> snipped part about eating <
Eating is not one of the things that I consider not important to a
mud as far as gameplay. As a matter of fact, in every D&D campaign I ever
played, food was never mentioned. Everyone had a week or two of iron
rations, but they were never consumed. Why?
It's because it's boring, and it's one of those things that does
not affect the game. Circle changes it so it _does_ affect the game, but
really how many people ever worry about being hungry, or thirsty. It's
covered with macros. One place I visited made this a bit more difficult
by including weight loss/gain from eating - something affecting your
movement and actually could eventually kill you if you get too fat or
thin. It does add a touch of reality, but I don't think that this
actually adds anything to the game.
It would be funny to see someone dying of overeating though :)
> Look at any Base-Circle MUD (or any MUD for that purpose)and you
> can see realism is not really implemented.. Mobs regen after 5-10
> minutes, weapons that do 200000 damage on the average, people with
> 200000000000 hit point (I mean come on how many whacks from a sword do
> you think you could really with-stand if you were naked?) The shops
> come into it too, no store has an unlimited supply of amor on weapoons
> or whatever they are selling, from time to time they 'sell out' and you
> have to come back later instead.
This is not a problem with muds, but with the mud developers. If
you allow people to have these upper limits, you'll get them. Much of a
mud is a point-by-point competition vs. other characters. How many muds
have you been on where people complain that their hitroll drops to +67
from +70 with a given piece of eq? This doesn't take into account that
internally, there is no difference after you get out of the 1-20 range for
thac0.
The problem is that many developers equate large numbers with a
better gaming experience. This is the fallacy of inflation. Too often I
see muds which are so in the grip of inflation that single point gains -
hit, damage, level, even experience. I have been fighting an uphill
battle on the mud I program for, to lower everything to the point where a
single level - for example - makes a definable difference.
Why do I think this is so important? Well, because muds are not
D&D games - they cannot adjust themselves to be dynamic systems which
change with their players. If your world ends up with stats which are
outside the bounds of your combat system, or any other system, you will
quickly become unbalanced. My mud shows this in the way the combat system
requires that you have skills/spells which disallow the character from
attacking for multiple rounds - to actually beat anything for the 40'th or
so level, you need to figure out how to remove all attacks from the
attacker. Sounds a bit unbalanced, specially when most mobs at that level
have around 3000 hit points or more, and the attacker has perhaps 300-400.
> So how realistic should we go? Or should we leave it up to our players
> to choose how they like their MUDs?
No. Players have no concept of inflation. They have no 'world'
view. This is what the immortals have. It's their job too, to figure out
what it is, and how to deal with it. If you let players have their way,
you're going to have each one ask "Could I have a weapon exactly like
'previous characters' + 1?". Well, until you get to the point where they
say "infinity +1 please"
What you need to do is say "My system is set up for, say, damage
going from 1 point to 100 in a single hit - but no player should ever go
past 30." Make all your systems like this. That will give you the
leverage to expand them in the future, if so required - it will also allow
you to always have a mob more challenging, because players will only be a
tiny fraction of the possible power. This is actually the standard for
FRPG's - the boss creature is usually much more powerful than any of your
individual characters could be.
Anyway, one thing people may want to do is write some simple
statistic gathering functions. Some output you may want to look at:
- top 10 mobs killed for each 10 levels (1-10,11-20,etc) - and how many
kills
- Average experience points gained for a kill in those ranges (break down
by class?)
- Speed between levels
- # of times skills are used (breakdown by class)
- Average gold per mob/per char/per kill (by level)
- Average stat value for each class for each group of 10 level
- # of players in each class/level division.
- average attack abilty for perhaps every 5 level group.
And more.. Incredible ranges or large values may point to
problems with those values - I gaged when I realized that the average
player gold for our system was somewhere around 3 million gold, total
player gold is around 440 trillion. Total gold in game upon reboot is
around _2 billion_. Wow. You can bet that all the animals had their gold
removed from them right quick, and the rest lowered.
PjD
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