29 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Of course, I also dislike the idea of level restrictions on items, but that's another topic. :)

And here is that topic.

Some level restriction systems prevent people from using equipment of higher level than their own (although they can still save it for later). Some prevent characters from saving equipment of higher level than their own (although they can still use it until they log off). Some approaches prevent both usage and saving.

A variation that I'd find more appealing would be for equipment to be used at reduced effectiveness if the character's level isn't high enough. Thus (to use a simple example) if I'm level 8, and wielding a level 10 magic sword which normally gives +5 hitroll and +10 damroll, it should only give me +4 hitroll and +8 damroll. A possible weakness of this approach is if a player can get the top-of-the-range gear at low level, although they won't be stronger than players of their own level, they won't have to worry about upgrading their equipment any more as they progress.

The variation that I use is for players to be allocated a total 'level' worth of equipment they can use, so that players can choose to use a single powerful item, many weak items, a few moderate items, or whatever other combination they prefer. I'm not sure if this is technically still a level restriction, although the concept is much the same.

The other approach I've seen for restricting items is rent, and personally I dislike that more than any other approach I've seen. Any other approaches I've missed?
30 Dec, 2009, Exodus wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Level based character advancement where items are restricted by level, but the level range is +/- a few levels of the character's actual level. I've seen 400 level muds that allow characters to wear items within 25 levels of their actual level. It's interesting only in the fact that it allows for wearing items that are somewhat more powerful than what a character would normally be able to utilize, up to a certain point.

Reducing an item's effectiveness if the user is too low of level is an interesting idea, but I can see where it may become a pain to manage depending on how many types of affects your items can have.
30 Dec, 2009, ATT_Turan wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Exodus said:
Level based character advancement where items are restricted by level, but the level range is +/- a few levels of the character's actual level. I've seen 400 level muds that allow characters to wear items within 25 levels of their actual level.


So what was the point of this? Did the items have some sort of reduced effectiveness when using them in this grace range? Otherwise, what's the difference between doing this and setting every item in the MUD 25 levels lower?
30 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 4th comment:
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On my old game, we used rent as the control factor to keep powerful weapons out of the hands of newbies. If you somehow managed to kill Asgard the Lich and get his staff, have fun! You'll be the talk of the town for a few hours, until you have to rent and can't afford to keep it.

It should be noted that my game also doesn't have gold falling from every blade of grass trampled by the players as they run around. Most people had to struggle to pay for their training costs and repair bills through the lower levels, and at the higher levels people wanted keeps, which cost a LOT of cash to build, maintain, hire guards to defend, etc.
30 Dec, 2009, jurdendurden wrote in the 5th comment:
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While I agree that level restrictions on items just don't make a whole lot of sense logically (of course it is a fantasy game, but aside from that :P), I don't think rent is the answer either. Who are they renting the item from? They've already looted it fair and square from whatever dead lich corpse they found on the side of the road. Reduced ability from said item seems like a more likely route to traverse on this subject, but then again that seems to leave something missing to me. You could always create some sort of 'intelligent' item system, where the item in question can begin to take 'control' of your character over time if it is way beyond his ability level, planting suggestions in the player's mind, etc..

Good topic though I've been looking at some way to handle this in my mud for a few weeks now, since like I said I'm not a fan of level restrictions but feel there should still be some way of 'policing' powerful items in the hands of newbies.
30 Dec, 2009, Barm wrote in the 6th comment:
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Twinking and power leveling are benes.

Does your baby monk not like having plasma infused atomic rune etched hyper bo sticks? Heck no.
Who doesn't like it? That neighbor lady who complains about everything anyway.
30 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 7th comment:
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The neighbor lady rightfully complains. She got her apartment next to the n00b village for peace and quiet, and now all these young punks are running around with noisy nuclear bo sticks. I bet her cat is quivering in terror all day long.

Oh, and rent doesn't mean you're renting the items from anyone, it means you are paying for a secure place to sleep and store them. That, itself, is another topic too. :)

When you log off of the game, in every MUD I've seen so far, your character also vanishes from the game world. Where do they go? In a game with rent, they presumably hang around town and pay the innkeeper to post a guard on their room so thieves don't steal all that stuff they've been working to collect. Player housing also serves that purpose in some games, and there you are paying for upkeep instead of rent on items.

