[MUD-Dev] Self-Sufficient Worlds

[Christopher Allen]

"Chris Lloyd" <crl199 at soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> A magic-user might be able to mix up a healing potion, but where does he
get
> the bottle to put it in? Can he get a peddler-class PC to make it for him,
> or does he have to buy it from an NPC shop in the high-street? This follow
> for everything else: weapons, armour, clothes, and whatever else a player
> needs. Is the only way to get food to buy it from a shop or complete a
> quest, or can you hunt down a deer and cook it? There are always lots of
> other little items that an given character class needs: The ingredients
for
> a spell or potion, pipes to smoke herbs in, metal to make armour.

The closest I've seen to success in this is DartMUD, where you have player
smiths, armorers, cooks, farmers, etc. but I think most people would say
that it doesn't work without the NPC shopkeepers at some level. Ultima
Online also has somewhat of a player economy, but most items are not made by
PCs, and NPCs are the intermediaries or sources for most commodities (such
as spell components).

Accursed Lands (a new mud with a number of the coders from DartMUD) is
attempting a PC driven economy again, more agressively. Taking some lessons
learned from DartMUD, they are pulling out NPCs as soon as some players have
the skills, and pulling out the NPC buyers as soon as items are valuable to
players at all. For instance, for a while there were some NPCs that bought
furs -- now that a few players can make leathers and armors, those NPCs
either don't pay as much, or have been removed. Personally I don't think
Accursed Lands has enough critical mass yet for this to be working very
well, but you have to credit them for working hard on it.

We believe at Skotos that you can't have a realistic economy without an
underlying simulation that simulates many NPCs for every PC. So that is
where we are heading with our most advanced game, Alvatia.

However, requirements for a PC economy do not have to include "realistic" so
I don't think there is anything that prohibits a design of a game that is
completely PC driven -- it is just very hard.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.. Christopher Allen                                Alacrity Ventures ..
.. <ChristopherA at AlacrityVentures.com>             1512 Walnut Street ..
..                                            Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
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