[MUD-Dev] DGN: Why give the players all the numbers?

[Brian Hook]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003 15:40:31 -0600, Chanur Silvarian wrote:

> I would assert that the player doesn't need to know any of these
> things and that they are only a hold-over from a medium in which
> there was no way to hide them (pencil and paper).

You would be correct, but also missing the point.  Players don't
NEED to know this information, but they often WANT to know this
information.  Achievers want to min/max, and if you take those
tools, they can get irritable -- or they'll just figure it out on
their own.

Players can get frustrated if they don't have the means to quantify
their advancement.

> is unhappy, the devs are unhappy... It is a mess over something
> that the players didn't need to know in the first place and would
> have more fun if they didn't know (because they wouldn't be
> involved in said unhappiness).

They'll figure it out anyway.  And instead of sending in logs with
numbers, they'll simply do demos showing the imbalance.  Maybe you
can't tell that your warrior did 1650 points of damage to that
dragon, but you CAN show that you killed that dragon in 2 minutes
with 25% of your HP left, and your friend's shaman killed it in 3
minutes but with 100% of his HP left.

You should not underestimate the desire of many people to quantify
their gains.  "My car has 440 HP", "My house is worth $525K", "I
made $80K last year", "I'm a size 4", "I bench 285 pounds".

Maybe those attitudes are silly, superficial and callow, but they
are also common and powerful.

> With no metrics given, there is no more drive for the other types
> to try to keep up with the achievers so long as they have enough
> gold or whatnot to be comfortable.

If that drive exists, then they are also achievers.  If you don't
care about material possessions, whether you know someone else is
"rich" vs. "owns a $3.2M house" shouldn't make a difference to you.

> Nobody even considers removing the numbers altogether because of a
> prevailing "everyone else has them, we can't just remove them"
> mentality.

No, I think it's because people have thought about it and discarded
it because that's not really what players want.

> I know that I'm a radical in thinking it

Not really.

> would go a long way to improving immersion in anything calling
> itself an RPG and would stop a lot of the customer complaints
> about how they can't optimize themself to be as good or better
> than someone else.

You remove a symptom, not the cause.

-Hook
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