[MUD-Dev] Playing catch-up with levels

[John Buehler]

Sean Howard writes:
> "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com> writes:

>> I'm not a fan of juggling equipment.  It mostly means hassle.

> I'm pretty sure that any Diablo II fan will disagree :) But
> seriously, other than equipment and levels, how else would you
> define capabilities?  Classes, maybe?

Skills, combined with the props of basic equipment.  I think I'm
envisioning a rather different form of entertainment than current
games provide.  Instead of providing players with changing
experience by giving them new appearances and ways of causing
damage, I want to present them with different ways of solving the
in-game challenges based on a configuration of skills that they
choose.

Current games seem to rely on a model of adding to a character's
efficacy so that the character can tackle tougher and tougher
opponents.  The tougher opponents are more impressive to look at and
simply cannot be tackled without the boosted character efficacy, so
there is a sense of achievement.  This is the track presented per
class in current games.

I'd like to pursue a model of altering a character's efficacy in
multiple areas.  That is what a game offers across multiple classes.
Eliminate the class boundaries and the skills can be mixed and
matched to produce many different permutations of interaction.  And
I don't mean that this technique can be applied to an existing game.
The skills and the challenges would have to be designed with the
technique in mind.

When this is done, however, power accrual can no longer be the
primary source of entertainment because it leaves a single goal for
everyone to optimize on.  The one or two most effective skill
combinations would quickly become the only character formulation
that anyone would bother with.  Asheron's Call experienced this to a
large degree.

>>  I'd prefer to have scenarios subtle enough to permit players to
>>  be >> successful by using their own approach

> That would be particularly difficult to balance. For instance, if
> a warrior type could breeze through a group in 10 minutes to get
> the reward (at the cost of healing), a stealth type would take 40
> minutes (at the cost of time). On a MUD where the reward makes
> successive missions easier, pretty much everyone will pick the
> warrior type and you'll have wasted your time designing for the 5%
> that are the stealth type.

You're assuming that the goal is to kill stuff to accumulate cash
and prizes.  Warriors kill stuff, true enough.  But that's the
reward for being a warrior: killing stuff.  The actual process of
killing things must be entertaining.  A stealthy character's
entertainment comes from successfully sneaking around.

The shared experience of all players is to advance their common
goals.  Players work together to overcome the bad guys, prevent
natural disasters, shape the economy, prevent the rebellion,
whatever.

If I were to use an analogy to compare current games with what I'd
like to see, it's the difference in entertainment between watching a
chain gang break rocks with sledgehammers and watching Jet Li fight
a group of opponents.  In the chain gang model, at the center of the
rocks are cash and prizes.  As a result, the players break the rocks
(kill the monsters).  In the Jet Li model, players fight the group
of opponents because it's entertaining to do that.  Jet Li doesn't
go through the pockets of his opponents.  They are his opponents
because they oppose his goals.  That means that he has a goal.

Other than picking their pockets, that is.

The player goals are supposed to be derived from a world plotline
that slowly advances, making (for example) the victory at Bingo
Boingo move things along a bit.  The primary reason for the world
plotline is to make the world change, so that the game content isn't
exactly as it was when you left it a week ago.  That's an attempt at
dealing with the slow change in venue presented by working one's way
up in levels.

> Don't get me wrong. I'm no advocating forcing players into
> specific playing styles dictated by the designer. It's just that
> if it really is different strokes for different folks, perhaps
> there should be exclusive scenarios dealing with each
> stroke. Warriors wouldn't take the stealth missions (unless they
> wanted to).

Stealth is for cracking a problem in a different way.  The warrior
does the full frontal assault.  The stealthy character just sneaks
by.  The goal of an encounter is to accomplish an end result.  That
doesn't mean that everything needs to die.  It might mean that a
door needs to be opened, a guard needs to be silenced, a ditch needs
to be dug, a siege engine needs to be crafted, and so on.  And then
there's the possibility that the whole fight can be handled through
diplomacy.  Or bribery.  Or pure intimidation through use of
illusions.

When the NPC opponents in a game take more information into account
than the level of and direction to the nearest player character to
kill, scenarios can become more involved and entertaining.  Going
from 1 or 2 decision criteria to 10 or 20 means that various types
of NPCs can behave very differently - down to the granularity of
individuals in a group behaving differently.  Suppose when you
create that illusory fire, only five of eight trolls run away?
Suppose you couldn't ever predict what an NPC was going to do?  That
you could only guess at trends and possibilities?