In rent-based games, you assign a value to items based on their power, difficulty to obtain, etc… and rent charges some percentage of that value for every <insert period of time here> the player is logged off. In very old games, this gold was drained from the gold you had on hand, later they added your bank account to it as well. When you log back in, you are charged whatever amount was accrued, and if you lack the funds to pay it, your items are typically sold off until the bill is paid, or you run out of items too.

One supposes you could make those items be held in escrow by the landlord, so the player has the option to go make some money and buy them back. To me, the only downside of rent is that you need a vacation/freeze system to go along with it, so that people who know they aren't going to be able to play for a few months can freeze their accounts and NOT accumulate rent fees.
30 Dec, 2009, Runter wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
KV said:
A variation that I'd find more appealing would be for equipment to be used at reduced effectiveness if the character's level isn't high enough. Thus (to use a simple example) if I'm level 8, and wielding a level 10 magic sword which normally gives +5 hitroll and +10 damroll, it should only give me +4 hitroll and +8 damroll. A possible weakness of this approach is if a player can get the top-of-the-range gear at low level, although they won't be stronger than players of their own level, they won't have to worry about upgrading their equipment any more as they progress.


An interesting solution. Perhaps if the decay of usefulness was exponential you could solve this problem. I.e., vastly higher level restricted items end up being less valuable to wear at low levels than items you could find closer to said level.



I thought I'd mention the hybrid approach I want to take. I plan on making it *very* fast to reach max level. Effectively making level restrictions unimportant after your first few hours of play. After this point, all players being equal in level, it takes on the characteristics of a level-less game.
31 Dec, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
On my old game, we used rent as the control factor to keep powerful weapons out of the hands of newbies. If you somehow managed to kill Asgard the Lich and get his staff, have fun! You'll be the talk of the town for a few hours, until you have to rent and can't afford to keep it.

I've seen the same approach used for level-restricted solutions, whereby you can use any gear you like - but it only saves if it's your level or lower.

Of course (like rent) you probably got the staff from Bubba the Barbarian, who kills Asgard every morning before breakfast, so it's not as if you actually earned it yourself anyway. But (unlike an extortion rent system) at least you're usually able to keep the gear you have fairly earned, without some so-called "Innkeeper" charging you vast sums of money to prevent all your hard-earned belongings mysteriously vanishing while you sleep.

Your post did remind me of another alternative to level restrictions though - equipment repair and maintenance costs. I don't find that quite as horrible as rent, because you only pay when you want to and the cost is relative to how actively you play, but it's still not a solution I'd like to use.

Runter said:
I thought I'd mention the hybrid approach I want to take. I plan on making it *very* fast to reach max level. Effectively making level restrictions unimportant after your first few hours of play. After this point, all players being equal in level, it takes on the characteristics of a level-less game.

Even a level-less system might require limitations on equipment usage (for example my approach, which I mentioned earlier, where each player has a overall quota of magical items they can use at any one time).
31 Dec, 2009, Tonitrus wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Rent always strikes me as a great idea for balance purposes, but a pretty wretched idea for anything else.

I used to play a mud that had "rare" and "unique" items, and it had "anti-hoarding" code, where if you didn't log in within X time, it would strip all your rares and uniques. I believe it also had a secondary limitation where it would add up your rare/unique eq levels and compare them to your character levels to determine whether or not it should strip from from you. I guess the second part is a sort of rent system that doesn't require payment.

Regarding equipment saving, I'd just like to say that silently stripping a character's eq when they log off is just about the most player-hostile feature I've encountered. In concept, I can see no problem with not allowing them to save equipment they shouldn't have, but the item should be explicitly dropped to a room or something instead of implicitly deleted.

And now I get to the point:

What I did for my Smaug PK design was have level be assigned to items based on their stats. It followed a triangular number progression (1:1, 2:3, 3:6, 4:10, 5:15, etc) based off adding up all the stats (after dividing hp, mana, and move by 5, as I recall). The level didn't affect who could wear or save it it in any way, but the cost of an item was multiplied by its level for the purposes of buying/selling/repairing. This made the repairs pretty cost prohibitive for really nice items while still allowing people who didn't have the money to cash them out by selling them to shopkeepers. I think that option (the "reward player for discarding items they shouldn't have anyway" option) is pretty important for any system like this, as it incentivises players to do what you want anyway in a way that may make them happy to do so.

