On Tue, 30 Aug 1994, Anthony Spataro wrote:
> Hrm...that's interesting about encouraging RP. How about having
> multi-user pre-written quests? At a certain time of day, the game
> announces that signup for xxx quest is beginning. Signups continue until
> all the spots are filled, and all members are teleported to the quest's
> starting point. Mobs, props and whatnot are placed, and the quest is
> played out. It involves combat as well as puzzles, and group work. It'd
> require a lot of coding to make this automatic, but it'd be worth it.
>
>
> -ads|lc|kilwren|cardy
>
> "I can resist anything but temptation."
I was thinking of integrating them even more into the game. If you used
special processes and mob prog well enough, you could have a lot of
quests built into the game that run at all times. They could range from
finding hidden treasures, rescuing an imprisoned person, assasinating a
certain mobile and bringing something back to get a reward, etc..
Drunks in taverns could have special processes where they talk of legends
and quests, certin mobs could hire you to do a task, or an NPC like a
King or a Mayor could offer up a reward for a quest.
The problem which I see here is that once a quest is solved, you need to
be able to stop the special processes and such. That might take some
code to support. Also, it seems like an awful lot of work to set up
these quests and make them good ones. Making special processes and using
mobprog, even with on-line building can be very time consuming. If there
was a nice way to be able to reuse quests that would help. Unfortunately
people like to reveal secrets and solutions to things once they solve
them. Preventing that is pretty hard. Anyone out there have experience
setting these types of things up and/or tips on what is effective and
what types of things players have enjoyed?
Other things I favor which I believe encourage role playing are:
1. Removing the numbers side to the game.
I get real tired of hearing questions like "What are the stats on
that?", "How many HP do you have?", "What strength do you have to have to
wield that?", etc.. I would rather use words to describe these types of
things. All abilities can be replaced with words describing ranges. For
example, you could use a table like this to replace numbers for abilities:
21+ Godlike
17-20 Excellent
13-16 Good
9-12 Average
5- 8 Fair
1- 4 Poor
For HP, Mana and Moves you could use a table like this to describe things:
HP Mana Moves
100% Healthy Burning Fine
80-99% Slightly Hurt Hot Sluggish
60-79% Hurt Warm Tired
40-59% Wounded Neutral Slow
20-39% Bad Cold Winded
1-19% Awful Icy Fainting
0% Dead Frozen Exhausted
I wouldn't even show AC, hitroll or damroll. For armor and weapons I
would impliment skills that players could use on them. For weapons and
armors you could easily do a compare skill. For treasures and objects
thieves could have a value skill. You could also have a quality skill
which tells you the quality of the item. Thus you could set ranges which
would return values of superb, excellent, fine, average, poor, shabby
or garbage.
Knowing all the numbers of the afore mentioned things seems to me to be
unrealistic, not promote role-playing, and unnecessary.
2. Take out global communication.
I don't like gossip, auction, grat, group say, tell or any other global
communication. I'd rather see tell be a directed form of say (perhaps
complimented with an eavesdrop skill which you could try to overhear
tells or whispers.
Auction should be limited to a room (maybe a special auctioning block in
a town) or at least a zone. Group say and quest say channels would also
be directed forms of say (working only in that room). Shout or yell
should be the best a player can do.
This obviously detracts a lot from the game. To make up for this type of
change I would impliment more hireling type mobs. You could hire
messengers to deliver messages to players. You might even have carrier
pigeons you could send out.
A nice spell for mages could be something like Astral Window where you
open up a window through which you can talk to another player over long
distances. Or maybe a spell like Ethreal Message which sends out an
ethreal form of the caster to deliver a message.
I just think there are more creative and realistic ways to include global
communication in the game. Being able to tell, auction, gossip, etc.
across miles and miles of terain (possibly across dimensions or planes if
you have them) has always bothered me as a player.
3. Require quests to advance in level.
Maybe not one for every level, but at least some type of quest activity
could be required by your guild before you advance to certain levels. I
was even thinking that certain quests could be guild sponsored. You
could view these as trials for guild members, or tasks which must be
completed in the name of the guild.
4. Incorporate a trophy system into the experience system.
Far too often people find mobs which are the easiest to kill for the most
experience and then kill them over and over and over and over and...well
you get the picture. I trophy system keeps track of the number of kills
for each mobile and reduces experience awarded after a certain number of
kills. The percentage doesn't have to fall from 100% to 0%. It can be
reduced incrementally.
This seems realistic to me. How much experience can you gain after
killing a giant for the fiftieth time? Should it become old hat after a
while?
These are the types of things I am trying to incorporate into my code. I
think they make the game more interesting and realistic. Since I am far
from completing most of these, I haven't gotten any practical feedback on
the ideas. Some of them (maybe all of them) have been done on other
MUDs, but I have never seen a MUD take all of the aove steps. It might
just scare players off because it would radically change the feel of the
game.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I have always wanted to change the way area
resets are done. I've been working on a system where mobs actually
reproduce. For each mob there are five versions for each sex: infant,
youth, adult, old and ancient. A mob has a reproduction period (much
like a zone has a reset time now). After this period is up, the number
of infants put into the game = 1/2 youth pairs + adult pairs + 1/2 old
pairs. The percentage that an ancient just drops dead is 5%. When a
reproductive period is up for a mob, the existing mobs are replaced with
the next version up, some ancients die off and the new infants are put in.
Although I am not finished, it seems like it will be feasable to do. The
biggest problem I have is what about special mabs like shopkeepers, or
unique mobs. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have five versions
of these mobs. I was thinking of having a !KILL flag for mobs like
these. They are a part of the game which should not be removed, and
there wouldn't be a problem with resetting them if they were never killed.
(I'm still shaky on this problem.)
Well, enough for now.
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