[MUD-Dev] Striving for originality

[Travis Casey]

Sunday, June 09, 2002, 9:02:17 PM, caduvall at glue.umd.edu wrote:
> Matt Mihaly <the_logos at achaea.com> wrote:

>> To me, saying that something like magic, which doesn't exist in
>> the physical world, should have properties Z and effects A, B,
>> and C screams box-thinking. Surely magic can be whatever a
>> designer designs it to be.

> So far as I have kicked things around, if you use names with which
> people attach certain expectations to mean something entirely
> different, most of what you'll end up getting is grief and
> frustration on the part of the player. If you have something in
> your world which grows out of the ground, has petals, needs to be
> watered semi-reguarly, etc, then it is a daisy, not a raygun.

> I'm running into this in the game I'm helping to admin currently -
> people reguarly bother the imms to tell them that vampires
> "should" or "should not" have certain properties/skills/whatever.

If they're bothering you about vampires, send 'em to me... when I
kept the alt.vampyres FAQ, I got a lot of practice dealing with the
"but vampires are *really* like this..." crowd.  :-)

Now, I will say this: if you're going to alter things to make them
extremely different, it's probably best just to change the name.  It
makes for less confusion and fewer arguments with players.  However,
the scope of what should be "allowable" within a name is fairly
broad when you're dealing with things that don't exist in reality.

--
Travis Casey
efindel at earthlink.net

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