So you're saying it's completely unacceptable to have a handful of rarer, more valuable items within a game? Special loot from more difficult encounters or exceptionally hard to locate items/monsters that may have limited spawn chances?

I use an automated tool in my own game that will set an item to appropriate stats based on level, slot type, and material type (for armors) created from defined tables of values. Items flagged rare (giving them an exceptionally low chance to load) are given an automatic +15% across the board. The auto-set is just a baseline tool, though, and things can be manually tweaked if needed by the builder. However since my game is currently me, myself, and I – I haven't run into an issue with QC among multiple people yet.

I do still have plans to create some type of deviations command though to track down outliers in the future.

All of the items should be interesting. Every single last one. And no set of rules can apply to everything. Laws in this country and everywhere should be proof enough of that.

All of the items should be desirable, however, I do believe that certain items should be considered 'special'. Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest are the ones who have to worry about some massive formula that will apply to 10,000 weapons, and hold the balance between 20,000 people.

Beauty of MUDs…immortals.

People want to go imm-less these days, but the Imms are what make a MUD, I'd say. They are the one who can monitor those 'special' items, if they get over powered. They don't have to wait for 5,000 emails reporting a bug.

Not only that, but any MUD I ever played, once I 'heroed', I'd be out gathering the best set of EQ I could get my hands on.

If it was clan gear, I'd join a clan to work on that. If it was quest equipment, I'd quest my heart out. If you're going to make special items, make them count, and don't throw them around. It took me atleast three to four months to collect most of my quest gear on my very first MUD, then I had a second set to aquire.

Not sure how on-topic I was on this, hahaha, just got off work and wanted to respond.

Depending on what you mean by valuable, I could say yes or no here. My approach (when I was going to use a similar system) involved having item level determine the cost of buying/selling/repairing items, and nothing else. I could feed any item into the points system and have the level calculated automatically. This also meant that enchanting an item raised its cost, which I found appropriate. Are there more valuable items in this system? Yes. Are they more valuable in a points sense? Yes. Do they violate the points system? No. As an example, a level 1 item with +1 hitroll that cost 10 gold to repair, but was subsequently enchanted with +3 hitroll/+3 damroll, would suddenly cost 160 gold to repair. It would likewise be worth 16x as much to buy or sell. That's because I used accumulating cost (triangular numbers) for each type, then added them, but you get the idea.



Very, very poor comparison.


Special does not necessarily require that an item be overpowered. If an item violates the point system, it is likely overpowered.


Players really don't like it when you gimp their items. What good does it do to observe the issue if you can't change it?


I realize that few people share my views for how games should be run and organized. That is fine, and I'm not too interested in trying to convince people to adopt mine. That said, I would make the following suggestions, which I believe will be to everyone's benefit long term.

1) Track/enforce item power levels with code. When you change the code, the items change. Find an issue in the points system? Change it, the item changes automatically.
2) Make the faults of items something a player can exploit. If the item goes up in gold-cost-value past the point where the player wants to bother with it, he now has a way out: he can sell it.
3) Force items to follow a scalar system that's easy to implement. Then, if you have to make exceptions, make it to the system, not the individual item. If Charisma should be on more items, make it cheaper. No reason to make a special exception for one particular item.
4) Don't allow items that don't follow the rules, or that use the rules differently. People will just grind away for the best gear anyway, which alters the base power level of your game, which makes the whole point system worthless to begin with. If there's no best gear, they acquire the gear that allows them to specialize to their liking, which does not tend to result in a "best eq set" mentality, and allows for more character customization.

Are there cases where it's best to have a particular item "better" than others? Probably. In a tabletop game I ran, I gave a player an extra 20 character points (33% increase in power level) for not abusing the system like the other munchkins in my game. Is that generally wise, particular in a mud-like setting? I would say no. Players will pursue the best until the best is common. I'd let your point system gimp certain items until you get around to figuring out how to fix it, then items become more useful, and people hardly ever complain about that. But if you make a special exception to an item that makes it more powerful, you can expect to hear complaints about it until the end of time if you change it. In other words, I don't think the approach I'm endorsing works all the time, merely that it is more desirable in the long run.

This is about to turn into a 10 page argument about management.

Mark my words.

Yeah…might be steering these folks away from the fact that I am still looking for builders. Progress is being made, and I got a couple of people who seem to want to stick around. :)

forsakenmud.mudhosting.net 5500

I can see both sides of the argument, but I'm particularly interested in the cases where the rules would need to be broken. I can't really think of any legit circumstances.

The rules need to be broken when they are imperfect. My claim here is that it is very, very difficult to get perfect rules, and much easier to live with the *occasional* exception.