In another thread, Hades Kane said:

In this vein, I'm wondering if anyone else is working on a MUD that has a deliberately "retro" feel to it?

My DeepMUD codebase, for instance, lacks modern amenities such as 'scan', 'recall', and only has 30 levels. It's based on a premise presented by KEO, long ago on usenet - that, in their native setting, the old areas were more fun than most new areas. She cited Midin'nir as an example - on a stock ROM, with 'scan' and typical level 5 EQ and spells, it's not much of a challenge, just another small XP farm. However, enter those woods with a more typical DIKU character without 'scan', and things become quite exciting. One Goblin you can handle, but what if one shows up in the middle of a fight? What if you have to flee? And the deeper you go south, the more dangerous it becomes.

Am I alone in looking back to move ahead?

I can't really help much here because I never played the older MUDs. I'm not sure if older features for the sake of older features is what we want. From your post I find interesting that the underlying desire seems to be a simple and streamlined game-play, removing some degree of information presented (information overload?) and reducing the power of characters. I agree that that sounds like a good goal. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a difference between taking away from the huge toolbox modern characters have, and getting rid of innovations that one might find like economic and political systems that weren't present before. Sorry for being a little brief, need to run…

I think the older style games work out quite well, however, when it comes to things like scan, my mud has improved upon that ability greatly, by adding in a racial variable, different races can see different depths and such, so the modernization has worked out well, and though you mention mindin'nir, what we have done to make scan essentialy a help, but not necessarily a complete help is to add in things like sneak/hide onto critters, we also added random spawns, and monsters that yell for help when they are hurt. (and help will come).

The simplicity of the older style did make it very interesting, and I do indeed like it, but I am drawn more to the functionality on the newer styles because it allows for the player to have far more options, and the immortals/staff to have even more then that in the creation process.

Case and point, my flee system, if you are fighting someone that is equipped with a whip, and you flee, they get a chance (so long as they are not dazed/stunned or under any mal-affects that stop them) to strike out and whip their ankle (stopping them from fleeing) aswell as getting a free shot, ofcourse, every weapon has its own little bonus, it just depends what one you have.

With that being said, allot can be said from taking from the older style of games, but the newer styles that improve upon them and do lots of work to balance things out, make even better games.

IMO.

Thanks for the replies, guys. Apparently "retro" doesn't imply the connotations I was expecting it to. :sad: At least now, I know not to base an ad campaign on it.

Just for the record, I see the older games as more complex, or at least, containing the possibilities of complexity. I believe much of ROM's popularity was due to simplifying gameplay. And most ROM derivatives maintained this, simply adding more skills and spells, levels, races,etc. Of course, that was ten years ago, so maybe this thread would have made more sense back then. :redface:

Is there a more or less easily accessible example of what you're talking about? My knowledge of text-based games starts around Adventure and Zork, and jumps straight to ROM/derivatives, with a brief pass by Nethack-type games. I think it might help me understand where you're coming from. I mean, when I hear "old", I think Adventure, and Adventure is quite a bit simpler than modern MUDs… :wink:

I think that retro can work, to some extent, but it has to be more than just the "coolness factor" of not having graphics – the quotation marks being deliberate, because I'm not sure how to convince some people that it's actually cool.

What I like about MUDs over graphical games is the relative ease with which new features are added. Not having to create any artwork or mess around with graphics of any kind, and not having to worry about the more sophisticated networking that MMORPGs need makes life quite a bit easier. That said, if I had a MUD with the exact same feature set as a graphical game, it's at least somewhat likely that I would prefer the graphical version.

A simple example is due to the kind of features that I like. I'm very much interested in giving spatial meaning to MUDs beyond this-room and that-room. I want tactics having to do with who is closer to whom; I want you to only be able to attack things you can reach; by extension I want groups to have to think about who to put on the front lines, and whether to worry about being flanked. I want flanking to matter: if you have your fighters in front and mages in back, that decision should have tactical consequences.

But all of this is incredibly difficult to do in a straight text-based MUD. Displaying real-time spatial information is basically not feasible if you have to mix it with normal input/output. Nick's new mini-windows feature for MUSHclient basically solves this problem by allowing separate window for graphical output – and it's interesting to note that mini-windows are basically creating a hybrid between textual and graphical games.

Well, sorry for the tangent – hopefully that was helpful at least somewhat.

