On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Ron Cole wrote:
-+>ObCowboyGame:
-+>Talk about a cheap victory. If ever a team did not deserve a victory,
-+
-+Hrm... I would guess that Daniel is *not* a cowboys fan...
I don't particularly like them; but then, I don't like the Eagles either.
Fact remains, however, that the Eagles would have won that game had it
not been for the terrible "mistake" by the referees.
-+ What do you think about dropping the gold field and making money objects, just
-+like anything else? With various coinage/gems and all the conversion headaches/
-+opportunities that would come with it? I like the fact that you can't carrying
-+around a million gold coins, due to weight restrictions alone. Even a million
-+in precious gems is probably going to be heavy.
This isn't really needed if you properly balance things. But you can
implement money weight without making them objects (just takes a field
for each type of currency that holds the weight of the coin; then you
multiply num_of_coin_xxx by weight_of_coin_xxx (as if someone couldn't
figure that out) and add it to the character's weight.
Now, the problem is, if you implement weight of coinage, and start to
limit how much coinage people can have, make sure the prices of things
are properly balanced. If you want a long sword to be a god purchase
for a level 12, then make sure that they can just barely inch up to
enough gold for the purpose of buying that long sword. I remember a
mud that was exquisitely balanced and challenging. In other words,
no-one had a weapon or armor higher than their level dictated. So,
sure, there were level 30's with the all mighty Thunderbolt, but then,
it was so difficult for them to get, they probably wouldn't be handing
it down to newbies. Or, at least, not many newbies (who would
invariably die because they thought the Thunderbolt somehow would
make a level 5 capable of destroying peacekeepers).
The point is that you need to be sure you balance everything with the
monetary system changes. Otherwise you get ridiculously underpowered
newbies, or ridiculously overpowered newbies.
One idea I just had is to limit the amount of gold in the game much
like it is limited in RL. In other words, if Bob has 7 billion gold
coins, then there is no more left for anyone else. Make it hard or
impossible to horde that amount of gold; make sure that gold spent
at shops gets placed back into the open economy for someone else to
get, and watch the cycle of the same coinage repeatedly passsing through
hundreds of hands. :)~
Follow this up with limits on
-+the larger denominations, so it becomes nearly impossible to accumulate vast
-+fortunes without pay large fees to banks, or large amounts of money to pay for
-+your own fortress to protect it. Or is this a little too much realism, making
-+the players leave for simpler pastures?
If implemented properly, it can be a Good Thing(tm). But it really
depends upon what type of Mud you have in the first place--or rather,
what type of players. If your players have been all too happy to
just hack-n-slash their lives away, then implementing an entire
monetary system taking into account some of the ideas portrayed in
this thread (oppurtunity cost, weight and currency for coins, limited
monetary distribution, and all the other good ideas people have come
up with), you might run into problems. So, before you go ahead and
implement an entire monetary system, first make sure you have everything
accounted for (there will, of course, be stuff you forgot about, but
if you think you have everything accounted for, then the stuff you have
forgot about will be rather few and far between). Next, make sure it
fits your mud and player's ideal mud. (Uhm, you should probably do
that in reverse, starting from checking if it fits your Mud, then to
thinking about all the affects it might have on your mud and trying
to account for those right-off).
--
Daniel Koepke -:- dkoepke@california.com -:- [Shadowlord/Nether]
Think.
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