[MUD-Dev] Continuity of experience in movies

[eric]

From: "Valerio Santinelli" <tanis at mediacom.it>
> From: "eric" <ericleaf at pacbell.net>

>> Not true. Who kidnapped Mr McDonald, and why? That is, what *is*
>> the story here. Was it orcs, to eat him? Or maybe King Ivris the
>> Red to force to devulge the floor plans of his enemy King Bulwark
>> the Blue's castle? If there is a motive, then removing the GM,
>> and

...

> You are making an assumption that your player base is willing to
> build up the story. Or better yet, it's the players that are
> making their own quests.  That would be the best, but I think that
> this is not realistic. In my experience, only a few players are
> really interested in creating their own quests, most of them are
> simply looking for pre-made tasks to accomplish to gather XPs or
> magic ...

I'm not using any connotation of "build", any building would take
time, I definately see that there will be no epic struggles between
the united orc kingdoms, and King Ivras' kingdom, until both those
entities exist.  I'm not sure where your definition of RPG players
lies, but I'm saying that doesn't strickly matter. Wether a person
wants to roleplay a King isn't relevant, people do want power, if
power can be achieved by gathering a group of warriors to the same
flag and goals, then there you have it. You see this already in all
MMOGs, most are called the clans. It should go without saying that
people that spend a lot of their own personal time to manage and
build a clan are doing it for some reason. Wether its only for
power, or community with a shared beliefs, its still a creation of
players, and as a group they have power. Now all they need is a
world where that matters and you have the basic materials of all
stories.

This is more anecdotal than assumption, I've seen this in many
games. From the losely grouped members in UO communities that create
player ran towns, or the more extreme communistic societies of
roleplayed orcs. UO spawned a lot of these player created
communtities that I am sure exist in different varieties in all the
MMOGs, as they existed before in the smaller scaled ones.

But still again, at the heart of this idea is that no one person
will be creating stories, just as our real human history didn't have
a grand writer so won't this world. The vast input of many players
will create the overriding themes of an area, and its history. At a
local level you will see the things that offer the entertainment
that is the limit of current MMOGs, you go to creature x's
cave/field/city base them, gather loot, go home. But no action will
have local effects, you could have just violated treaties, or even
just killed the son of a powerful orc lord, which will then come
looking for you. Of course this is another player so you can expect
this to be a potentially memorable experience and enjoyable for all
involved.

But in more defense of this idea, where primary motivation isn't
enough to evoke action on the players part, there are rewards. There
are artificial rewards I've set up that consist of basic worldly
power, for instance you played an evil human, you have now gained
the ability to play an assassin.  You may have killed for money
before, but as an assassin you have much more power at your
disposal. There are other reasons I've chosen that route, one of
them being a way to balance player skill versus world power. I
surely wouldn't want a newbie playing a dragon, that ends up being
easy to kill, and thus not giving the dragon slayers an adequately
fun experience.

> Yes, that's a way to go, but to be able to let your world work
> without automation, you've got to motivate your players to build
> the world themselves. This also means that you're looking for a
> percentage of users that are likely to be online for a long time,
> and not the casual player.  All this can be accomplished, but it's
> going to take a strong effort from the world admins in the
> starting phase of your game. Nothing that cannot be done, but I
> see it as an harder task than it looks like.

Its going to more closely approach free will, there will be no admin
maintance. If there is an orc village constantly raiding your
farmers, you have options, two of which are move(flight) or
fight. That is hire mercenaries, raise an army, convince a sappy
adventure group to save your town. Any of those might solve the
immediate problem. But just as the group of orcs built up a power
base, so will you be able to defend yourself from them.




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