[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Travis Casey]

Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> On Wed, 06 Jun 2001 18:38:11 -0400, Travis Casey
> <efindel at earthlink.net> wrote:

>> Anyone gambling and *expecting* to win is a fool.  The games'
>> odds are in favor of the house, not of the players -- they have
>> to be, if the house is to make a profit.

> And likewise, as any casino owner will tell you, if the house is
> to make a profit -- people need to WIN. That's the incentive for
> all the *other* people to *keep* playing. If no people win, no
> people play. The ideal situation for a casino is to keep the
> AMOUNT of winnings low, and the APPEARANCE of winnings high.

Exactly.  This doesn't change the point a bit, though -- that there
are many people who go gambling for fun, expecting that in all
likelihood, they're going to lose money.  Those who like to gamble
and know this do things like decide how much they're willing to
lose, and ration their bets so they don't lose all of that the first
ten minutes they're in the casino.

In the same way, you can play a game where you'll eventually lose
your character for fun -- and if you know you want to play for a
certain amount of time, you can ration your risk.

>> You're also assuming that a player cannot "afford to lose" their
>> character.  It's true that many players are strongly averse to
>> losing their character and having to start over.  There are other
>> players, however, who simply view it as a part of the challenge
>> of the game.

> But it has out-of-game consequences.

I never said it didn't.  All I'm saying is that the consequences of
character death are acceptable to some players.  Indeed, some
players will tell you, and honestly believe, that the game is less
fun without the possibility of losing their character.

> This may be offset almost completely with a PERMANENT character
> identification, separate from the character's name.

Which already exists -- the player's real name and background info.
I can tell you that I've gone around to people after I decided to
change characters and told them, "Hey, this is Travis.  I used to be
playing [character X], but I've decided to make a different one."

The same thing happens moving from mud to mud -- I like to create a
new character on each mud I play, with a name that I use just on
that mud. If I run into someone I know from another mud, I just tell
them, "I'm X on mud Y."  That way I don't have to start rebuilding a
relationship with them from scratch.

Now, for an extrememly strong roleplaying mud, these might be bad
things -- but for most of us, I think they're acceptable.

>> If you want another example of "playing to lose", consider older
>> arcade video games, like Missile Command, Galaga, Pac-Man, etc.
>> No matter how good you are, you cannot play the game forever
>> without losing your "character" in the game.  Yet people enjoyed
>> (and still do enjoy) playing those games anyways.

> False analogy.

> In these games, your character is the same at the end of the game
> as he was at the beginning.

Not true.  In Galaga, you could gain the second ship and keep it --
making your character more powerful.  Across the genre as a whole,
many video games have "powerups" of various sorts.

Further, one could say the same of some muds -- in a MOO-style mud,
for example, there's often no character advancement of any kind.
The only thing that changes about your character is his/her
relationships to other characters -- and those can often be
recovered easily with a new character, as I describe above.

> There is no investment in the character -- only in the score. Your
> character also has *several* lives (cities in "Missile Command"),
> and the game only ends when they are exhausted.

And?  Permadeath does not leave out the possibility of multiple
lives -- it only implies that a final death is possible.  Paper D&D,
for example, has the ability for characters to come back from the
dead, but also has permanent death.

> Successful gameplay adds more lives

As it effectively does in many RPGs as well -- how many first-level
D&D characters have access to any sort of resurrection magic?  The
higher-level D&D characters are, the more likely they are to be able
to come back after dieing.

> , and gameplay is a single skill which is easily learned.

One could argue that the same thing is true in many RPGs, and even
moreso in many muds.  Your knowledge of what works well and where
things are doesn't go away because your character died.

> Furthermore, the ONLY way you could lose a life would be if YOU
> made a mistake.

Supposing a perfect environment, yes.  In the real world, though,
I've often lost lives in video games because someone bumped me, or I
suddenly had to sneeze or cough, or a loud noise distracted me for a
second. These sorts of things are part of why many people don't like
"twitch games".

For that matter, in some games, it's possible to get into situations
where it's simply not possible to survive.  I've had it happen to me
before on the higher levels of Galaga.  (When a wave of attackers
starts shooting to both sides of you, with their shot-streams
converging, it's often impossible to shoot them (because the ones
shooting at you are not directly above you) and impossible to dodge
(because dodging to either side is going to get you killed).  All
you can do is wait the couple of seconds until the end.)

> In contrast, permadeath in MUDs means you have one and only one
> chance to invest a great deal of time and effort in developing a
> character through multiple difficult-to-learn skills and systems,

Not necessarily.  As I mentioned above, permadeath does not have to
mean that there is *no* access to resurrection, just that it isn't
automatic.  The fact that your character *can* die permanently
doesn't mean that *every* death has to be permanent.

(To use another example than D&D, in a cyberpunk mud I was working
on developing, we wanted to have some form of permadeath, but didn't
want to be too harsh.  What we settled on was this:

  - A dead character can be brought back to life, if the character
  is taken to a hospital.

  - Bringing a dead character back is only a probability, not a
  certainty.  The longer the time between death and the resurrection
  attempt, and the worse the damage was, the lower the chance of
  resurrection.

  - Resurrection would also cost money.  The first one would be
  free, but after that, either the character would need to have the
  money for it in an account (which the hospital would then access
  and get the money) or someone else would have to be willing to
  pony it up.