When I think retro, I think of games that require you to think. Games that don't give you 200 hit points as a level 1 character, and don't lead you through a "mud school" where everything is handed to you, just for reading. Our old MUD was proud of the fact that the highest damage weapon in the game was something like 3d8+4, where others were scaling up the munchkin chart with Sword of a Thousand Cut style 100d10+50 weapons, and thousands of hit points to go along with them.

Over the years, games have not only let their numbers slide higher and higher, but they've also tried to make every character able to play the game solo. In the old days, a mage had Level * 1d4 hit points. They only solo'd if they knew they could kill things in their opening volley. Otherwise, they ran or hid behind the guys with armor.

Things like scan, automapping, autoexits… those are all tools to let the players turn their brains off. Why bother reading the room description when the important(!) stuff is listed at the bottom… contents and exits, in a nice list format. Why try to explore and learn the layout of a zone when you can pull up a map whenever you want? Why sneak into a room (or as we used to do, hit "n;s" with flee pre-typed, so you'd hopefully pop in and see what's there, and pop back out before it noticed you), when you can use scan to see if anything's there?

The problem is, of course, we've all become used to them. Just like the fact that schools no longer teach kids how to drive manual transmission cars, we expect things to be soft and cushy. We don't want to type "get all.gold 3.corpse", because we want autogold to do it for us. In some cases (like that), it's not a bad thing. In others, it makes the developers water down their content because the players don't get it.

What's the problem with a MUD school that teaches you the basics of the game? I realize you put in "where everything is handed to you", so perhaps you have a particular kind of MUD school in mind, but I found that a basic introduction to how to navigate the game and what general kinds of things happen in the world is pretty useful.


Ah, yes, and this has done a great deal of harm to interesting races and classes. It is almost inevitable that, if everybody is to be able to play solo equally well, all classes end up converging to being very similar, just with different names put on the various actions. The differences become superficial only, in that one person casts a spell that does X damage, whereas the other uses an attack skill that does the same X damage.


This is another case where a MUD school can be useful. If you can show off some nifty features, you can let people know that such things are even possible in the world to begin with. For example, you can demonstrate advanced dialogue options, or the ability to move furniture that only appears in the room description.

I've always been a fan of starting people in small villages that have lots of carefully designed quests that teach you the basics of gameplay. It's a difference of style, I suppose. Every mud school I've seen always feels horribly contrived, and usually ends up being an all-or-nothing affair. That is, you can't learn about the clever flanking commands until you've slogged through the "how to kill the defensless earthworm" room, and the "how to pick up your first copper coin" room.

If I were to get off my butt and actually make a new mud, I'd probably have people start in different areas, but in each starting village, I'd make sure there was a town crier telling people tips, some kind of news board people can read, and perhaps even in-game mail as you do things telling you about similar features, or quest-givers that offer related quests.

Ah, I suppose that I was including a small area with carefully designed quests in the "MUD school" category. Mine is not quite at that point, but the school is centered around an admittedly somewhat contrived quest that involves several sub-quests, each teaching some aspect of the game.

Different starting villages has always sounded great to me on paper, until I realize that it spreads an already very thin playerbase even further across the map. I'm not sure how to get around the problem of newbies not running into each other, or even that many other people in general, when they start in different villages.

MW won't have a MUD School, or an Academy. Pre-Auth will cover the basic story of the game world, and cover a bit about the classes, races, and the other systems that will make up the core of the game. Players will also pick one of 6 starting cities where there will be quests and things to go further into detail about the intricate details of the game. But to get the starter set of gear, instead of killing things, the mobs in pre-auth will ask you something relevant to your character, or the topic being covered. And while not necessary, the gear will help a bit when you're just starting out.

I've always felt that higher level people should be available to help out newbies, probably because the MUD I started on worked that way. Too many games lead players by the nose and move you from starter zone to easy zone to middle to end game zones, and so the players never interact with anyone not working on the same content they're working on.

I've always felt you need to spread content out so high level people have reasons to revisit the starting areas. Maybe one of their trainers lives there, maybe some quest requires an item found there, or maybe you coded a clever dungeon that has a door which can only be opened by a player who remains untouched by evil (IE: a virgin – a newbie), so high level people have to ask young folk for help if they want to do that dungeon.

You can always find ways to gather people together by adjusting quests to pull people towards a single city.

One city is workable, even though I I think a game can suffer by being too focused on a single city, but several cities is quite a bit harder, if anything because people will be heading to each of the "magnet" cities. The way to prevent that is to make the only relevant city to them their starting city, but now you've sort of divided your playerbase by the number of starting cities (as far as this is concerned).

