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<H1>Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</H1>
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<LI><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#null,net">mud-dev#null,net</A></LI>
<LI><em>Subject</em>: Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</LI>
<LI><em>From</em>: <A HREF="mailto:coder#ibm,net">coder#ibm,net</A></LI>
<LI><em>Date</em>: Sat, 17 May 97 14:48:20 -0700</LI>
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<PRE>

On 16/05/97 at 10:12 PM, Adam Wiggins &lt;nightfall#user1,inficad.com&gt; said:

&gt; [ChrisL:]
&gt;&gt; Didn't see that one.  Orion Henry and I stared a spirited chat on the
&gt;&gt; area in r.g.m.m back when (which I think ended up with me inviting him
&gt;&gt; to the old list).

&gt;Yeah, that was me, posting from the mud account between compiles (which
&gt;has Orion's name on it).

Speaking of whom, his account has been generating a lot of bounces lately
(he lost almost all of last week's mail (I don't think I saw any bounces
today).  If he wants a resend of the last week or two, I'm perfectly
willing.

&gt;&gt; In one case UggUgg gave his magical objects to you to exhaust your
&gt;&gt; mana and cause your and his magical objects to instantly decay, and
&gt;&gt; your spells to fail.  The problem here is that this action is not
&gt;&gt; necessarily harmful.  It depends on whether you consider the
&gt;&gt; destrution of the magic items to be damaging or not (their absence
&gt;&gt; certainly simplifies the combat), whether your mana reserves can
&gt;&gt; withstand the strain, or even whether those magic items are actually
&gt;&gt; helpful to you to accomplish something you want (last component for a
&gt;&gt; super spell?)  There's a lot of context here, and a lot of subjective
&gt;&gt; assessment.

&gt;How about just ignoring what the actual action was?  If someone does
&gt;somehting which causes your magical items to decay, it doesn't matter
&gt;what that action was.  This also has the nice side effects of causing
&gt;misunderstandings, ie:

&gt;  Bubba gives you a mithril longsword.
&gt;  Your Great Axe of Hair-Splitting turns to dust.
&gt;  &gt; say you asshole!!!!

Hurm.  Ignoring the problem of the system auto-deciding what your reaction
as a player is to a circumstance in the game (something I *REALLY* don't
like).

&gt;Even if the cause of your axe dusting was actually a sudden mana vortex
&gt;in the room or soemthing, rather than the mithril longsword.

Bingo.

&gt;I'm not even sure about that.  Combat is a tag that we, as humans, like
&gt;to stick on a certain set of actions...the mud shouldn't care, to my
&gt;mind.  People just do stuff, and they can call it whatever they like. Is
&gt;Bubba accidentally dropping his rifle, causing it to fire, which hits
&gt;Joebob (who happens to be flying 400 ft overhead) in the foot, combat? We
&gt;wouldn't define it as such, but it has all the necessary elements. (No
&gt;point in mentioning 'intentional'...there's just no way to define
&gt;intentional results...only the person issuing the command knows their
&gt;intentions, and this is out of the scope of the mud.)
&gt;
&gt;So we can save a lot of time by just not ever worrying about it.

I have advanced to firmly agreeing with you here.  See my fairly recent
posts specc'ing having a stateless model where a combat state can be
causitively invoked on a per-player purely to simplify the entering of
combat-type commands for that player (and the auto-generation of combat
scripts etc).

&gt;&gt; Even more indirect methods are event more effective, decently
&gt;&gt; guaranteed, and difficult to track.

&gt;Sure.  Mudders love to come up with stuff like this.  Given some of the
&gt;totaly creative things I've seen people make use of in the relatively
&gt;rigid environments of 'normal' muds, I'd *love* to see what happens in an
&gt;environment like this...

That's precisely my hope.  Just enough structure to define a decent
goal-oriented game, and more than enough flexability for them all to hang
themselves twenty times over.  

Aside: I'm actually considering making user-programming a dangerous
activity unless done under very guarded circumstances...  Probably this
would take the form of user-programming realising "aethir" (for want of a
bettter world).  Said aethir flows like a liquid in much the same ways as
mana, but also has the interesting property of attracting rather vicious
predatory teleportory beasties who are intensely irritated by it.

