[MUD-Dev] More ad-hoc grouping thoughts

[John Buehler]

JC's thoughts on ad hoc social structures got me to thinking about
ad hoc grouping.  Again.

The challenge with ad hoc grouping seems to be one of allocation of
motivation, assembly, agreement, action and rewards.  The solution
seems to lie in the notion of raids.  I thought about this a long
time and, sadly, had to accept that what I came up with turns out to
be very similar to raids, such as the plane raids in EverQuest or
the epic raids in Dark Age of Camelot.

Problems with raids in current games:

  1. Assembly.

    Finding the characters with the skills for the raid targets, as
    well as finding those willing to spend the time and energy to
    organize the things.

  2. Organization.

    Wrangling the players and their characters into groups, and
    transporting them to the site of the raid.

  3. Retention.

    Keeping the players around long enough to complete the
    multi-hour raid.

  4. Lock outs.

    Once a raid is started, it can be difficult or impossible to
    join it.

  5. Restrictions.

    Because player experience/skill is frequently mandatory in order
    to function in a raid setting, low level raids are not created.
    They are used as an incentive to continue gameplay until a
    higher level character has been created.

The approach that I'd like to see is focused on the mainstreaming of
raiding, but it makes some assumptions that few here will find the
least bit interesting.

My assumptions:

  1. Levels and experience are not a gating factor.

    Every player character is immediately useable in all content.
    The hitch is that a player character can only be configured one
    way at any given time, and various configurations exclude
    competency in certain actions.  Warriors fight.  Blacksmiths
    craft.  And so on.  Characters may be reconfigured at any time,
    but it takes a certain amount of elapsed time to reconfigure
    them, depending on the degree of change.

  2. Loot is not a gating factor.

    NPC opponents are not pinatas.  Defeating an NPC opponent
    doesn't leave behind stuff to be looted.

  3. No player character death.

    Player characters are defeated, not killed.  The conditions of
    defeat are that they are progressively disabled to the point
    where they must either retire or risk further disabling.
    Because recovery is not a linear process, serious disabling
    could keep someone out of a fight for as much as 30 seconds.  If
    a group of 10 characters are disabled for 30 seconds, it could
    turn the tide of a battle.  But I want to keep players in the
    fight as long as they care to be there.

So what does that leave the player to do?  No levels, no experience,
no loot, no dying.  The answer is that it leaves the player with the
ability to participate.  Combat becomes fighting at the front lines.
You know where people are gathered for some number of constant
'raids'.  Fighting is constant, enemies are constant.  The variables
are the types and number of enemies, the types and numbers of player
characters, and the type of ground on which the combat is taking
place.  The gains and losses are the shared gains and losses of
territory.  Holding ground.

It doesn't matter how anemic or powerful your character is.  The
goal is to enjoy the combat.  In order to do this properly, some
number of NPC wranglers would be needed to throttle the enemy
forces, to throw a measured set of opponents at the assembled
players.  That's because there may be four people assembled today,
or there may be 400 assembled.  The response by the game must be
appropriate to the player force.  Because everyone is the same
level, the game operators can roughly approximate what a good fight
would be - including tactics such as flanking maneuvers, ranged
attacks, etc.  Player skill would not be in twitch skills, but
rather tactical skills.

As the fight pushes the NPCs back, new territory will be
encountered.  These would constitute new 'levels'.  No maps could
exist for them because it is new ground, and hard-won.  The terrain
may change from open plains to forests, to rocky ground, to tunnels,
castles, anything the designers might care to come up with.  If the
operators want to, they could push back the players if they are
particularly inept in their efforts - as feedback that they need to
use their heads.

I'll leave the basic idea there: players know where the action is,
and they go there as part of a shared effort that benefits the
group, with everyone on an equal footing.  The ad hoc grouping is
created through a lack of a need for actual groups.  Colocation is
enough.

This need not be the only pattern to gameplay, but it's the way I'd
approach combat.  Combatants are, well, combative.  I want to
channel that energy such that players are working together, focusing
their 'anger' against a common foe.  People interested in less
extreme activities could have access to more head to head sorts of
activities.  Perhaps in politics or trade.

This system requires solving some very tough problems, including
collision detection.  Physical opposition must be enforceable.

JB
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