[MUD-Dev] RP thesis...

[Adam Wiggins]

>    at 09:07 AM, Matt Chatterley <root at mpc.dyn.ml.org> said:
> >A troll might like to chow down on a goat's carcass after he biffs it
> >over the head, but a human would almost certainly cut it up and cook
> >it first. This is an important distinction. Different races will have
> >to eat slightly different things.
[Chris L:]
> Don't forget that cooked food is significantly less nourishing than
> uncooked.  As a friend once put it, "All cooking does is make food
> more dead."  There's a lot to be said for going au naturale, and I'd
> expect your players to notice that.

It does a tad more than that - it makes it more palatable to us 'civilized'
folks, and it kills most nasty stuff that likes to live in such substances.
(Don't forget being able to make jerky and the like, as well.)

> >We have both normal rooms, and our own mappable virtual room areas,
> >you can create a map such as:
> 
> >XXXXXXXXXX	X = impassable terrain
> >**########	* = swamp
> >*######@##	# = grassland
> >XXXXXXXXXX	@ = a lake
> 
> >and set a scale for each room - this map would be converted into
> >normal rooms with randomly set sizes, descriptions, weather suited to
> >the area, and so forth.
> 
> The problem with virtual rooms, which can be handled is when players
> make a change to a virtual room which requires them to become
> permanent, or the notice something in a virtual room and refer to it
> later expecting it to be permanent.
> 
> eg:
> 
>   > l 
>   You are in a forest...(desc of forest)
>   > cut blaze on tree
>   You cut your sigil on a nearby tree.
> 
> or:
> 
>   > l
>   You are in a forest...yada yada something about an oak tree.
>   ...much later...
>   > say "Just go east in the forest until you see the Oak tree, 
>   and then head west..."

It's a 'problem' that they expect something to be peremanent?  To mind
there's no point to doing it if you walk off and a second later whatever
you just did has disappeared - or worse yet, the features of the land vary
(hey, that tree was over there last time!).  Storing general info about
land is fairly easy, of course - storing specific changes is just a matter
of having a small list of those changes.  In order to keep that from
growing out of proportion, you just need a) sufficiently small nodes (small
being defined as whatever your RAM can handle) and b) time decay.  Tracks
get obscured, foliage grows back, objects left lying around get carried off
by unknown persons.