First of all, quixadhal 'gets it' perfectly, so I don't feel quite so bad. :wink:
quixadhal, you should drop by tnnmud.com 6789 as it's pretty much just what you're describing. I'd be very interested in your impressions.

David, so sorry I didn't get back to you but I got caught up in this game called Legends of the Darkest One, or something like that. :biggrin:

You have the best mobprogs I've seen in a dikurivatve, by far. Your school is excellent. Someone has a great sense of timing. Yours is not the sort of school quixadhal is complaining about. In fact, Legends of the Darkstone follows the 'retro' ethos fairly closely. As you say on your webpage, the point is to make players think.

Thank you, Sandi! :biggrin: You've really motivated me to start turning the crank again. I had been playing around recently but I think this weekend I will start getting "serious". Unfortunately I have let the MUD lag to some extent by not having worked on it beyond bug fixing for a good couple of years or more… time to fix that.

Not just trying to plug my game or anything, but I felt like some of the issues in the thread we've done what we can to address…

–Newbie School–
As far as the newbie school thing goes, we have worked really hard on making our newbie school as useful as possible. Upon coming in it, you are asked your experience level with the game, and you have 3 options: 1) Total MUD Newbie, 2) End of Time Newbie, 3) End of Time Veteran.

Option 1 sends you through the complete newbie school, which includes things like training stats, practicing skills, killing monsters, fleeing, etc. After you get past the basics of MUDing, you get into more End of Time specific things.

Option 2 skips through all of the basics of MUDing. The first little bit of it is dedicated more toward pointing out things that we've changed more specifically from stock, then the rest is introducing new features.

Both options have the basic information in the room and mobs in the room that you can talk to you get more information on the subject the room teaches. If someone just wants some basics, they can glance at the room and continue, if they want more in depth information, or tips/hints toward deeper parts of the systems, they can engage the mob in conversation (and the conversation goes at their pace). Both options also equip your character, with option 1 having you kill mobs to get your EQ.

Option 3 skips all of it and gives you full equipment and sticks you in front of a trainer.

After making it through the school by either going all the way through option 1 or 2, or selecting option 3, you are put in a place with 8 portals leading to various locations. One portal leads to your hometown (more on this in a moment), another portal leads to a typical "arena" with various levels that have increasingly more difficult/higher level mobs. The other 6 portals lead to self contained "starter" zones that are independent of anything else in the MUD that are laid out with some better lower level equipment and quests aimed at getting the player familiar with the play-style of the game and other or more advanced concepts not covered in the school.

The overall idea of the school is to provide as much of an 'at-your-own-pace' style as possible, with various options available for every player to get started in the game how they want. I also think we've approached in a way where new players won't feel bombarded by too many options, but its open enough for veterans to get right down to what they want to do.


–Hometowns–
We have three hometowns that players can start at. There are a few reasons for this… 1) Anticipation of a larger playerbase that's probably unlikely :p 2) Much of our world layout and story is revolved around three major clans/governments, and each government has a hometown city, 3) We are working on a playable storyline where players will quest through most of the game, and up to about level 20 or so, each hometown will have a different story.

We have added in a room flag where players are able to set said room flagged as such as their recall spot. So as they progress through the game and get more and more toward higher level areas, they have more towns they can choose from to set their recall point. Past about level 15 or 20, there's very little use they might have out of their hometown unless they are just passing through to another area. I think its good to give lower level characters the freedom of having areas they can explore without having to compete with higher level players for resources or space. Since our storyline does "merge" in a way from the hometown quests, I also think that brings together the playerbase more so at about level 20 or so. The town we chose to have the storyline merge at is also the town we have taken steps to have setup as the "center" of the game or world. Indeed, it actually is as close to the "center" of the world (physically speaking) as possible. It sits pretty close to the center of a grouping of islands dubbed "The Trade Isles" which sit in the center of the map. The Trade Isles are a relatively neutral grouping of islands, though each of the big three governments has a port town located on their own island. As a whole, however, the Isles are neutral and there's treaties involving the governing of it and whatnot, and the neutral governing body of the Isles have a Manor they govern out of along with this city which serves as much of the focal point of the Trade Isles. Aside from having it physically the center of the world and having the storylines merge there, we have also made a particular point about having it easy to navigate, to have mobs and equipment from level 15 up to level 80, to have several boats going from that city specifically to other parts on the map that are otherwise difficult to reach, to have most of the rest of the world accessible from somewhere on the Trade Isles, its recall spot is the -only- safe room in the entire game, and its one of the few places that has a donation pit outside of hometowns.. While we would never "force" anyone to choose a city, I think that city's much higher convenience will definitely help promote it becoming the center of the social aspect of the game. People are still free to recall to wherever they want, and certainly some places will inevitably be more convenient depending on where in the storyline they are, but I imagine players will likely flock to that single location.

