03 Feb, 2010, Kaeden wrote in the 21st comment:
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I suppose people who are trusted to roleplay zombies accordingly could be granted a flag that allows them the option of controlling the zombie form of themselves after dying.
03 Feb, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 22nd comment:
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shasarak said:
The RP comes in when you allow subtle little flashes of the zombie's former personality and memory to show through in unexpected ways… split-second hesitation before biting your former spouse's brains out, etc.

I guess. I didn't really picture this as being possible given the description of zombies so far. I also confess that even if you allowed it, it still doesn't strike me as much opportunity for RP because you can only exhibit extremely brief, basically meaningless flashes of something that doesn't matter anymore. I dunno, maybe I'm just a fuddydud and don't "get" the value in this. :wink:
03 Feb, 2010, Barm wrote in the 23rd comment:
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If you coded it so that once you became a zombie you couldn't communicate with or recognize your former human friends it might work. Just provide a nightly report of who ate whom. You'd also need some kind of zombie advancement to keep the undead players engaged. More power for every dozen live brains consumed. Instead of N, S, E, and W you could label exits with random numbers to simulate aimless wandering and deter overly coordinated attacks.
03 Feb, 2010, Kline wrote in the 24th comment:
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http://www.urbandead.com

Might steal some ideas? You can play as human, then once you die either be revived (if you're lucky and another player revs you) or raise up as a zombie. Once a zombie you can be cured by special injections from higher level players to return to being human. It's a cycle that goes back and forth. Either trying to stay dead or trying to stay alive. Advancement is separate on each side, but when next killed/raised you retain all your previously learned abilities.
03 Feb, 2010, Kaeden wrote in the 25th comment:
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I sort of envision playing the zombie version of yourself as being a minigame meant for laughs. I kind of like the idea of disorienting a player in control of a zombie by obscuring where they are and who's around them. Kind of building upon Barm's suggestion–maybe if N,E,S,W,etc were replaced with numbers ranking the relative heat values of rooms. Maybe even make the player zombie move in a random direction when they try to move in a particular one every now and then.

The postponed report of what you accomplished while a zombie could be amusing too. I can see it now–"Oh crap! I ate my former friend Ted!" I don't know if there will be a cure for zombie-ness in my MUD anytime soon, but the carrying over of "zombie exp" or whatever you wish to call it could be done.

In example: A player creates a new survivor character, George. George eventually succumbs to injuries and dies while infected and rises as a zombie. Zombie George tears up the neighborhood and eats some people, gaining some zombie exp. Zombie George's reign of terror is finally brought to an end by a survivor, completely deleting George but storing the exp gained to his account. The player then creates a new character, Frank, who eventually becomes a zombie and now has the experience that George had earned.
04 Feb, 2010, Koron wrote in the 26th comment:
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Kaeden said:
I suppose people who are trusted to roleplay zombies accordingly could be granted a flag that allows them the option of controlling the zombie form of themselves after dying.

To facilitate this, PC zombies might see all non-zombie characters as "Today's Dinner" instead of "Bob." :smile:
14 Feb, 2010, DemonAlucard wrote in the 27th comment:
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Yea I don't think its wise to allow players to control zombies and or mutants really considering the fact that they would be able to reanimate constantly without really dying unless someone took the time to really make sure they are dead by removing their head or if they score a headshot by chance. I would say if you DID make zombies something the player could play… to give them limited mobility make them have to plan a strategy with other zombies or use the horde as a sort of shield to get to the player they want to kill.
There is also the idea that mutants wouldn't necessarily be friendly towards zombies, sure they are made by the same virus but a mutant is going to see a zombie walking around feeding on humans and probably think "competitor" "kill" just as an opposing predator would do to another predator given the right circumstances. So players being zombies wouldn't exactly be all that much more different then a survivor when it comes to mutants.
14 Feb, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 28th comment:
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Kaeden said:
I suppose people who are trusted to roleplay zombies accordingly could be granted a flag that allows them the option of controlling the zombie form of themselves after dying.

Why not just remove their communication commands and have the zombies randomly display thematic messages? Seriously roleplaying a zombie might be entertaining for the first 15 seconds or so, but I don't perceive it having any lasting value. Coupled with the perception-alterations, anyone could be a zombie, then. I'd make it so they can't hear any channels (say included), or see emotes or socials also.

Kaeden said:
The postponed report of what you accomplished while a zombie could be amusing too. I can see it now–"Oh crap! I ate my former friend Ted!"

I don't know why, but I find this part strangely appealing. "Did I eat anyone I like? Ah, crap."

Could be great if you keep the zombies as recognizable too. A person might be disinclined to kill their now-zombie friend, but not killing them may involve their death as well. I wasn't too interested in this concept up to this point, but it sounds kind of awesome now.

Not sure what kind of replay value it would have, though.
14 Feb, 2010, Dean wrote in the 29th comment:
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Well, he could always chain him up in his shed and play xbox with his now zombified friend. :tongue:
14 Feb, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 30th comment:
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Tonitrus said:
Could be great if you keep the zombies as recognizable too. A person might be disinclined to kill their now-zombie friend, but not killing them may involve their death as well.

Maybe the zombies aren't obviously recognisable as zombies within the first hour or so of being zombified? You might think it's literally your PC friend at first, at least until his response to "Hi Bubba!" is to try and eat your face…

Could encourage a nice amount of paranoia among the playerbase - idle players getting shot when they don't respond fast enough.
20 Jan, 2011, KaVir wrote in the 31st comment:
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I've recently been reading World War Z: An Oral History of the Zomb..., and it got me thinking about how it would make a great setting for a mud that used a graphical interface, because you could get away with a relatively small amount of graphics (compared to the huge range of monsters you'd need for most fantasy games). And that reminded me of this thread, so I thought I'd have another read over it.

Kaeden said:
The MUD employs what I call a heat system. Heat is a blanket term that I use to describe how significant/noticeable a players presence or trail in a room is.

In World War Z, zombies moan whenever they encounter a living creature. If another zombie is within hearing range, they moan as well, then head towards the first zombie. This creates a sort of zombie communication network, where if one sees you they all start closing in.

I'm not sure how well that would work in a mud - if not handled carefully, you could end up with every zombie in the game packed together. However (inspired by "Sugarworld", I think it was called?) you could randomly assign each zombie different ratings in things like "hearing", "moan strength", "speed", "metabolism", etc, and I think it could create some pretty cool zombie swarming patterns.

So the initial zombies might use the heat system to track someone down, but once they spotted you they'd call for others. Perhaps "heat tracking" could even be a zombie skill? Zombies with a high rating would then take on a sort of scouting role.

Oh, and this would be great fun with MSP ;)

Cratylus said:
A game that is strictly about surviving an end of the world zombie onslaught will probably be fun for a little while, but eventually only the people who enjoy the tedium of neverending waves of the same enemy will remain.

I did also wonder how effectively you could incorporate ideas from Minecraft into an overhead 2D graphical mud. Imagine a huge randomly-generated world where the players can go around gathering resources and building whatever they like - while fighting off hordes of zombies. In fact (although I've not played it myself) Minecraft does already have a survival mode, where you have to build a base to hide from monsters during the night.

Of course as I've said before, players will trash the environment if they can. But in this case, does it really matter? If the game world is initially completely generated, you could allow players to do whatever they like until its been either completely pacified or completely overrun…then generate a new game world, representing another part of the "real" world.
20 Jan, 2011, Runter wrote in the 32nd comment:
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David Haley said:
shasarak said:
I'd have thought playing a zombie would be interesting from an RP perspective, too.

Given the description of zombies in Kaeden's world, it seems like it would be rather like role-playing a magnet that only knows how to go find iron and clamp onto it. I have to confess that this doesn't sound terribly exciting to me.


Solomon Grundy.
20 Jan, 2011, plamzi wrote in the 33rd comment:
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"World War Z" is an excellent good book, and the reason for that is it uses a zombie apocalypse as a vehicle to dissect the current state of the world. Zombies are thrown in to make the "cool kids" want to read something that will actually teach them a few things about the bigger world out there. I used the book in class, and found undergraduate students receptive to ideas they would have otherwise dismissed as boring, just because those ideas came in a zombie wrapper.

I believe a zombie-themed MUD can work. Whether or not it is based on the rules defined in "World War Z", it should definitely learn from the book the important lesson that zombies should be means to another end.
21 Jan, 2011, KaVir wrote in the 34th comment:
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Well (from the perspective of designing a zombie-themed mud) it was primarily the idea of zombies using their moans to gather in numbers that I liked, as a mechanic for creating hordes on the fly whenever humans are encountered. Combined with the randomised ratings in different abilities, you could model the zombie behaviour on an agent-based social simulation, which I think could be pretty fun.

I finally managed to find some information on SugarScape (not SugarWorld, sorry) here, and there's also a Wikipedia article on it:

All Sugarscape models include the agents (inhabitants), the environment (a two-dimensional grid) and the rules governing the interaction of the agents with each other and the environment.

The original model presented by J. Epstein & R. Axtell (considered as the first large scale agent model) is based on a 51x51 cell grid, where every cell can contain different amounts of sugar (or spice). In every step agents look around, find the closest cell filled with sugar, move and metabolize. They can leave pollution, die, have sex (multiply), inherit sources, transfer information, trade or borrow sugar, generate immunity or transmit diseases - depending on the specific scenario and variables defined at the set-up of the model.


And as for being a means to another end, I would point out that Minecraft's sandbox approach does seem to have achieved a certain degree of success.
24 Jan, 2011, Kayle wrote in the 35th comment:
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Speaking of World War Z
16 Feb, 2011, ryanhamshire wrote in the 36th comment:
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May I suggest that you divide your world up into many regions, which are only weakly connected (you must travel a great distance to reach an entirely different region). When a player starts a new character, the server will pick "randomly" which region that player will start in, which will give players more variety when they're dying a lot (it would suck to start in that same familiar warehouse every time you die, especially after 10's of restarts).

You mention that players can freely attack other players to take their gains. I worry about players with more player skill or more in-game skill routinely preying on weaker players during the daylight hours, and logging out during the night hours to avoid zombies.

The above suggestion would also open the door for you to quietly group players who prefer more player-versus-player together, for example in a series of regions disconnected from the rest of the world's regions where more cooperative, agreeable players frequent. So if someone racks up lots and lots of player kills, maybe the next time he dies and has to restart, he finds the population seems suddenly more predatorial (what goes around comes around, thanks to fair-minded developers).

http://textgaming.blogspot.com
16 Feb, 2011, sankoachaea wrote in the 37th comment:
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ryanhamshire said:
suggestions on balance and fair-play


Quoted for truth.

This sounds like a lot of fun.
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