[MUD-Dev] About Fencing (was: mass customisation)

[Jessica Mulligan]

On Friday, July 19, 2002, at 02:57 AM, Marian Griffith wrote:

> Mainly I am curious to know how the experience of actual fencing
> (which I have done only twice) can be translated to muds. For me
> the actual experience is *vastly* different from watching messages
> scroll by..

This is one of those areas I have thought about for years.  I fenced
in college, spent some time in the SCA and was also a stage fight
captain and combat choreographer for years.  If the object is to
recreate it, I'm not sure the feel of the 'true' experience can be
adequately translated using today's technology.  The essence of
fencing is a combination of long hours of training, speed and
strategy applied to what your eye is seeing and the body is
experiencing, so that parries and attacks happen almost
instinctively.

If the object is to define a number of styles for a number of
weapons and give the player more detailed control over the process,
this could be done fairly easily (ignoring the vagaries of Internet
latency, of course).  I'm not sure how fun it would be for a text
MUD, unless the players were into learning various styles and
becoming subject matter experts at some level.  For graphical MUDs,
it would certainly be visually appealing.

In fact, I solicited a proposal from Gordon Walton in 1988 while I
was a game wonk at AOL and what he came back with was a great
arena/gladiator style game that would see players training their
fighters in various styles, weapons, moves and combinations, then
facing off in battles in the arena in various combinations of 1-on-1
through X-versus-howevermany.  It included an observer mode, so
players could sit in the stands and watch, and also a
camera/recorder mode, so fights could be put in an archive and
downloaded later as 'research.'  It also included a management mode,
so you could own a stable of fighters, and betting. It was a great
proposal and we were all very interested, but the 'betting' part
scared some people, so AOL passed on it, irritating me no end.

But for that, we might be discussing to fine-tune fencing online,
rather than how to actually implement it, <g>.

-Jessica Mulligan

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