[MUD-Dev] Mass customization in MM***s

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:
> On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, John Buehler wrote:

>> The only people who are going to want to help out in the assault
>> on the Death Star are the ones who believe that they are going to
>> get some remarkable experience commensurate with their risk.  The
>> inability to ensure that everyone gets something worthwhile out
>> of the overall encounter is the real difficulty.  If I'm flying
>> my X-Wing fighter and get blown out of the sky in the first 10
>> seconds of the fight, am I going to be happy about having simply
>> been part of the casualties?  Especially if I've lost one of my
>> lives - which might be expensive?

> So make death relatively painless. Maybe being blown out of the
> sky only takes them out of the encounter for X period of time.

I thought Marian's original premise was to make the adventure have
high emotion through the possible loss of something valuable:

  "Actually, I tend to think that the death star is an excellent way
  to make the fight very, very meaningful to the players
  involved. But to work it needs a different approach to games than
  you normally see.  Players would purchase an account with a number
  of 'lifes' to it."

Given that, death is not supposed to be painless.  Or are you
suggesting that players can get right back into it, but perhaps at
the cost of another quick death?  Does that set up a player for huge
disappointment who really isn't capable of handling the ferocity of
the encounter and loses all his lives?  I know that you don't really
care about such a scenario unless it starts to impact your business
model.  But I care about structuring the entertainment so that my
players will reliably get a certain level of entertainment.  Thus my
original posting.

JB

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