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

[Matt Mihaly]

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Marian Griffith wrote:
> In <URL:/archives/meow?group+local.muddev> on Mon 15 Jul, Matt Mihaly wrote:
 
>> So make death relatively painless. Maybe being blown out of the
>> sky only takes them out of the encounter for X period of time.
 
> That would defeat the original point. The idea was to make the
> outcome of the fight matter to the players. By making it pain-
> less to be defeated the outcome is unimportant, just as dying is
> now on most muds.

This is a fiction that seems to exist in the minds of a number of
people on this list, but it's just that: A fiction.

I venture to suggest that our players in Achaea are more deeply
emotionally involved in encounters like this than you find in a game
where xp is ultra-important, despite the fact that death in Achaea
doesn't actually cost you all that much. It is all about glory and
shame, not whether some silly piece of data has been altered more or
less. Glory and shame are -far- more powerful motivators.

> No, the solution would not be to make it less significant, but to
> give the players more control. I.e. it would not be easy if at all
> possible, to get blown out of the sky withing seconds.  By
> focussing less on attrition of hitpoints, and more on skill and
> parry, then players have a lot of action to determine the outcome
> of a fight.

Yes, making it depend on skill is one way to imbue the qualities of
glory and/or shame into the outcome of an event. That's how Achaea's
combat system works.
 

--matt

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