[MUD-Dev] Scripting Languages and Magic

[Jason Murdick]

From: "Alex Chacha" <achacha at hotmail.com>

> Ways to make it more appealing would be to give all spell casters
> an ability to copy spells (at a cost) and give the spell maker the
> ability to name their spells after their character... people like
> to have their names in stars.  

I like this... Sort of like some of the AD&D spells... Melf's Acid
Arrow and stuff. You could even reach a point where you'd have
competing versions of a spell. Bob's Flaming Sphere and Joe's
Flamign Sphere which was based off Bob's original design. Joe simply
tweaked it. Of course, you would need to decide if you wanted to
allow the player to learn just one or both of the spells. Might make
it interesting if they could only learn one.

> The other aspect is abuse, unless the system is relatively simple,
> people will find ways to exploit the system and cause general
> havoc.  If they have the ability to create and control particle
> effects, some may decide to create spells that generate enough lag
> to cause the game to slowdown unacceptable, etc.  People find ways
> to misuse anything that is not nailed down.

This is often a potential problem with softcoding on MUSH-based
games, but it is one that they successfully tackle. You can always
implement safeguards. Allow the players to script, but have the game
log who ran the script and what the script was. You can have
flexibility, but it requires responsibility. MUSH restrict this by
allowing only those who have been granted a builders bit to
build. You could do the same. Much like AD&D, you cannot research
new spells (i.e. script them) until you reach a certain level of
experience or power.

- Jason Murdick
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