[Deutha, Dyla]
Introduction:
The activities of players on Discworld are currently centred
around obtaining and then spending experience points. While quests
can by no means be ignored as far as obtaining experience points is
concerned, most players will have completed most of the quests quite
early on in their playing career; for the rest of the time, the usual
method of slaughtering NPCs is used to obtain experience, often with
a wyrm sword, holy blade or scythe obtained from one of those quests
completed early on.
It is our belief that this central role of experience points
in the game is the primary obstacle to a greater degree of role-
playing, player involvement and player enjoyment in the game. In
considering this problem, we have concluded that the two crucial areas
in promoting these things in the game are the skills system and the
structure of guilds.
Skills:
Once a player has amassed enough experience points, she can
exchange them for an increase in skill levels, either by learning
at her guild (which also requires some money to be spent), by being
taught by another player with a higher level in the skill to be
advanced or by teaching herself. A considerable criticism of this
system is that a non-fighter must advance her level in her most
relevant skills, which generally will not include fighting, by
spending experience obtained from fighting; this means that _all_
players, whether they _should_ be fighting, _must_ fight if they
wish to advance beyond a certain level.
One suggestion is that the casting of magic spells, the
use of prayers and the "steal" command, for example, give
experience, or more than at present, but this still suffers from
the problem that a player can advance her level in one skill
through using another, unrelated skill. It is also much more
difficult to gauge how much experience should be given as the reward
for these tasks - the combat system gives quite homogeneous amounts
of experience given that a typical fight lasts a reasonable length
of time with plenty of numbers (attack strengths, damages, etc.)
being generated from which to calculate the reward. However, the
casting of spells and the use of commands are generally of short
duration, with little from which to calculate experience gains
compared to the combat system.
Our suggestion is that experience be taken out of the
loop altogether, with, following the completion of a task in
which a certain skill is used, that skill directly increased by
an amount depending on such parameters as the current level in
the skill and the difficulty of the task; there should also be
increases in skill level following a failure, since mistakes are
often as educating as successes. The functions to do this can be
put into the piece of code where skills are handled, with the
same formulae applied regardless of the skill involved. In this
way practice will become important, the emphasis on slaughter
in the mud removed and more diverse guilds can appear, as well as
allowing a player to move up in her guild in an appropriate way:
a thief through daring robberies, an assassin through dangerous
inhumations, a priest through great religious acts and a wizard
though mysterious feats of magic. Quests can still give raw
experience points which may be used, as at the moment, to advance
any set of skills of the player's choice.
Guilds:
The biggest problem with the guilds at the moment is that
they are all too much alike. As discussed above, of whatever guild
a player is a member, she spends most of her time killing things
for experience; she probably also has the same, complete set of
commands as everyone else. This rather goes against the principle
of a guild, which exists to protect the livelihoods of its members
and its craft secrets. Besides which, it just makes the game plain
boring if everyone is the same.
As pointed out in _The Streets of Ankh-Morpork_, "one of the
strengths of Ankh-Morpork in the books ... is that it has a vast
bustling civic life that continues quite independently of the
activities of the plot-line - it needs brewers, bakers and other
tradesmen" - this point extends equally well to Quirm, Pseudopolis,
Sto Lat, Lancre and many other towns and cities. Now trade guilds
do not have much of a role in a hack 'n' slash mud, where players
rank themselves on the number of innocents they have slaughtered
or the amount of damage they can do to something in one hit of a
weapon or one casting of a spell. However, if the pivotal role of
experience (and hence slaughter) can be lessened and a system
provided so that a player can advance a particular skill by using
that skill, then a much broader, more interesting range of guilds
is possible. Players could become smiths, weavers, alchemists,
brewers, apothecaries, etc. trading their required materials and
their produce either directly with players or via the merchants'
guild, which would also organise trade between other cities of the
Sto Plains, the Klatchian cities on the coast of the Circle
Sea and beyond. Players of any guild, given sufficient funds,
could rent premises for a shop, although, job protection being
what it is, a player would have to be a merchant to own a shop
outright. With players becoming rich and influential, the
pickings would be good for thieves and assassins, and fighters
could be hired as bodyguards and guild porters.
There are also a number of guilds for players who are
not so much bothered about being renowned or rich, but just want
to enjoy themselves, have fun and maybe do a bit of role-playing
by becoming fools, gamblers, beggars, musicians, conjurors and
seamstresses, amongst others. We believe that the existence of
such guilds will greatly add to the interest and depth of the
game.
Conclusion:
As pointed out already, a number of these ideas have arisen
before, but it seems that what has stopped them being implemented
is not how well they have been thought out or how sound they are,
but how enthusiastic the creators are. Let's face it, we have some
damn ingenious people here and there are some _very_ fancy pieces
of code in the game which go quite a bit beyond most or all of our
proposals above. A lot of what is suggested here is the province of
independents, lords and above, but there is a lot that can be done
by creators also - quests (and more general activities) and objects
that require use of the skills (at a wide range of bonus values)
that are not so used at the moment need to be coded in bulk if a
system of advancing skills through using skills is to be feasible.
As usual, comments please.