–Classes–
I agree that most games tend to have a Fighter and a Mage different only in HP/MP balance, and the messaging of the damage they inflict. If a Fighter has a "chi" move that takes mana and does damage, how is that different than a Mage casting magic missile? One of the things we've tried to focus on is having each class have their own measure of strength and balance, and have the classes and the skills actually behave/play different than the others.

The first part worth mentioning is our magic system. We have put an enormous amount of effort into it, making it one of the deepest magic systems I've come across in my time MUDing. The basic method of casting a spell is similar, and basically people only need to get as deep with it as they want. I'm going to use the 'red' spell Fireball in my examples… When you type 'cast fireball' then you are put into a "casting state" where you are "tracing a pattern in the air" or basically manipulating the mana of your surroundings. After a specific amount of time (determined by the spell) then your spell fires, hitting your target, and you are able to act again immediately. However, during this "casting time" you have several options available to you which allow you to manipulate the spell you are casting. There are commands like 'brighten' which pump more mana into the spell making it cost more but it makes it more powerful, while 'fade' does the exact opposite. Widen will spend more mana to target more people, and there are various levels you can widen, and different spells can be widened more than others. Truncate will cancel the spell immediately. Compress will speed the casting time up, while expand will make it last longer. Each of these commands you can do multiple times for more effect, and the time it takes to finish casting the spell is the time you have to manipulate it. In addition to manipulating them like that, you can also interrupt the spell you are casting to cast another one first then finish the one you were originally casting (we call it spell stacking). If the two (or more) spells you have stacked are compatible, you can actually cast "combination" spells. Our list of elements (6 in total, identified by a color [black, green, red, white, yellow, blue… in that order]) are arranged on a six pointed star, and for red, you have white and green on either side of it and thus those are considered red's allied elements. At creation every character picks their innate elemental alignment, then they choose which of their elements allies they are aligned more with. So, the first level red spell fireball, and the first level green spell tremor, can be stacked to create magma burst. In addition, if a player maxes out fireball to 100%, they automatically learn the next level red spell (this is how most of our elemental magic and many of our skills are learned). If they then max out tremor to 100%, they automatically learn magma burst as a spell that can outright cast without having to stack it. In addition to the obvious stacked spells, there are other secret combinations that can be cast if the correct spells are stacked. While the Mage is casting, they are more or less utterly defenseless and they don't do the automatic combat ROM is known for. For this reason, they are pretty hard to solo, but as a balance their magic is incredibly strong. Obviously, having a well guarded Mage in a party is almost invaluable. Their play style is completely different from a Fighter.

Fighters play more or less like a normal class on a MUD, although we have tried to incorporate interesting and interactive skills for them that give them something unique like Mages. Knights are kind of a combination between a combat class and a magic using class, but much of their combat prowess relies more on defense and being able to guard others, but they do get some weapon oriented things like parry, they have shield block, and they are the only class that once maxing fireball, they learn 'fire sabre' which adds the fire element to their attacks.

Thieves are another class that we've really tried to break the mold from. Maybe some of it has been influence from D&D, but I've always felt like Thieves should be a class that plays different than a fighter and require quite a bit of strategy and tactics to play right. This is another case of looking at having a class be considered balance or equally useful without necessarily considering just raw combat strength. In a straight fight with a fighter, there is no doubt a thief should probably use. With a bit of preparation (they are very item dependent for many of their skills), they should do quite well. Sneak in the room and check out who else is with the fighter, lay any of a number of traps in the room surrounding him. Sneak in with a backstab, use a smokebomb to flee and cloud the room, which will lure him into one of the rooms you have trapped. After he leaves and gets hit with the trap, run back in with another backstab and immediately tangle the fighter so they can't flee. Hit him with one of your blinding abilities, and if he still gets the best of you, ensure he's still tangled and flee to go heal. There are other things we are working on with our thief class to make them invaluable to an adventuring/exploring party, rather than just measuring their worth based on combat.


Really the main point of my post is to perhaps give others some ideas, and to illustrate that at least in my mind, a new game with a lot of features that might make parts of the game more easy or dumbed down (like scan, auto exits, etc.), can still use more advanced or creative thinking to make the game deep, make the game challenging, make the classes play different, make a newbie school useful without being redundant, and make hometowns work without dividing the playerbase too much.

