[MUD-Dev] XP as gift (was: Attractive Grouping)

[Max Battcher]

Eli Stevens (WG.c) wrote:

> Why not do this with XP?  Define a play session somehow (the
> duration of a group, etc.), and at the end of the play session
> have the character assign the XP they earned to other players.

> You cast fireball at the ogre: 100xp
> You cast silence at the ogre mage: 150xp
> You cast silence at the orge: 10xp
> Total: 260xp

> Your group:

>  Bubba the warrior: [80xp]
>  Buffy the rogue: [120xp]
>  Boffo the incompetent: [20xp]
>  Left to assign: 40xp

> To encourage the assignment of XP, have a player not recieve XP
> from a play session until they assign their share to others, with
> penalties for waiting too long.

> A player's level becomes derived from how much XP they have from
> other players.

This is just about how cash (pieces of eight) distribution is
handled in Puzzle Pirates when pillaging with a group on a ship.
Ship pillage money goes to the ship's hold during a voyage, and at
the end of the voyage it is the captain of that ship's duty to divvy
out the cash from the pillage.  The game speeds this up by
automatically calculating "shares" based on the percentage of work
that each person performed.  A captain is still free to adjust
things, though.  Then, the rest of the members vote on the divvy
created by the captain, to keep the captain from being too power
hungry.

I think this does work well as a system in terms of cash, and in the
case of Puzzle Pirates it even makes sense in that environment.  How
it would with XP, obviously, is left to be seen.

I think the big thing I would suggest is that to keep such a system
from being too much of an annoyance to play you want to make sure it
is easy and provide some good automatic calculations for those
players that just want to "click OK and move on".  Of course, that
ultimately means that most of the XP is still going to be based on
_your_ formulas most of the time for most of the players (the
players in ordinary situations when they don't care what the friend
XP they give is and go with the automatic values).  In the case of
Puzzle Pirates, the shares calculation includes the share biases of
the crew that the captain is a member of (and the ship is itself
owned by), which might give more share to officers of that crew than
to random strangers "jobbing" for that crew.  In the XP scenario you
could do something similar (the Mages Guild requires you to give x%
more to other magic users).

Basically, what you are really doing is not adding new XP to the
system, but giving more player control over your normal automatic XP
distribution.  If done well I think it could work out well (for
instance, less problems with "hangers on"...  members only in a
group for group xp and just doing the bare minimum (amount of
flair), because a person is always better at noticing this than a
formula).

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/
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