[MUD-Dev] Gossip, fiction and tactical lore

[Damion Schubert]

>From Matt Mihaly:
 
> 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.

I recently did an IRC chat where I espoused my opinion that player
stories are more important than character stories.

When designers think in terms of gripping fiction, they think in
terms of having a backstory that goes on for ages, is 10 layers
deep, is evident in books around the world, takes half the manual to
describe, etc, etc, etc.

However, while there are some people who actually read all of this
cruft we put out there, players have always seemed universally more
interested in stories about player interactions.  The king declared
war on the orcs?  Fascinating.  *yawn* Joe killed Steve?  Oh, dear.
What's Steve going to do?  Why'd Joe do it?  Steve was cybering
Joe's online girlfriend?  Who was really a guy?  Good stuff!

Okay, so Gossip is powerful.  Got that.  But it goes a layer deeper
than that.  Players also describe game interactions to each other in
player-terms and not fictional terms.  We hear it all the time.
Players don't say "I was greviously wounded when I expelled the last
of my spiritual energy."  They say, "Wow, that was close!  I was
down to 3 hit points, and I thought I was doomed, when I remembered
I had enough mana points to cast Delayed Blast Fireball!  This
killed the main guy, but aggroed his friends..."

Why do people fall back on describing the game from the player
perspective (in what I'll call 'tactical lore') instead of character
perspective?  Lots of reasons that have surprisingly little to do
with a lack of imagination.  First off, you need to use player terms
to teach another player and teach these tactics.  Trust me, when
you're teaching a newbie how to kill monsters in EverQuest, you want
to be sure he's crystal clear on what it means to 'aggro' a monster
- and you don't want that lost in flowery rhetoric.

Secondly, you need it for bragging rights.  "Greviously wounded"
could be any level of pain.  "3 hit points" - now, that was a close
call!  No doubt about it!

So is this a bad thing?  I would vote 'no'.  In fact, I would vote
that you want your gameplay mechanisms to be so much fun that
sharing tactical lore is incredibly interesting in its own right.
Consider if you heard someone describing a chess match or a Magic
the Gathering hand in fictional terms only.  You'd think he was daft
and, what's more, you might even think that he was so wrapped up in
telling a fancy story that he didn't notice how ingenious inspired
and imaginative the play he witnessed actually was!
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