Ten Rules of PvP was RE: [MUD-Dev] Interesting DAoC Poll

[Vincent Archer]

According to Azeraab:

>   out of the fort and attack.  You face an orange con albion
>   armsman, he kills you taking less than half damage.  Your
>   friend, another level 40 Berserker, who specialized in hammers
>   kills the wounded armsman easily.  Over your corpse he says,
>   "Didn't you know that hammers do much more damage against armor
>   than swords?"

Against Albion armor, that is.

The next day, when you and your fellow berzerker are clearing out
the way to the Hibernian keep, and the other guy is barely alive at
the end of the combat while you've only lost half your HP slicing
Hero scale armor in two, you can gloat and tell him "now, who's the
gimp?" :)

Of course, if you had specialised in thrusting weapons... Hmmm,
wait, you can't specialise in thrusting weapons as a berzerker,
that's only for hunters :)

> Now you are faced with a choice.  Keep playing a character who is
> totally ineffective, and really not what you expected, and try to

That's assuming you are "totally ineffective".

I spend a largeish article on the vault recently explaining to all
the people from Albion who were screaming they were gimped by being
the only realm requiring two skills for weapons why, at BEST, the
difference between them and the hibernian or midgard was about 6%
more damage.

The "gimp" syndrome you see over and over and over is, alas, chiefly
a psychological effect. For all its worth, the DAoC class/skill
system is highly adequate, and most characters, no matter how they
skilled, are effective in a lot of circumstances.

The only gimping I've seen is related to bugs (example: friars
specialising in endurance over skill 12), or because of being
utterly foolish and trying to emulate a different class (like friars
or shamen specialising in their respective healing skill).

> There are 2 ways the designer can avoid the problems with rule 10.
> Either make all of the classes similar.  If everyone was a mage
> variant the problems would be minimized.  The issue of no ranged
> attacks wouldn't exist, issues with spells being interruptible but
> melee attacks not being interruptible wouldn't exist, and so on.

Don't you think Mythic know that? Get a good look at Spellbinder:
Nexus Conflict for a very good example of "Counterstrike with mages"
:)

> The other way is to allow players to make changes without having
> to restart.  Ala UO.  The berserker in our example should be
> allowed to at least toss aside his sword and pick up a hammer
> without penalty.

I've seen two proposal for this. One is a relatively high level
"restart".  Once you're 40, you're allowed *once* to reset your
specialisations, and build upon what you've learned. The other is a
UO2-style "lose one skill and recover the skill points" style per
day.

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)
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