[MUD-Dev] Striving for originality

[Damion Schubert]

>From John Bertoglio

> Most advancement/damage models are built on the desire to reward
> user participation and loyalty. Because they have no touchstone to
> provide a reality check for their metrics, most online worlds have
> vague, unsatisfying physical rules that create (at best) an
> unconscious feeling that things are not right.

In who?  In what?  How so?  This seems quite subjective to me.  I,
for one, think that Counterstrike doesn't feel quite right because,
since I suck, I usually die quickly and sit around having no fun.
 
> MUD designers would do well to look at Half-Life mods like Counter
> Strike and Day of Defeat. While there is lively debate in those
> communities (Is the sniper rifle too powerful? Why can I only
> carry two grenades? Etc.) but the debate is centers on changes of
> +/- 20% or less. Because these designers use real world physics as
> their baseline, they get close to balance on the first pass. The
> weapons they model were all designed for the same purpose and
> reflect standard engineering trades-offs. Tweaking the balance is
> required because the simulation cannot fully reflect reality.

That level debate isn't very unique for those mods.  The same sorts
of debates exist for Vanilla Quake, as well as CTF.  In neither of
those cases does realism ever come into the debate.  The debate is
much more about "Is it fair?"  Come to think of it, most of the
debate in Counterstrike is the same.

Internal consistency is good, having a well-thought out philosophy
on how you're going to seperate out power is good.  Realism is
usually a dead-end road, though, if you find you have to choose it
over fairness or fun.  I'll stick with 'fairness', since otherwise
this will bog down into another standard 'realism vs fun' debate. =)

> 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.

What concerns me with this is what I loosely call the 'cleric
problem'.  In EverQuest (as in many text muds), Clerics are very
potent against the undead, and very mediocre against everything
else.  The end result is that clerics choose disproportionately to
spend more time in the undead regions.  Which is to say, unless you
FORCE magic-users to go into zones where they are ineffective, they
will simply avoid the zones where they have been castrated.  This
can have pretty serious ramifications on your social structure
inside your world space.

> By tying some of the power of magic to location, we have the
> effect of creating tactical differentiation.

Not quite.  You have strategic differentiation. =) What I mean by
that is that people are choosing the battlefield and after that
point the choice is forgotten.  Tactical differentiation shouldn't
be too out-of-reach, though, with the system that you describe.

--d

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