[MUD-Dev] Creating a Player Narrative

[Douglas Goodall]

Ben Hawes wrote:

> Has anybody deliberately designed with the goal of facillitating
> player created stories of thier in-game exploits? Anybody else
> found this sort of thing to be helpful for player enjoyment? I
> suspect there are MUDs out there who have. In suggestions for
> incorporating this into more mainstream or graphical games? Would
> this help create the sense of "epicness" missing in many of these
> worlds?

No, but the only MMO I worked on avoided numbers entirely. Damage
wasn't described in numbers or words. You could tell when you were
hit or not by the audio and animation. You could tell when you were
seriously injured (inside a ship--it was a sci-fi game, or at least
it was set in the future) when sparks appeared on the controls, the
ship became jerky, and started making nasty nail-on-blackboard
noises. You could tell when you were seriously injured (outside a
ship) when the camera got wobbly and red filtered, and you began to
hear your own ragged breathing. Even your character's skills weren't
described in numbers. You were either "poor" at a skill or "good" or
"master," etc.

Although the game was cancelled and would have been, in many ways, a
complete failure, the purely visual and auditory nature of combat
was very immersive. I think it would have led to more in-game
narrative, but that was not our intent (we just thought it was
cool).

Number crunchers won't like it, though.
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev