

So, how do you avoid the problem?  Well, there's a method that a few
paper RPGs use which I really like.  That method is to not reward
players for *choosing* a disadvantage, but for *using* that
disadvantage.

The basic way it works in most systems which do this is:

 - The player has a pool of points which can be used to activate
 special abilities.

 - In order to get more points, the player can activate, or allow to
 be activated, disadvantages.

 - Therefore, a player who doesn't allow his/her character's
 disadvantages to ever be activated will run out of points, and no
 longer be able to use special abilities.

In most paper RPGs, there's just one pool of points, but in a
computerized one, with the bookkeeping overhead lower, one could
have multiple pools of points, with different advantages and
disadvantages tied to different pools.  Thus, someone who chose to
be a dark elf might have a pool of "dark elf points", which are
gained through the dark elf disadvantages, and spent to activate
dark elf abilities.  A player who chose to be a dark elf, but never
allowed his/her dark elf disadvantages to activate, would simply
stop being able to use dark elf abilities.

And, before anyone says anything, yes, it's not "realistic".  But
not everything has to be.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) 

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