[MUD-Dev] Cans of Achievements and Quests

[Sean Kelly]

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Rayzam wrote:
 
> It's not a fair comparison in one specific sense:
> length. Single-player RPG: 60 or so hours. LAN RPG: probably a bit
> longer. The faults that are associated with Mud quests are due to
> the fact that the quests are shorter, can be redone, and there's
> no forced linearity. However, if the LAN RPG was shorter, say it
> took 20 hours, would you and your friends play it over and over? 
> Would you play it for 2 weeks to finish it. Then start it over,
> and play it again? Well, not as many times as quests are redone in
> a mud.

But in my experience quests are redone in a MUD largely in an effort
to gain experience/levels/items, not because the story is so cool.
Single-player and LAN games are closed environments where things
like experience gain can be calcuated fairly well so that by the
time the player(s) make it to the next part of the story they're
generally ready for it.  The combination of non-linearity in MUD
quests combined with the fact that in persistent worlds you don't
want players to level as quickly means that by necessity the players
have to re-do quests multiple times in order to advance to the point
where they're capable of doing the more difficult quests.  This
means a lot of busywork and (to me) boredom.

> But that is the fair comparison. If you wouldn't play the
> single/LAN rpg over and over and over again, then its plots suffer
> the same fate as the mud quests. Or the converse: if the mud had
> so much content that you never had to replay the same quest, then
> it has the same star quality of the single-player/LAN games.

Thing is, it's not the number of available quests that's really
important to me so much as the illusion that those quests have a
lasting impact on the game world.  If I slay a dragon to save a
town, then I want the local populace to remember that, maybe thank
me when I visit the town in the future or tell stories about my
feat.  The fact that there may be a zillion other dragons out there
to slay is comforting, but ultimately small potatoes if there is no
evidence of my deeds if I decide to visit my old haunts.  By the
same token, if I wander into an inn and kill the innkeeper, I expect
to be hunted by the local militia and possibly imprisoned.  Further,
if I return to that inn sometime later I expect a gravestone in the
backyard, not for the innkeeper to greet me at the door and ask for
my cloak.  If the inn needs to continue to function then perhaps a
son, daughter, or stableboy takes over the business.

Thing is, in Real Life the end of one quest creates the opportunity
for others.  Repelling a monster invasion means that the locals can
likely expand their farmland and perhaps create another settlement
in a previously dangerous area.  This might result in local
political conflicts, trade may develop which could fall prey to
bandits, the settlement on the frontier may fall to a resurgence of
the vanquished and resentful monsters, etc.  If I quest for a
Special Magic Sword, others on the same quest may later hear the
locals tell of someone who had been searching for the sword and went
to wherever... they may get to where it's supposed to be and find it
gone and the cave empty.  Or perhaps I decided to claim the dungeon
as my own and conjure monsters to terrorize the local populace.  I
grant that coding such a system would likely be an incredible amount
of work, but that is the kind of persistent world I'd like to see.


Sean


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