[MUD-Dev] Re: Re[2]:[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD Design doc (long)

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 18 Dec 1998 15:37:46 -0800 
Caliban Tiresias Darklock<caliban at darklock.com> wrote:

> You will notice that if I have lots and lots of attack strength, I
> can wander around and blow people away all day long. Something had
> to be done about this, so there are... dirty tricks. There is
> camouflage, which makes you look nastier or wimpier than you
> really are. There is the self-destruct, basically a tac nuke that
> blows the $#!+ out of anything nearby when you die. And there are
> even more insidious devices, things that can make your life a
> LIVING HELL.

This is one of the resons I so like Mage2Mage.  It makes for very
very uncertain combats.  I want an appreciably large percentage of
unpredicted outcomes to combat (master swordsman attacking
tooth-picking novice gets a toothpick thru the eye and dies
instantly).

> We haven't touched the question of psychological warfare yet, or
> even simple escape -- devices exist that can register attacks and
> actually take evasive action immediately before your attack forces
> respond. Coupled with something vicious to autodrop on the way
> out, this can be very nasty -- if you survive the initial attack,
> you can conceivably waste your opponent without risking
> yourself. I can drop some of my attack force somewhere and just
> leave it waiting to ambush someone, in which case you could be
> killed without my being at risk. It's even possible for me to
> create a guerilla attack team that actively searches for things to
> kill without human intervention.  (Currently, I can't create a
> team that looks specifically for YOU, but this is in the works...)

Excellant.  I like.  A lot.

> There are literally *hundreds* of nasty tricks that can be
> acquired; in combination, there are tens of thousands of vicious,
> imaginative plots that can seriously screw up your whole day. The
> flip side... *you* can use these nasty tricks, too. ;)

I specifically want human player skills to be more important than
game-character skills.  (I'm gamist thta way) As such I want
knowledgable players controlling newbie characters to be typically
more dangerous than well dressed characters played by reasonably
skilled players.

It makes human relations an inescapable part of combat.  You can no
longer assume that the ragamuffin really is defenseless.

> The major problem: With all these options and all these
> possibilities, the learning curve is STEEP. With well over a
> thousand possible things you can do or use or buy or pursue,
> attracting the new player is apt to be difficult. The target
> market is most likely to be old-hand players who enjoy SF wargames
> and simulations, but don't particularly need any specific level of
> realism -- just a feeling that they can do anything they want with
> the tools they can find. There's a certain aspect of inventiveness
> that pervades the system.

<nod>

> See my above comment on counterattack. Note also that an offline
> player on my game does not drop out of the world -- you can, in
> fact, be killed while you are offline. Conversely, you can kill
> others while you are offline. Some people dislike this idea, and I
> am one of them... but it works, and it works well.

<bow>

--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
(Contractor)                             Internet: coder at kanga.nu
---------(*)                    Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...