[MUD-Dev] D&D vs. MMORPG "complexity"

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Paul Schwanz wrote:

> In what way are mobs even monsters if you "farm" them?  Seems to
> me mobs are functioning more like corn and the guilds are fighting
> over something like a cornfield.  If players really want to farm,
> why not give them cornfields.  Then monsters can start to make
> sense again as the creatures that ruin cornfields, attack you on
> the way to the market, or otherwise interfere with your ability to
> farm corn. ;)

Well, if you're going to discard the world fiction for the sake of
what's really going on, why not just present everything as what it
is: Changing pieces of data on the server. Of course, as that
wouldn't be fun for just about everybody it's probably better to
keep the world fiction. And if you're going to buy into world
fictions (which you kind of have to in order to play) then why try
to force the players to farm corn instead of mobs when I'm thinking
95% of them would enjoy farming mobs more than corn, regardless of
how similar they may end up being. (Of course, corn doesn't tend to
fight back where I'm from.)

--matt
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