Anyway, I never actually got around to running that mud design, so I'm not sure how it would have worked in practice.
31 Dec, 2009, jurdendurden wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
Incentivises is the best word ever created :D
04 Jan, 2010, shasarak wrote in the 12th comment:
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I don't advocate these approaches, but have seen them:

- On my first ever LPMud, if a low level character used a high level weapon, the item was actually destroyed (with a message saying "you are too inexperienced for such a powerful weapon" and informing you that it had broken in your hands). All such breakages were logged as evidence of possible abuse.

- An alternative to rent is if items quickly wear out and need constant upkeep and repair to function properly. If the repair costs on high level items are prohibitively high then (as with rent) low-level characters can't afford to maintain high level equipment.

- Another option, of course, is simply to remove most of the dependence on equipment. In real life, so long as a sword is reasonably well balanced and not likely to snap or fall apart, there is actually little practical difference between one that is made competently and one is that made by Hattori Hanzo's real-life counterpart. Regardless of whether the swordsman is a beginner or a master, the quality of the weapon simply doesn't have much effect on its performance - it's really all about the skill of the wielder. One could adopt a similar approach on a MUD and simply not have any weapons that have more than a +1 bonus (or its equivalent) and have all of the difference in power between a newbie character and a near-immortal come down to differences inherent to the character himself rather than his gear.
04 Jan, 2010, Orrin wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
One could adopt a similar approach on a MUD and simply not have any weapons that have more than a +1 bonus (or its equivalent) and have all of the difference in power between a newbie character and a near-immortal come down to differences inherent to the character himself rather than his gear.

This is pretty much the system we use. In our game a sword is a sword is a sword and we don't have any equipment that drops from mobs so all of our gear is player crafted. I decided on this system because it fitted in with the goal of a 100% player economy and also made it easier to balance PvP more around player skill than equipment. I think it's also fun for role-players because you can equip your character with items that you like the appearance of rather than feeling you have to use those that give your character the best advantage.
04 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm a little irked at myself for not remembering this before, but when I was working on my Smaug design, I came up with an interesting way to handle equipment.

First off, I stole the D&D 3.5 idea of bonus types not stacking. Namely, if you had a +1 morale bonus and a +2 morale bonus, you'd have a total of +2. If you had a +1 morale bonus and a +1 luck bonus, you'd have a +2 bonus.

What I then decided was to tie these bonus types to stats. I made one for each, which I can't recall offhand. might, grace, … something, something, competence, something. Each stat had a D&D 3.5 bonus associated with it, the basic gist of it was that your stats capped each of its bonus types, something like:

0-2       0
3-12 1
13-14 2
15-16 3
17-18 4
19-20 5
21-22 6
23-24 7
25-26 8


Anyway, to what this means:

A rapier might have a grace bonus of +3. Grace is tied to dexterity. A zombie with a dex of 2 would get no bonus at all from this +3 rapier. A character with 13 dex would only get +2. I was intending to have reasonably low stats for this design, I stole something someone told me from D&D 4th edition and just gave people set numbers and let them assign them to stats. The numbers were: 14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8. Stats could improve some with levels, as I recall. Anyway, the overall idea had the same effect as penalizing people for using weapons "more powerful" than them without actually adding any sort of negative effect, it just capped the bonus.

I think this is my favorite idea regarding D&D style game mechanics that I've come up with. Unfortunately it doesn't work with my current designs.
05 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
The other approach I've seen for restricting items is rent, and personally I dislike that more than any other approach I've seen. Any other approaches I've missed?


Don't make equipment include any kind of significant numbers (a sword is a sword, and either you have one or you don't) and hence avoid the problem entirely. Particularly appealing to fans of low-fantasy settings.