>> I wouldn't want to design encounters that require players to
>> carry equipment for the four types of challenges present in the
>> game.  I think we want players to be able to be somewhat
>> innovative - not pack mules :)

> Not neccessary with proper metaphor and design. For instance, if
> going into a fire dungeon, you know that bringing a fire sword
> isn't going to help. It isn't that the player will carry 7,000
> pounds of equipment for those 'just in case' missions - knowing
> the mission beforehand and planning appropriately for it.

Right.  And that means that instead of carrying 7,000 pounds of
equipment, they have 7,000 pounds of equipment in the bank and they
swap back and forth between those sets of equipment as needed.  I've
experienced that, and it's not something that I find entertaining.
It also clashes with a personal ethic where I like to think that
it's the man, not the tools, that make him what he is.

> For instance, there is a dungeon in a volcano, so you need to
> bring an ice sword (which does double damage). However, on the
> path there are plenty of stone enemies which are all but immune to
> ice. Do you bring a quake sword too, for the trip there, or do you
> stock up on more ice equipment and just avoid the stone enemies,
> or do you bring a general purpose sword which works equally well
> with all enemies but isn't that great against any one.  If you've
> got a group, perhaps you can coordinate equipment?

Static encounters must go away if what I've just described is ever
going to come to pass.  The whole idea of the game is to throw new
situations at the players all the time, and have them react to those
situations.  That's what players are looking forward to when they're
the first ones to visit a new game area in a static design.  They
don't know what to expect.  In a dynamic design, once an encounter
is dealt with, it's dealt with.  The hostages have been rescued, the
bridge has been built, the monster incursion has been quelled.  The
world plot advances and new challenges are waiting for the players.

Something that will be lost in a dynamic design is the enthusiasm
for then announcing what it is that has been discovered.  In current
games, the Tower of Foobie is a known quantity.  The knowing can be
documented and presented on the web, and some people really enjoy
doing that analysis and presentation.  But it's a form of
entertainment that would be lost.  Perhaps a more complex form of
analysis would come into being.  I don't really know.

> With the level system, players going to a dungeon bring their best
> equipment (there is almost always best equipment) and kill
> anything that is their level or lower on the way to the dungeon.

Yup.  That works in the spirit of current games.  It entertains
players.  I like to think that I'm talking about a new generation of
games.  Perhaps it's something that all game designers have as their
goal and it's simply not practical today.  I dunno.  I just know
that I haven't seen it and I haven't heard anyone talking about it.

>> In current games, if all characters and monsters were level 50,
>> players would quickly visit everything in the game at a pace that
>> THEY found entertaining and be done with the game in a couple
>> weeks to a couple months.

> I can't tell if that is sarcasm or not. :)

No sarcasm.  Players have a love-hate attitude about the level
grind.  If it's such a strong reaction, why not publish a copy of a
game that makes everyone level 50 and all mobs level 50?  It would
seem to appeal to a large chunk of the player population that's
tired of the level grind.  Given the anecdotal evidence that I've
seen, there are lots of people fed up with the grind who are just
not playing the genre anymore.  Young gamers who haven't gone
through it will still find it entertaining, but us old folks are
done with it.

>> There are other side effects of course, but pacing the players
>> through the game content is probably the most valuable one to the
>> publshers.

> Right, but grinding is probably the number 2 complaint (behind
> bugs/nerfing).

Bugs are a fact of life.  We are imperfect.  As evidenced by the
fact that we still have the level grind in games :)

> And people will always find a way to maximize the grind.

Because it's such an annoyance.  It's not entertaining, so get rid
of it and then figure out how to entertain players without it.

Actually, it should be retained, but relegated to a niche form of
entertainment.  Achievement is a perfectly legitimate way of
entertaining people.

> On the other hand, City of Heroes seems so blandly balanced that
> the game gets monotonous. You can only play in one area of the
> city until level 5, then you can play in the next one. At level
> 15, you can go to the next one and never have to visit that first
> one for much.  The growing up seems so forced that I could
> literally see the rest of game being played for me. I could
> predict what skills I'd get at what level, which areas I'd get to
> visit, how long it would take to get there, and so on.

Balance is when two players are competing against each other and
neither has an advantage over the other.  You're just talking about
a game without enough entertaining content.

JB
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev