21 Jul, 2009, Dean wrote in the 181st comment:
Votes: 0
I had a good example in mind but forgot it. So..

I roll 2d6 in an attemp to cast Skitterleap in an attempt to get back into the hole from which I lurk from.

*rolls*

4. Miscast. Damn. :sad:
21 Jul, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 182nd comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
Grimble said:
David Haley said:
Things are broken if one specialty always beats another specialty, yes.

What if your game system is based on the old rock/paper/scissors approach, to encourage team play? Many successful RTS games of the past 15 years employed this approach via different units with different specialties.


Depends on the type of game you want to make. Obviously in the game Rock Paper Scissors this is how it was implemented, for example. I'm not sure I specifically enjoy or find the concept endearing.

David also stressed the 'always beats' part. As opposed to 'has an advantage against.' Quite a different thing when we're talking about matching players up against each other.

Yes, Runter is correct that the emphasis was deliberate and important. Furthermore, if you start talking about groups of players and a game that only functions with groups, you need to consider the groups as a whole and not individual players. I don't really see the point in whole groups being rocks and other whole groups being paper. Strategic advantage is one thing, but unquestionable dominance just doesn't appeal to me.

That's not to say that there isn't a place for R-P-S type of games, it's just not something I find terribly interesting. The R-P-S aspect would have to be quite hidden away for it to be enjoyable. I don't really want to play a game where I will always lose to Bob just because, no matter how much skill I have. (Again, if you were to adapt this to team play, you would talk about the groups instead.)
21 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 183rd comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
Or another example of something conceptually (albeit it ridiculous) possible is playing hands of poker with the pot each hand being your life points. First player who is out of life points dying.

Oy! There's nothing ridiculous about my poker-based combat minigame.
21 Jul, 2009, Runter wrote in the 184th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
Runter said:
Or another example of something conceptually (albeit it ridiculous) possible is playing hands of poker with the pot each hand being your life points. First player who is out of life points dying.

Oy! There's nothing ridiculous about my poker-based combat minigame.


What's the reward for playing and is it texas hold em? :P
21 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 185th comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
What's the reward for playing and is it texas hold em? :P

I'm serious! The reward is 'glory' (which can be spent on improving specialised pieces of equipment) and a place on the weekly scoreboard. It started out as a 'draw poker' snippet I created for a MudMagic coding contest, although I've modified it quite a bit since then, turning it into a wargame. But it still uses 5-card hands and a poker-style scoring system.
21 Jul, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 186th comment:
Votes: 0
Nice one KaVir! I always like mini-games that actually have an impact on the regular game. I can't remember where I saw it, but one MUD I played had a dice game where the mobs would remember how well you did, and their willingness to play against you (and the stakes they'd risk) would vary. You could also try to cheat, but if you got caught you both got that on your record AND the town guards would react (initially just throwing you out, but eventually barring your entry to the inn or attacking you).
21 Jul, 2009, shasarak wrote in the 187th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
It's funny actually because I was thinking about MtG too, I just never got around to articulating it.

I'm not aiming this comment at David in particular, just making an observation about using MtG decks as an analogy for MUD character creation.

There's one rather important distinction betweem MtG and MUDs, which is the time factor. A given MtG deck exists only for the duration of a single game. At that point the player can take what he has learned and use that knowledge to improve his deck for the next game. The turn-around time for any one deck is measured in days or (often) hours. But a MUD character can have a lifespan measured in months or even longer. Imagine what it would do to MtG if the choices you could make about what cards you put in your deck were strongly curtailed by decisions that you made about the contents of your deck several months ago when you first started playing the game - how much less fun would that be? But it's in the nature of MUDs that you don't get anywhere if you start a new character every day - it takes substantial amounts of real time to level a character up. And yet, under most class/skill systems, your choices at high-level are significantly affected by the choices made at low-level.

Requiring a player to constantly be refining his character creation process in order to be competitive isn't compatible with requiring competitive characters to have long real-time lifespans.

I think what this means is that players need to be quite strongly guided through the process. This may be done either explicitly (detailed suggestions in the help files) or implicitly (by the system restricting choices to reasonable ones). Too many MUDs don't give you enough information up-front to be able to decide what is or is not a useful combination of skills. They may tell you that a given spell does x points of damage, but there's no real way for a newbie to gauge how useful doing x points actually is.
21 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 188th comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
There's one rather important distinction betweem MtG and MUDs, which is the time factor. A given MtG deck exists only for the duration of a single game. At that point the player can take what he has learned and use that knowledge to improve his deck for the next game. The turn-around time for any one deck is measured in days or (often) hours. But a MUD character can have a lifespan measured in months or even longer.

That depends entirely on the mud in question. As I said earlier, I drew inspiration from the deck-building concept of MtG when I designed the classes in my mud. Your name and class are permanently fixed, but everything else can be changed (although your subclass and trained stats require a 'reroll', which can only be done for free once per calendar month). Your abilities can be rearranged freely, and new abilities are unlocked as you play (similar to collecting new MtG cards).

It's comparable with playing MtG with everyone using single colour decks, and allowing people to rearrange their decks between games but not change their colour.

shasarak said:
Requiring a player to constantly be refining his character creation process in order to be competitive isn't compatible with requiring competitive characters to have long real-time lifespans.

Not 'require', but 'permit'. What is this 'long real-time lifespan', how is it incompatible with post-creation customisation, and what value does it add to the gameplay?
21 Jul, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 189th comment:
Votes: 0
I think that a "feature" of the way many people think about MUDs is that you must have this "forever living" avatar. This has all kinds of sometimes odd consequences on gameplay, the simplest being that people just never seem to die no matter how often you cut them into pieces. Another consequence is what you brought up, Shasarak, where you want characters to be more immutable over time.

I posit (without trying to take credit for originality) that you can have very interesting games without making such a strong association between the player and the character. You can still "be" a given character, but it would typically be for a shorter period of time. You could "reroll" your character by simply switching into another one and have the other party member be controlled by an AI, or just somehow disappear – maybe you could go back to your castle, change which Lord you control, and then sally forth as this new character.
21 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 190th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
I think that a "feature" of the way many people think about MUDs is that you must have this "forever living" avatar. This has all kinds of sometimes odd consequences on gameplay, the simplest being that people just never seem to die no matter how often you cut them into pieces.

Non-permadeath can still make sense in some situations, though. For example, supposing someone were to create a mud where the characters literally represented immortal godlike beings…

David Haley said:
Another consequence is what you brought up, Shasarak, where you want characters to be more immutable over time.

Yet interestingly enough, he also mentioned "how much less fun" MtG would be if your playing deck was immutable. I'm sure my players would feel the same about my mud if I were to remove their ability to freely respec their characters.

David Haley said:
I posit (without trying to take credit for originality) that you can have very interesting games without making such a strong association between the player and the character.

I don't think you even need to avoid the association between player and character - if you want an in-game justification for the respec, there are plenty of ways to do so, although some themes are easier than others.
21 Jul, 2009, shasarak wrote in the 191st comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
shasarak said:
There's one rather important distinction betweem MtG and MUDs, which is the time factor. A given MtG deck exists only for the duration of a single game. At that point the player can take what he has learned and use that knowledge to improve his deck for the next game. The turn-around time for any one deck is measured in days or (often) hours. But a MUD character can have a lifespan measured in months or even longer.

That depends entirely on the mud in question. As I said earlier, I drew inspiration from the deck-building concept of MtG when I designed the classes in my mud. Your name and class are permanently fixed, but everything else can be changed (although your subclass and trained stats require a 'reroll', which can only be done for free once per calendar month). Your abilities can be rearranged freely, and new abilities are unlocked as you play (similar to collecting new MtG cards).

Well, that's true - but I think the option to keep switching skills around retroactively is fairly unusual. Most MUDs have a linear progression - you gain additional skills and abilities as you go along, and each time you decide which new skill to acquire, the choice becomes permanent. You may be able to learn new skills, but you can't unlearn old ones and get the practice points back.

Obviously, a linear system (like the above) and a recursive one (like yours) will have very different characteristics and requirements.
21 Jul, 2009, elanthis wrote in the 192nd comment:
Votes: 0
shasarak said:
There's one rather important distinction betweem MtG and MUDs, which is the time factor.


I keep coming back to that myself while I thinking about this. A game of Magic lasts like 30 minutes. A character in just about any RPG is expected to last at least a 40+ hours, if not for weeks and months.

I'm also thinking back to my MtG, which granted where when I was 12 which was well over half my life ago. I also hung out with some buddies who play MtG last night and watched a few games. My current line of thinking is that games like MtG are only about the preparation. There is strategy in play, but the strategy in play is 100% trumped by the strategy of deck preparation. Even if you play with two fresh start packs, your chances of victory or defeat are pretty heavily determined by the random contents of your starter pack.

In short, MtG is all about building a deck to defeat your opponent. RPGs are all about making in-character choices to defeat your opponent. MtG would likely be a far less popular game for its demographic if deck building didn't matter much and instead relied primarily on strategy of play, and I believe RPGs suffer when they focus more on point allotment and meta-gaming than on being the persona you created in the virtual environment of the game world. Basically, an RPG like MtG is a really shitty RPG. It may be a great game on its own merits, but it becomes something that – while the game community as a whole still labels them as RPGs due to a lot of more specific terminology – breaks from the roots and purpose of role-play gaming.

KaVir said:
That depends entirely on the mud in question. As I said earlier, I drew inspiration from the deck-building concept of MtG when I designed the classes in my mud. Your name and class are permanently fixed, but everything else can be changed (although your subclass and trained stats require a 'reroll', which can only be done for free once per calendar month). Your abilities can be rearranged freely, and new abilities are unlocked as you play (similar to collecting new MtG cards).


I guess that exemplifies my point. Your game is something different. It's much like claiming that Team Fortress (a class-based FPS) is in the same league as Fallout 3. It's not. You have a player-vs-player game (which is a vastly different thing than a character-vs-character game, I might note). The classes and abilities aren't there to define a persona. Using your own analogy, your game is about building a deck of abilities, not about building a virtual persona taking part in an alternate world history/story.

My points probably don't apply much to your game, because you explicitly are designing a game that focuses on "deck building" instead of on development of character. It's a totally different genre of game, though I don't think we actually have the terminology to differentiate it from other RPGs/MUDs. (It's not a matter of PVP vs PVE.)

Quote
I posit (without trying to take credit for originality) that you can have very interesting games without making such a strong association between the player and the character. You can still "be" a given character, but it would typically be for a shorter period of time. You could "reroll" your character by simply switching into another one and have the other party member be controlled by an AI, or just somehow disappear – maybe you could go back to your castle, change which Lord you control, and then sally forth as this new character.


This is pretty common in LARPs. It works well, especially for people who actually want to role-play. You can be the guardsman, the merchant, the monster, whatever. Usually you can have several primary PCs, but you can be only one of them per event or per day. You can also have a number of ad-hoc NPCs you play as during the day to help out the GM(s) when they want to run some monsters or a story module or something, or you can even have your own "perma NPCs" that you can play as with GM permission, usually whenever you want (these are different from your PCs in that they do not gain XP and are still under the control of the GM in case he wants to have you use the NPC for a plot or something).

That's a vastly different game play experience than you metamorphizing into those different personas while still being the same character, though. There's a big difference between me being Jim the warrior one day and Jack the magician the next day compared to me being Jim the warrior one day and then the next day Jim mysteriously and confusingly losing all of my ability to use a weapon effectively while gaining the ability to cast powerful spells he never could before.

When your character changes the entire set of skills and abilities he has, it is no longer true development of character and the role-playing experience is heavily damaged. It's confusing to talk to a man one day, make some plans based on knowing that he and seven other people are competent warriors with a solid mixed-weapon unit tactic, and then the next day when you go to send them on a mission find out they all switched to bows and are totally useless on a battlefield without melee support units they didn't need the day before. You can't role-play like that. You can try, but the result is pretty pathetic and the game quickly degenerates into a non-role-playing game where most of the players just talk about their cars or monster stats or whatever. Being allowed to just change what you are destroys the game atmosphere.

Being allowed to have multiple characters is a fantastic RP tool and can somewhat mitigate the problem of having a broken, overly complex, and/or imbalanced character skill system. I still believe that it sucks to put a few days into a new persona just to find out he doesn't "work out" though mechanically, forcing you to retire him. A good skill/point/class/whatever system is still paramount.

I'm more willing to accept games that let you "rebuild your deck" of skills now than I was thanks to KaVir's point. I personally think those games are totally uninteresting, but I won't keep claiming they're broken. They're just a different genre of game, just like MtG is a totally different thing than D&D, and the rules and mechanics for one make no sense in the other.
21 Jul, 2009, Sandi wrote in the 193rd comment:
Votes: 0
It seems to me what a lot of players want is a GM'd AD&D roleplaying experience, and I don't think they're going to find that on a MUD. Certainly not on a DIKU derivative. Perhaps a D20 MUSH would serve their needs. I have a very strong feeling that some are trying to use the wrong tool - they're complaining about how the wood splinters when they hammer a screw.

I also think many players want to create a character that they are are comfortable with, and then expect that character should be competitive. Listening to them whinge, it sounds like they don't really want to play the game, they just want to win. They're like those twinks on WoD MUSHes that set themselves 'handsome' and 'charming' in chargen, and then wonder why the girls aren't falling for their lame pickup lines.

I think MUDs are games. And, like any game, you need experience to play well. Players should not expect their first character to be the best character the MUD has ever seen. They should not expect all choices to be equal. They should not expect the help files to explain everything. If it's a well designed game, they should expect to take several years to master it, but they shouldn't expect the fun to last forever. Only a great game can sustain one's interest for a lifetime, and the chances that a MUD is going to rival chess or bridge are slim*.

That many of you in this thread think differently is obvious. Oh, well. :smirk:



*Which doesn't keep KaVir and I from trying… we like the challenge.
21 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 194th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
When your character changes the entire set of skills and abilities he has, it is no longer true development of character and the role-playing experience is heavily damaged. It's confusing to talk to a man one day, make some plans based on knowing that he and seven other people are competent warriors with a solid mixed-weapon unit tactic, and then the next day when you go to send them on a mission find out they all switched to bows and are totally useless on a battlefield without melee support units they didn't need the day before. You can't role-play like that.

What about a Matrix-style mud, where you can download skills into your brain? Or a cyberpunk game, where you can insert "skill chips" into the back of your skull? What about D&D-style wizards who can memorise a different set of spells each day? What about a game where your abilities come from spirits you bind into service for a limited duration, or from symbionts you attach to your body?

What if I told you that the characters in my mud are gods, who are omnipotent when on their own plane of existence, and capable of rewriting their own timelines in the material plane (imagine something like the movie 'The Butterfly Effect', except they only have vague memories of their former pasts when outside of their home plane - or perhaps something like 'Dark City', except they can do it to themselves).
21 Jul, 2009, Runter wrote in the 195th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
What about a Matrix-style mud, where you can download skills into your brain? Or a cyberpunk game, where you can insert "skill chips" into the back of your skull? What about D&D-style wizards who can memorise a different set of spells each day? What about a game where your abilities come from spirits you bind into service for a limited duration, or from symbionts you attach to your body?

What if I told you that the characters in my mud are gods, who are omnipotent when on their own plane of existence, and capable of rewriting their own timelines in the material plane (imagine something like the movie 'The Butterfly Effect', except they only have vague memories of their former pasts when outside of their home plane - or perhaps something like 'Dark City', except they can do it to themselves).


A little off topic, but I think the most refreshing thing about KaVir is his appreciation for thinking about game design outside of the box. It's something I truly appreciate.
22 Jul, 2009, elanthis wrote in the 196th comment:
Votes: 0
KaVir said:
What about a Matrix-style mud, where you can download skills into your brain? Or a cyberpunk game, where you can insert "skill chips" into the back of your skull? What about D&D-style wizards who can memorise a different set of spells each day? What about a game where your abilities come from spirits you bind into service for a limited duration, or from symbionts you attach to your body?


Those would be interesting games, surely, and fluid skills would make perfect in-character sense. They're also complete strawmen in the context I was talking in, and you know it. Obviously in some settings, skills are fluid. That's fine. That's a game design choice and surely it makes sense in whatever way you define "sensical" in your game. If your game is one with relatively stock human-like characters, though, swapping abilities around makes no sense. If you implement that feature to work around a screwed up skill system that lets players "develop" into a corner, then your game isn't fixed: it just went from having one problem regarding bad mechanics to having a second problem with a game world impossible to role-play within. My point is that adding ability swapping isn't a valid fix for a game world where ability swapping doesn't make sense.

That aside, games such as you listed would still likely have character intrinsics. They limit which skill chips you can pick and when. The limit which downloads are available. They limit which spirits you can bind. In the case of D&D wizards, for example, they certainly do limit which spells you can memorize. The skills behave much like equipment in a conventional MUD, but they're still governed by some intrinsic capabilities, or else you've got a game that has no character development at all (it may have character _building_, but not development). Every single sub-genre you mentioned has games representing them, and every single one of those games has attributes that differentiate characters at their core from one another.

Don't get hung up on the terminology. The fact that "skills" in one game are intrinsic and are dynamic in another isn't the issue, because I'm talking about "skills" in reference to the intrinsic capabilities of a given character.
22 Jul, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 197th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
Those would be interesting games, surely, and fluid skills would make perfect in-character sense. They're also complete strawmen in the context I was talking in, and you know it.

They're not strawmen - they're counterpoints to an over-generalisation. The point I'm making is that the problem doesn't lie with mutable characters, it lies with features that aren't internally consistant with the theme.

It's a similar situation to the players who argue for permadeath on the grounds that it's more "realistic", without stopping to consider that in some themes, permadeath may in fact be unrealistic.

elanthis said:
My point is that adding ability swapping isn't a valid fix for a game world where ability swapping doesn't make sense.

Likewise, adding magic isn't a valid fix for a game world where magic doesn't make sense. But I wouldn't go around telling people that they can't roleplay wizards, just because I happened to prefer modern or science-fiction themes!

It's really important to recognise that different muds have different themes, and to judge their internal consistancy with their own themes, rather than with one's own preferences.
22 Jul, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 198th comment:
Votes: 0
Well, maybe you're over-generalizing to some extent as well. I think it's reasonable for people to be operating with a certain set of assumptions of what their theme is like; e.g., your character is an exceptional but still mortal creature. You might say these assumptions should not be made, but I think it's not really fair to argue against gameplay statements made in these contexts by talking about completely different themes.

I think that nobody is disputing that you need to judge consistency within one theme internally. But here I think you're arguing about how some gameplay element can make sense in theme X, where Elanthis was making a bunch of statements about theme Y.
22 Jul, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 199th comment:
Votes: 0
Speaking of large numbers…
22 Jul, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 200th comment:
Votes: 0
180.0/213