From: cs90djs2@brunel.ac.uk (Duncan J Stansfield)
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin
Subject: Re: Becoming a wiz (was Re: ATTN: skill based muds)
Date: 19 Nov 92 16:25:08 GMT
Organization: Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

Just a few opinions...

My ideal here would be for a self continuing group of wizards.
I personally am going to be leaving university at some point, so there
must be some continuation after I have gone that does not require my
or my current colleagues support.
so who is best able to judge who should be a wiz? the other wizards,
but also the players who will have to adventure in those places that
wiz is going to build.
I would thus like it where the top adventurers would have the power
to promote one of their members AND have the power to demote current
wiz's who aren't pulling their weight.
who are the top adventurers? In my mind nothing is so important as
dedication. so someone is an expert programmer and has loads of
fantastic ideas? so what, if they ain't gonna do anything, then they
shouldn't be a wiz. for this reason, along withthe fact that people
do leave, there must be a way of removing unused wizardships
one suggestion is to have a limited number of wizardhoods around.
when someone wishes to become a wizard, they must brown-nose the
current wizards and their peers and find some poor fool to remove
from power. This would prevent any wiz from becoming complacent,
and give everyone something to aim at.
so who are the "top" adventurers? well in my opinion, those with
a reasonable amount of skills (skill based system of course) but
more importantly, a large number of hours and friends. It is no
good logging on a 9am and playing till 9pm and doing everything
perfectly if everybody hates you.
so potential wizards should be competing with existing wizards
for places? a poor shout for the underdog, so there has to be
some form of policing, or on the otherhand, maybe not...
(the evil wizard goes around blasting all the up and coming
players). but that could then be blamed on the people who voted 
for that wiz in the first place.
so wiz's are voted in and out by the high level characters
ok.
so why not continue this idea to produce the high level characters?
ok. so we have a certain number of positions of power that may be
occupied, and a set of people who can vote people into these
positions.
eg. the thieves guild
level 1 : guildmaster,guildmistress
level 2 : night master, day master, burglary master
the rest : all fully paid up guild members
obviously thieves morals have a little bit to be desired, so to get
hold of someones position, there must be a vacancy. (whoops my knife
slipped), but there must also be sufficient places to prevent
someone achieving the position then hiding all the time.

so we have our election methods covered, warriors/wizards having
formal combats, clerics through voting or amount of donations to
the church.

so that's the theme covered, back onto skills...
I agree entirely with realism (there was a sarcastic letter earlier
that i entirely agree with).
death should be permanent.
there are a large number of games i have played (moria,omega,nethack)
and a huge amount more, where death is fatal. I cannot agree more.
it is one of the moral failings of the game is the trivialisation of
death. as a tiny capitulation to some of the more hardened lifers here
that there should be an escape route for very high level characters
via the resurrection/reincarnation/raise dead path. this would need
an associate on hand whilst you were dying. or if you do enough
for your god then he will bring you back.
to provide a bit of interest, players should be allowed to come back
as monsters before returning with a completely new character.
this provides a bit of entertainment for those very high level
characters who come back as dragons....
the burden of thinking up names is removed from players, and a 
random generator is provided. This also means that the player must
have a userid the is completely separate from the players name

practice makes perfect.
when you use a skill you have a (100-skill)% chance of getting better
less often if the skill is easy to use.
skills deteriorate in real time (1% / 2days).
using lars original genesis skills idea, based on a tree system
offensive,axes,small
offensive,axes,battle
then as you increase the skills at the bottom, the next layer up
has a 20% chance of having a (100-skill)% chance of increasing.
so when querying a skill you also include a proportion of the
skills on the path down. (knowing the technique in one weapon
may help with using similar weapons). as to whether you should
gain in skill if you fail(learning from mistakes) that is a matter
of taste (smaller chance of learning)

movement speed
one thing I had always planned to do was to slow people down
one thing I hate is when people set up macros to travel ten
to 15 miles in less than a second. the way i have implemented it
is to increase a variable by one every time a move is done.
the next time a move is attempted the is checked against the time 
and the speed of the mover. the slower they are, the more likely
they are to be prevented from moving.
cruel huh?

recently changed to MudOS 0.9
useful stuff in there. but I wish I knew why I can't get error
messages any more for wizards, oh well, never mind.

Gods
gods are drained of power when their priests cast spells, so 
when a god reaches zero, it kind of "dies". (poor little priests)
so gods must be created too (from players?).
to increase the power of gods, sacrifice valuable objects.

ranged weapons
maximum realistic range is 1 "room", makes fireballs more fun.

sorry, got a bit carried away there, i won't bother mentioning
that i wish we could get a legal system working (you commit
crime, someone witnesses it, reports it, you get captured,
court sentences you, you have no money, you get hung).
and the maps(nice big ascii files,with villages done the same
way - just keeps a list of currently loaded rooms and creates
new ones on demand).

hope this will provide a few ideas for people to mull over
if you want to flame, make i nice and spicy please, as the
quality of flames has dropped over the last few years.

have fun.

duncan
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin