[MUD-Dev] Striving for originality

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: John Bertoglio [mailto:jb at co-laboratory.com]
 
> The goal in the proposal above was to create zones which were
> magic friendly and those where it was sparse and rare. In
> addition, we were trying to avoid the situation where a low level
> mage has spell power that is the equivalent of throwing rocks and
> a high level mage has spells with the power of a 16inch naval gun
> (along with a rate of fire admirals only dream of). An important
> component of the balance problem is the fact that with advancement
> comes many orders of magnitude of power increases.

Well by doing this, you are excluding certain members of your player
populace from certain areas of content. When Everquest first came
out, the druid class was pretty ineffectual indoors. After many
player complaints, the developers relented and made most of their
spells indoor castable. Its just a case of fun vs vision, and most
of the time fun should win. Everquest is orders of magnitude larger
now than it was then, so perhaps the limitation would be less
honerous now. Even so you'd have a hard time convincing me that it
would benefit the players.

> By tying some of the power of magic to location, we have the
> effect of creating tactical differentiation.
 
> What I envision is a situation where a group of personas who do
> not use magic (out of preference or for role playing reasons)
> found a town/fortress in a low/no mana area. Magic users who
> attempt to assault them will pretty much have to bring their mana
> with them.  The magic is powerful but must be used carefully to
> gain the desired result. A previous post suggested, it is
> impossible defend a fortress against magic users who wield spells
> that approximate tactical nukes.

Sure they can defend against powerful magic, with their own powerful
magic.  The whole concept of having expendable (and I assume
renewable over time) magic power in an area strikes me as somewhat
open to abuse. All it takes is one powerful mage in an area to
consume all the resources to compromise the experiece of all the
other mages there. Now imagine this powerful mage in the hands of a
player whose only goal is to ruin others fun, he can just run around
consuming magic, and there is very little anyone can do to prevent
it. It would also be easier to defend against powerful mages by
draining the zone than to fight them I would imagine.

I like the idea in principal and its very similar to the D&D
campaign setting "Dark Sun", but I'm not sure how one can scale it
into a fun multiplayer game. Perhaps the real issue at stake here,
is expectations management with regard to magic. Obviously laying
waste to continents isn't really compatible with a multiplayer game,
but the odd fireball if thats what you'd like in the game, isn't
intrinsically going to break anything.

Dan
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