[MUD-Dev] How much is enough? Communication design

[David B. Held]

From: "Miroslav Silovic" <miro at vams.com>

> What you just described could be easily prevented if battles are
> non-reproducible.  For instance:
 
>   - Make daytime, weather and season affect the player's combat
>   capability (ever tried to run in a full chainmail during
>   summer?)
 
>   - Make each monster unique and variable. Make their power vary
>   with tribe and group, and globally vary them between spawns (if
>   you have spawns).
 
>   - Add attributes to the player that go up and down, in semi-long
>   term. Ideas could be morale, mood, wakefulness, fatigue, hunger,
>   thirst, etc. If you make these affect the to-hit chance and
>   damage, well, any result of the experiment would be pretty much
>   useless.

Yes, these are all good ideas.  Furthermore, I would add that having
property, and allowing players to collect different sets of gear
would also help keep things interesting.  For instance, suppose an
NPC offered a bounty on a dragon.  Your stock plate armor is good
against 80% of the mobs you encounter, but for this job, you want to
go with the flame-resist mithril mail that you won on some quest.
So you go home, drop off the standard armor, and get your best
dragon-fighting gear.  Then you go dragon-hunting.  After you're
done, you hear that there's trouble in the mountains, and some
settlers need help fighting yetis.  So you go home, put on your best
anti-ice gear, and go fight yetis.  This would alleviate the
"everyone looks the same because they all have the same best gear"
syndrome that occurs on a lot of MUDs.  If people can anticipate
what to expect with certain challenging mobs/groups, they have time
to set up differently, and use different eq.

It's the difference between letting people be specialists and
generalists.  Most people prepare themselves to fight anything at
all.  And most eq is generic enough that this strategy works.  And
most games don't let you save enough eq to actually have different
sets for different fights.  And even if they did, it wouldn't help,
because you usually don't know what mobs are where, and what
properties they have.

Dave


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