Very spiffy, HK. Some of the ideas are ones I've been working on, others are new to me and very interesting. Good stuff, thanks for sharing.

I'm gonna snip some of this new novel out. :P

Our pre-auth (when I finish it -.-;) will work a bit the same way. If they've completed pre-auth before they'll be given a phrase to say at a particular room, to skip pre-auth, answer a single question, and recieve all their gear, plus a little bit of a bonus gift. If they haven't, they're going to learn about playing a mud (even if they know the basics, because a lot of the basics will be changing on MW.) from the start.


We have something similar in the works for MW, but we have 6 "Nations" that compete and a 7th neutral one that oversees that none of the others do things that are underhanded or violates the rules of conflict. (Long story, very relevant to MW's history.) And as players get higher in level (which will not be easy, but at the same time not terribly difficult. MW's focus isn't about getting to top level and then doing the other stuff the game has to offer, but rather do the other stuff as you level.) They'll find themselves being sent to other nations on diplomatic quests, or to the neutral nation to do something. They might also find themselves being sent into battle to defend their nation against invaders from an opposing nation, or even from a monster invasion of sorts.



For this, Well, It's hard to sum everything on this up. As far as our systems go, most of the staff plays, or is familiar with 3rd Edition D&D, and we've decided that we like the balance that comes with a system based off theirs, so using D&D as a guideline (yes Quix, even for the item stats :P no 100d1000+1000 weapons on MW. At least not yet. :wink:) we're designing our systems off that, with our own edge to it. We'll still have the automated combat, but it will be less… spammy, and more roleplayable. For instance, unless you're dual wielding, you only get 1 attack per round, with a chance (based on type of weapon) to make a combo attack which would allow you to hit for a couple more times. (this may change as we refine things further, as it stands now though…)

Magic will stop your automatic attacks while you cast, similar to yours, except players will need certain abilities before they could strengthen a spell, or make it an area attack, etc. MW will also feature different types of magic in addition to the different elements. Arcane, Divine, Psionics, Songs (for the bard), Dances (for the bladesinger), Runic, Ritual, and Runic Ritual are all of the types of magic I believe. Magic isn't something we've spent a lot of time focusing on yet, because we had been focused on Combat, and now our focus is switching from Combat (since it's mostly done) to Classes.

As far as classes go I agree that they should all play differently, Which is going to be interesting on MW, because players will be able to combine up to 6 classes on their character, all with varying levels but all adding up to at most 60. That doesn't make any sense. Let me try that again. Ok. On MW we have 16 classes available at creation. But there are 42 "prestige" (for lack of a better word) classes that players will be able to pick up throughout the world. But it's not like a remort system. You don't just become the new class. It's just tacked on to your current one. For instance, Timmy is a level 10 Shield Dwarf Warrior. And he comes across an old dwarf in an elaborate set of armor. Said Dwarf sets Timmy a task, Timmy completes it and returns. The Old Dwarf then teaches him the secret to being a Dwarven Defender. So now, when Timmy has enough experience to level up (it's not automatic on MW), he can choose to take a level in Dwarven Defender and would then be a level 10 Warrior/1 Dwarven Defender. Players will be able to take 6 total classes, but the prestige classes are limited to 10 levels. You won't be able to level any higher then that. So Timmy, assuming he likes Dwarven Defender, by the time he hits level 60 (our level cap) would be 50 Warrior/10 Dwarven Defender but his level is 60. So, you could in essense end up with a jack of all trades kinda character who's a 10 Paladin/10 Mage/10 Ranger/10 Psychic Warrior/10 Cleric/10 Runecaster.

But I'm nearing Novel length myself… And I forgot what I was going to talk about now anyway, so… yep.

This is one of the reasons I think it's vital to have content for all the level ranges mixed, spatially. If your level 20 fighters base themselves out of a larger city, they'll never be around to interact (and help!) the newbies unless the game gives them a reason to be near them. Put a level 20 dungeon under the hillside right behind the grocer in one of the newbie villages. Make SURE the newbies know not to go in there, either by limiting access, or (my preference) putting enough warnings up that people who READ will know it's too dangerous for them. People who run around in brief mode will figure it out when they get killed 3 steps in the door. :)

If you have 4 starting races (for example), you might want the mid or higher level content to both have peaceful quests that get them to return to their own starting area, and combat/stealth/etc quests in the OTHER starting areas.

