FW: [MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:

> It doesn't matter to me whether you want to pretend the character
> and player are different or not, but how can you know the character
> doesn't know something? How do you know he's never overheard this
> 'secret' information, or that no one has ever told it to him. Your
> code doesn't and can't know that. Again, in role or out of role,
> it's just making players jump through hoops for the sake of it in my
> opinion.

Just model character knowledge fer cryin out loud.  EverQuest does a
form of this with its No Drop items, except that you can't clone them
to hand them to other people.  If talking to an NPC gave your
*character* knowledge, and you were then able to give that knowledge
to another character (a copy), we could rely on an in-game mechanism
to spread rumors, have passwords and such.  There is no way to
transfer the actual in-game knowledge between characters outside of
the game.  Players can know it, but if their character doesn't, it
does them no good.

Personally, I think that in-game knowledge is going to present
interesting opportunities in the future, just as I believe that
character perceptions present opportunities.  Character knowledge adds
to the value of a character to the player without necessarily having
that character be powerful.

Solving the problem of players powergaming such knowledge is a
separate problem.

JB


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