[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is supposed to be playing, anyway? (Was: PK Again)

[Matt Chatterley]

On Fri, 26 Sep 1997, Marian Griffith wrote:

> On Thu 25 Sep, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 25 Sep 1997 08:50:47 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins
> > <nightfall at user1.inficad.com> wrote:
> 
> > >The morals being: character creation should ask questions in the correct
> > >order. - general to specific; and second, documentation about character
> > >creation should be availible before you actually waste your time creating
> > >a character that you'll decide to redo an instant later now that you know
> > >what your choices are.   This gets even more important as your character
> > >creation process gets longer and more involved (which I vastly prefer).
> 
> In many mushes this is handled quite nicely, with a series of rooms to
> traverse each having a number of exits  that implies a certain choice.
> In each room extensive documentation on the choice can be found so you
> do not have to jump in blindly,  and hope you made the right decision.
> The option to change your mind and return to the previous room thereby
> undoing the last choice  would be a nice addition  that I have not yet
> seen anywhere though.  And of course mushes come standard with a guest
> character  that you can use to look around and get an understanding of
> the game.

Well, to say that 'mushes come standard with a guest character' is a
slight mis-statement (this IS a nitpick) - they come with the capacity for
one inately in the server design. Or rather, they did when I was in that
game.

The style of chargen often found on MUSH servers (look around a few,
for instance, although I would recommend the games to no man, Battlestar
MUSH had a very good chargen system last year, so did B5) are typically
very good in terms of information, but veer to the complex side (which
often scares off those new to what many would term "MUSHing" (rather, the
concept of a game with a decentralised focus, whereby the intent is to
roleplay and have fun as opposed to hacking stuff up - at least, thats
vaguely how it must be perceived?).

The stock code phenonmenon has struck again in this area, and many WoD
games have an absolutely standard chargen, which I think is terrible. I
complained about it once to an admin and was told he couldn't change it,
because he couldn't code, nor could anyone else. Anyways, back to the
plot:

I have definitely been influenced by this concept from my past, and the
character generation sequence I will apply (although it will be largely
random - you get to select only race), will present you with the
opportunity to learn how to play the game (it being sufficiently diverse
from many "stock LPmuds") before entering. I am toying with the idea of
having it ask you 2-3 simple questions before allowing you to proceed.

> > Let me add another example. I gave the various 'specialist mages' in one
> > of my AD&D campaigns appropriately atmospheric names, for example
> > instead of 'necromancers' we had 'jaak-tsarin'. If you come across
> > something like this in a MUD chargen, particularly in a list of twelve
> > similarly inscrutable names, what the hell are you supposed to do?
> 
> Read the help on classes? Or pick one at random and pray ;)

The problem is that there frequently is no help, the following is common
on many games:

	Pick a class: 1. Jak'Tho'Tekkit 2. Ni-po 3. Yung-fu-sung-tickle
	Or type 'help <class>' for help on that class.
	> help ni-po
	There is no help on that subject.

and so forth. Also, help systems can sometimes be too obscure (with topics
named poorly), so a deliberate fall back feature in our system is to
return a menu of all help topics matching your query (and the first thing
we ask players to read is "help help").

Regards,
	-Matt Chatterley
	http://user.itl.net/~neddy/index.html
"Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics." -?