&gt;&gt;   All blows/spells/etc have a chance of failing, whereupon they all 
&gt;&gt;     also have a chance of reflecting back on their source (swing 
&gt;&gt;     sword at Bubba and chop off own leg, shell explodes in barrel, 
&gt;&gt;     ice spell freezes you instead)

&gt;In addition, I'd like to totally get rid of the boolean effect of
&gt;actions. Normally there is just sort of a failure state and non failure
&gt;state. You can fail to cast the spell, or cast it successfully.  Boolean
&gt;#2 is if they make their save or not.  There's no inbetweens - a paralyze
&gt;spell always renders them totally helpless, or does nothing at all.  How
&gt;about if you cast it poorly, it might still work, but end up only slowing
&gt;them down a bit?  Or, as you said - failed spells don't just fail, they
&gt;end up going off on the wrong target (possibly your friends or yourself),
&gt;being too weak (fly spell that makes someone feel lighter but doesn't
&gt;actually lift them off the ground), and so on.

Exactly!  A ressurection spell that actually only produces zombies when it
falters, a freeze spell that only gives you a runny nose, a teleport spell
that backfires by instead bring chunks of the destination here, etc.

&gt;&gt;   Combat doesn't last long.  Less than 5 - 10 minutes IRL.

&gt;This counts as 'not long'?  

My first run had combats lasting 30+ minutes...

&gt;...Does this mean that after 5 or 10 minutes someone is
&gt;assured to be dead/flee, or just that the combatants get so tired out
&gt;that can't continue?

The two are effectively synonymous for me.

&gt;&gt; True, they reek of their pulse/heartbeat based systems.  The problem
&gt;&gt; is that I explicitly DON'T want to pace normal action in the game.  If
&gt;&gt; the guy wants to walk across the entire land, and can enter (and have
&gt;&gt; the server process) the commands quickly enough, then by Gum, he'll
&gt;&gt; walk 10,000 miles in 3 seconds flat.  The comparitive problem with
&gt;&gt; this is that I want combat to be forced to be a less hurried affair,
&gt;&gt; and thus requiring pacing.  

&gt;Hmmm...you have limitations on how far the player can walk?

I don't have any plans for it to be.

&gt;Hmmm, does this mean sense == things which will delay the completion of
&gt;my codebase by at least several months?
&gt;In that case, all we ever do is talk sense...:)

That's the whole purpose of thsi list...

-- 
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw#null,net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder#ibm,net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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<li><strong><A NAME="00575" HREF="msg00575.html">Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>
<ul compact><li><em>From:</em> silovic#srce,hr (Miroslav Silovic)</li></ul>
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<LI><STRONG><A NAME="00162" HREF="msg00162.html">Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></STRONG>
<UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> Adam Wiggins &lt;nightfall#user1,inficad.com&gt;</LI></UL></LI>
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<ul><li>Thread context:
<BLOCKQUOTE><UL>
<LI><STRONG>Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</STRONG>, <EM>(continued)</EM>
<ul compact>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00158" HREF="msg00158.html">Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
Adam Wiggins <a href="mailto:nightfall#inficad,com">nightfall#inficad,com</a>, Fri 18 Apr 1997, 23:18 GMT
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00159" HREF="msg00159.html">Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Sat 19 Apr 1997, 01:51 GMT
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00161" HREF="msg00161.html">Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Sat 19 Apr 1997, 02:51 GMT
</LI>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00162" HREF="msg00162.html">Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
Adam Wiggins <a href="mailto:nightfall#user1,inficad.com">nightfall#user1,inficad.com</a>, Sun 20 Apr 1997, 02:29 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00550" HREF="msg00550.html">Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
coder <a href="mailto:coder#ibm,net">coder#ibm,net</a>, Sun 18 May 1997, 07:17 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00575" HREF="msg00575.html">Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
Miroslav Silovic <a href="mailto:silovic#srce,hr">silovic#srce,hr</a>, Mon 19 May 1997, 08:08 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00641" HREF="msg00641.html">Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
clawrenc <a href="mailto:clawrenc#cup,hp.com">clawrenc#cup,hp.com</a>, Wed 21 May 1997, 08:02 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00656" HREF="msg00656.html">Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
Miroslav Silovic <a href="mailto:silovic#srce,hr">silovic#srce,hr</a>, Wed 21 May 1997, 16:41 GMT
<UL>
<LI><strong><A NAME="00674" HREF="msg00674.html">Re: [MUD-Dev]  Re: Issues from the digests and Wout's list</A></strong>, 
Caliban Tiresias Darklock <a href="mailto:caliban#darklock,com">caliban#darklock,com</a>, Thu 22 May 1997, 01:07 GMT
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