There were several goals here.  One was to make it wise to adventure
in groups -- if you're alone, who's going to take your body to the
hospital?  Another was to create an extra resource drain on
players. Another was some level of realism.

I would consider this to be permadeath, since once your character
has died and resurrection has failed, all you can do is make a new
character -- but it doesn't mean that you never get a second chance.
Only that chances after the first are probabilistic.)

> and that character can be trashed forever by a single bad result
> from a random number generator.

Not likely, unless you're wandering into very high-danger areas.
And, as noted above, that's possible in some video games as well.

> I can't even count the number of times I've wandered from a 10-15
> level area in a MUD to a 30-50 level area without the slightest
> indication of it, immediately encountering an aggro mob which
> stomps the character into the dirt.

IMHO, the problem here is not the possibility of permadeath -- it's
the setup of the mud.  There should be some sort of warning there
(at least in the context of the game world -- e.g., dead bodies
around).  Also, if you are going to have permadeath, it would be
wise to give players a way to back out of fights they can't win.
For example, others have proposed combat systems where it's
impossible to die on the first hit unless you're already fairly
badly wounded.  Or combat systems where results other than death are
likely -- e.g., the character is likely to be knocked out first.

> With immediate resurrection and standard Diku-style corpse
> retrieval, this is a nuisance which may be rectified by jumping on
> a comm channel and asking for help (which fosters community). With
> permadeath, this becomes an irredeemable and unforgivable
> situation.

Only if *this* death is permanent.  Again, permadeath doesn't have
to mean that *all* deaths are permanent.

> Permadeath, in short, has several problems which need to be
> addressed.  But they CAN be addressed:

>   - All character capabilities must be provided immediately. The
>   chance of success may be very low, but all capabilities must
>   nevertheless exist.

>   - Learning the game must be easily done in less than a day's
>   play. This allows the player to concentrate on THE GAME, not THE
>   SYSTEM.

>   - All randomness must be removed if at all possible. Consistency
>   is more important than risk.

>   - All transitions in difficulty must be clearly marked and only
>   made by deliberate and informed player actions.

Why do all these things have to be done?  D&D, for example, has none
of these, but has permadeath.  I can see where these things can
mitigate permadeath, but I don't buy that *any* game that has
permadeath would need to do things this drastic.

I think you're presuming that a permadeath mud would have to have
the same emphasis on lethal combat that current muds do.  If lethal
combat is more rare, than permadeath would be easier to deal with.

>> You have won something -- the ability to say that you were good
>> enough to get to where you could kill the dragon.

> Then why do it? Why not just look at the dragon, say "I could kill
> the dragon", and keep walking?

Because then you have no proof that you could.  Is the idea of
wanting to prove your ability so foreign to you?

> It's basic human psychology. People are more afraid of failure and
> embarrassment than anything else -- even real-world death. If your
> game world does not provide a reward for success, the penalty for
> failure will make playing your game undesirable.

Sometimes success can be its own reward.  And one of the good points
of having a community in a game is that the game doesn't have to
provide all the rewards -- the community can provide some.  If I can
kill the dragon at a level where others consider it to be too
difficult, and I can let other people know that, then I can be
rewarded with respect, with people asking me how I did it, and other
such things.

>> Just as in Galaga, the only thing I ever "won" by playing was the
>> ability to say that I was good enough to get to X points.

> And that was your contract with the game: I will play for a short
> while and get points. In a MUD, your contract is somewhat
> different: I will play for a long time, spend untold hours
> studying the game world, attain membership in one or more
> communities, and amass a large quantity of items, gold, skills,
> and abilities.

Maybe that's your contract with a mud, but it's not mine.  Mine is
more like:

  I will have fun playing this game.

I can have fun playing in a game even with the possibility of losing
my character permanently.  Maybe it's the fact that I played paper
RPGs for twelve years before my first mud, and permadeath was
possible in all of those.  I've lost plenty of RPG characters.
Sometimes losing them was painful.  Sometimes it was actually fun,
as I got to heroically sacrifice my character to save the rest of
the party.  But I've never felt like losing my character meant that
all the time I spent playing him/her was wasted.

> If you die in a game of Galaga, you lose a quarter and ten
> minutes.

I haven't lost anything.  I paid a quarter to be entertained for ten
minutes.

> If you die permanently on a pay-for-play MUD, you lose something
> more like sixty bucks and 120 hours (assuming an average of two
> hours play each day for two months at $30 a month).

Again, I haven't lost anything.  I paid that money for
entertainment, and I was entertained.

> Before the obvious analogy of local PC adventure games is brought
> up, allow me to point out that such a game would be immediately
> drawn and quartered by the media and the public alike if you
> couldn't SAVE YOUR GAME. In a multiplayer environment, saved games
> are effectively impossible, so such a comparison is flawed from
> the start.

Why are saved games impossible?  Consider, for example, a cyberpunk
game with a braintaping facility.  You pay them X money, they take a
tissue sample from you and make a braintape.  If your character
dies, they'll clone you from the sample and play the braintape back
into the clone. *Poof*, you get your character back, with all the
skills and abilities that he/she had when the braintape was made.
With an appropriate deposit, you can even have the clone outfitted
with the same cyberware you had before.

Now, this isn't *exactly* like a saved single-player game, since it
doesn't save the world as well, but it gives much the same
effect... and it could exist even in a game with permadeath.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
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