From: yappo@fy.chalmers.se (Sten D~ring)
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin
Subject: Re: ATTN: skill based muds
Date: 17 Nov 92 17:24:34 GMT
Organization: Chalmers Univ. of Technology, G|teborg, Sweden

Helping to run one of the skillbased muds I can at least give some ideas of what
works and what really doesn't.
Utilizing skills is somewhat dangerous as most wizards tend to see skills as a
different system of burning down monsters rather than a way of weighing abilities.
Most admins of a mud seems to do as well. Instead of desperately divede the mud
in one combat part and one noncombat part you would probably gain a lot by moving
away some part of killgains to questgains or whatever.
Experience as a skillraiser works pretty well, apart from the killing of twenty
beduins helps you to advance your sailing skill. It works this way in our mud,
and well, to say the least, it isn't nice. So, by letting every skill memorized
in the player keep track of how many times the player in one abstract way has
succeeded with the particular skill you can advance the skills most used. This
however will result in players using high skills in different situations and then
solving easier ones with skills they are not very proficient in for the gain of
the skill. Like the normal abuse of Runequest and Call of Cthuhly RPG systems.

My personal solution, probably with bugs, is as follows:

Each and every skill belongs to a skillgroup. You decide how wideranging these
groups should be in your own mud.
You do award experience to the player, but the experience goes to the group
instead of being globaly available for skills.
You use some kind of system for having a cost in experience for skills. As the
experience available belongs to a group of skills, you can decide wether you want
to include a skill by skill cost reduction/penalizing due to usage of a specific
skill or not. At least you will avoid the largest anomalies given when using a
global experience system. Grouping skills also makes it quite easy to add on a new
skill or even a new skillgroup.

Skills ought to be statbased one way or another. I happen to be a more or less
fanatic fan of the Rolemaster system, so this is my biased view. You have a
computer. So, you can have stat bonuses as a multiplier of a skill. Zero stat is
zero skill whatever amount you have learned. This is not possible without the
computer when gamemastering but quite nice to do in a mud.
Of course I'm not a great fan of neither levels nor buyable stats. We have both
and our mudlib won't cope with the absence, but I more or less warn people from
starting up a mud utilizing such a system. You really don't have to start by
creating a global bug. Stats are stats, and let the player start with more or
less what he/she will eventually wiz with. Doing this a statraiser item or the
gain of a higher stat from solving a quest gets to be something to hunt for, and
you are able to monitor stats and believe in their not destructing gamebalance.

This note has nothing with the how/why a player becomes wizard. It's my opinion of
how to confugure a player during his/her mortal period. The only thing i feel very
strongly about is that a wizard should have all stats/skills etc removed. A wizard
is a coder and not a monster. Give them a wellmade testcharacter object instead.

   Yappo Kingdoms mud 129.16.117.17
   Be welcome to see our compromise of using skills.
   It's very far from being a good system, but it a system anyway.
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.admin
From: spell@spell.demon.co.uk (Martin Glassborow)