[MUD-Dev] Enforced log out aka "real sleep"

[Brian Hook]

So, let me state up front that I think the very idea of limited a
player's ability to play a game is fundamentally unsound.  It's a
Bad Idea.

That said, how do you handle games where you'd like there to be a
"temporal balance of power"?  Specifically, you want certain players
to be effective at certain times, and/or you want characters to
become "fatigued" if they don't "rest" for several hours straight
(or purchase the appropriate uppers, or whatever).

In a general setting, I'd eschew this completely as ridiculous and
completely unfun.  But...

One of my guilty, embarrassing pleasures is reading World of
Darkness fiction.  Vampire: The Masquerade, Wraith, Werewolf, Mage,
etc. fiction put out by White Wolf.  There are a couple authors that
are actually reasonably good (Richard Lee Byers)...but I digress.

While in the middle of one of my latest cheezy WoD fiction binges, I
started thinking about the play balance inside the WoD.  Note: I've
never, ever played any WoD game -- go figure, I love the fiction,
but I've never played the game.  I'm nutty.

In this universe, you have several distinct races that are not
particularly well balanced.  For this discussion, I'll just talk
about Kindred (vampires) and Lupines (werewolves).

Vampires are immortal (can only be killed via lots of damage to the
head, exposure to sunlight), but they basically have 12 hours of the
day taken away from them.  They must be indoors during this time.
There are multitudinous vampire clans, each with their own set of
powers, but that's not relevant to this discussion.

Werewolves can shape shift at will into various forms optimized for
different things (looking like a human, fighting, major fighting,
travel, etc.).  They aren't immortal (they age), but they heal
quickly and, of course, aren't particularly scared of bright lights.

As you can see a big part of the balance between werewolves and
vampires is that vampires just can't do anything particularly
interesting for huge chunks of time.  So werewolves (the mortal
enemies of vampires) gain a significant advantage for this reason.

Now, take this and stick it straight into an on-line game and you
have a problem.  Vampire characters aren't going to want to be
limited to the hours they can play.  So do you just give up on the
concept, come up with some hacky work around, or do you pretend it
really IS a World of Darkness and thus daylight never comes into
play?  Mandatory log out seems like a really bad idea though, but in
this particular case, it's what's necessary (hell, I'm not sure how
a mixed werewolf/vampire PnP session would handle this).

Related to this is the idea that characters must "sleep" in-game in
order to avoid fatigue.  In a single player RPG, this is
instantaneous (tap the "camp" button, bam, you're good to go for
another 24 hours).  On-line -- obviously not.  Most games I'm aware
of just avoid the issue.  So again, I'm curious if anyone has come
up with something particularly crafty to address this.

-Brian

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