You mention a dislike of rent, but one thing I've liked is upkeep or item damage. All items degrade over time. You have a powerful item well above your means, but if you use it, it will be depleted. You could allow items to be fixed/refreshed, but the cost would scale to the level of the item, and is mostly just like rent. Alternatively, items cannot be fixed, and the low-level player would need a means of obtaining multiple high-level items. If upkeep of gear requires skills and materials instead of just paying out coin, however, you can start to generate a LOT of extra economy action in the game, as well as make various roles of support character (smith and such) more appealing and useful. I've long favored a mix barter/tender system with a higher emphasis on barter, which the materials make necessary. If you aren't out killing orcs and getting their materials (rusty swords to melt down and such), then you're going to have a hard time getting the smith to repair your own weapons because the smith needs steel to do it.

You can use equipment binding to ensure that players cannot give other players high-level equipment, and thereby force the low-level player to actually work to get a high-level item. If he manages it, let it be his reward.

Instead of requiring a particular level, you can also require a particular skill. To use the Level 10 Sword, you need 10 ranks in Swords. That may or may not have some ties to level, depending on how many skill points a character has per level, how many ranks a character is allowed to have in the Swords skill at any given time, etc. Levelless MUDs can also use such a system, of course.
05 Jan, 2010, Twisol wrote in the 16th comment:
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I don't know why, but the idea of item durability (a la Diablo, WoW, etc) appeals to me far more than the idea of rent. It probably has something to do with the fact that durability generally only goes down when you're actually using it. The economy benefits you mentioned also seem very appealing, and potentially quite fun.

Elanthis, I just want to say, I'm really enjoying your posts lately. They tend to contain a kind of clarity and forethought I haven't seen too often. Keep it up :biggrin:
05 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 17th comment:
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Heh, WileyMUD had both durability loss (with actual scrapping if it got too bad) AND rent. :)
06 Jan, 2010, Greyankh wrote in the 18th comment:
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I was thinking about the durability idea. I too, like this idea and will implement something along those lines in my game.

I think, with the durability idea, we can cover a bit of the issue of "over-powered" weapons in the hands of newbies. I would make all items dropped by mobiles 50% of their durability (to simulate they're using said item). Those who can afford the upkeep, can get them repaired, but could use them still before they get back to town. Newbies could enjoy a brief experience with said weapon or item, but it would degrade quicker, due to their lack of experience in using such a grand weapon or item. I am all for letting them feel the power so they may want to attain the power.

Items or weapons bought in a store or created by players would always be 90% or better in condition. I plan to make them 100%.

On a side note, I have been giving serious consideration to bonus caps, or non-stacking. I like this idea. I also like the idea of the sword being a sword, which is a sword, because it was a sword. I am still debating on how much magic my world is going to have. I am leaning toward a low amount of magic and letting the players populate the world with the magic items. i.e Alchemy, enchanment, infusion, and the like.
28 Jan, 2010, Barm wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0


I remember playing Dark Age of Camelot and walking my lowlie character down a dark stretch of road, nobody else in sight. I came across a pile of gear mysteriously abandoned on ground. In the middle of this was a shiny, ornate sword that looked a thousand times nicer than the rusty stick I was carrying. Heart filled with greedy intent, I reached for it …
THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU!

The words echoed out of nowhere.

"Exactly what I'm trying to correct", I told my disembodied sword-blocker. Again, I reached down in the most environmentally friendly of pilferage.

THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU!

My fingers could not close – my opposable thumb could only oppose in the wrong definition.

"You are a jackass, Dev.", I told the empty woods. Thus I quit Dark Age of Camelot.


If you want to control items, I strongly suggest avoiding hard-coded restrictions because they suck the air out of the immersion factor. One of the things I'm doing in my project is to give each character guild a set of scaled values that control how effective they are at various things. For instance, a warrior might have a heavy armor skill of 1.0 and mage 0.01. The mage can put on armor if he likes, but it will do him less good than wearing a burlap sack. OTOH, he may have some fun reason to dress like a knight.

I imagine you could extend the same kind of system to level based gear. I may.
28 Jan, 2010, Idealiad wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
I like magic swords and what not, but I think they also work just as well with the 'one ring matches the power of its wielder' approach. This also can fit with a radiation cap like in God Wars 2 (though not used the same way as in that mud). An item has a certain power, you can only use it to its fullest if your radiation cap is high enough to include that and whatever other magical items you're carrying.
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