To avoid resource depletion, just make sure the resources in the starting area are not overly useful to higher level players. Mobs are worth little experience and drop coppers and junk equipment, natural harvestables are only useful for crafting lower tiers of gear or spells, etc. Sure, they can go around foresting elm branches, but they're not worth the time when they could be in the higher tiered zones harvesting teak.

The only gotcha here, is that the more areas you have, the more cross pollination you need. That means more work when developing ALL the areas.

Oh yeah, I should also mention I'm a fan of travel. I hate being able to just teleport from place to place, ignoring the wilderness. If you have two cities that are 50 miles apart, there should be things to do within those 50 miles! Having long travel times makes people want to spend more time around where they are, rather than making the long trek very often. So, once you DO get them to return to n00bland, they are more likely to hang around and look for things to do (thus helping the n00bs), before making the long hike back home again. That helps, but it does make it harder to entice them to go there.

Personally I don't think it makes much sense, in an IC and not OOC understanding, to have relatively dangerous dungeons right next to a town. There are some circumstances where you could explain it, but most of the time it's very hard to explain why this otherwise peaceful town exists right next to a rather dangerous place. Especially as the town grows in size, you would think that guard patrols would clear out most dangerous things – or the town itself would be cleared out by the dangerous things in question.

Of course, from an OOC perspective, yes, it's useful to have things for high-level characters to do in the same place as low-level characters. I'm just not sure it outweighs the negative for me.

I believe in a concentric circles approach, where as you leave "civilization" things get more and more dangerous. You can have several centers, so that if you travel in a straight line the difficulty is not monotonically increasing or decreasing, but most established communities should be fairly safe (from a storyline perspective) and only outposts or frontier villages should be dangerous.

As for travel, I am somewhat torn. Of course, the land in between should not be completely uninteresting. But there is value in having "emptiness" that is dotted with interesting things – this is one of the fun things to do in Morrowind/Oblivion. In this case, being able to fast-travel is very useful when you really just want to get from one place to another. Now, I'm not a fan of instant teleportation either; I prefer some kind of automated transport where you, say, hop on a carriage in a caravan and are moved across the road system. This adds all kinds of interesting opportunities for the world interacting with said caravan, e.g. bandits ambushing it.

True, although it means your challenges go from the simple mundane tasks to complex ones.

Perhaps the small village can't keep vermin like kobolds or goblins under control, and while there are small starter caves for them, you could place higher level content that lies behind hidden doors in the depths of the caves. A little clever scripting could make it only accessible to someone holding/wearing/wielding something that's only available from higher level content.

In larger cities, the objectives become more urban. Sure, you won't find caves with orcs near a big metropolis, but you might very well find secret societies working to restore an ancient god to power. You might also find dissodents who are unhappy with the current leaders and work to overthrow them, or ex-patriots who don't like the invaders who have taken control of their city. It could be even more grey… perhaps various factions within the city are working against each other, and the player can choose to encounter one or more of them. They could be doing business in plain sight, in the local taverns… or in basements or sewer tunnels… or perhaps in the estates of the weathy.

Consider. Our starting village consisted of three streets. Really, two roads leading out of town, and one perpendicular short street that was the "main drag", all 7 or 8 rooms of it. The two chunks of the "main road" that head east and west out into the wilderness both overshoot the "main drag" by a few rooms to have a bit more "downtown".

Now, there are a couple of farms set just off the roads, visible as you walk along the road. There's a deserted mansion on a small path to one side, and a church in a small field formed by the west and main streets. All around this, is grassland, with rolling hills to the south and east, mountains to the north, and dense forest to the west.

Near the village (about 12 steps away) we put a small kobold den in the hillside. This is far enough that the village guards won't do anything about it, but adventurers can get there and lay waste with their mighty level 5 newbies. A graveyard behind the cemetary, the mansion, and a small mushroom ring in the grasslands all provide content for folks from levels 1-9. However, one of the toughest mobs in the game (Asgard the Lich) spawns under exactly the right conditions in the same graveyard. Newbies are told to avoid the graveyard during the nights of the new moon, and those who ignore that warning learn to flee very quickly. This was one thing that got higher level players to revisit the starting area and hang out, trying to get drops from the Lich.

I'm a big fan of not letting space go to waste. Just because the building you wandered around in at level 5 didn't seem to have anything besides a few rats to kill, doesn't mean there wasn't anything else there. The trick is to have NPC's give players hints to go search their old stomping grounds for content they missed before. In modern games, you can use quests… in our old Diku, we had to hope people paid attention to NPC chatter or room descriptions.