<!-- MHonArc v2.4.4 --> <!--X-Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ] --> <!--X-From-R13: "Fenivf E. Qnfrl" <rsvaqryNvb.pbz> --> <!--X-Date: Thu, 09 Apr 1998 13:12:25 +0000 --> <!--X-Message-Id: Pine.BSF.3.96.980409073620.6151A-100000#dillinger,io.com --> <!--X-Content-Type: text/plain --> <!--X-Reference: 199804082356.QAA109525#under,engr.sgi.com --> <!--X-Head-End--> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <html> <head> <title>MUD-Dev message, Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</title> <!-- meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" --> <link rev="made" href="mailto:efindel#io,com"> </head> <body background="/backgrounds/paperback.gif" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" alink="#FF0000" vlink="#006000"> <font size="+4" color="#804040"> <strong><em>MUD-Dev<br>mailing list archive</em></strong> </font> <br> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] <br clear=all><hr> <!--X-Body-Begin--> <!--X-User-Header--> <!--X-User-Header-End--> <!--X-TopPNI--> Date: [ <a href="msg00090.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00092.html">Next</a> ] Thread: [ <a href="msg00079.html">Previous</a> | <a href="msg00095.html">Next</a> ] Index: [ <A HREF="author.html#00091">Author</A> | <A HREF="#00091">Date</A> | <A HREF="thread.html#00091">Thread</A> ] <!--X-TopPNI-End--> <!--X-MsgBody--> <!--X-Subject-Header-Begin--> <H1>Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</H1> <HR> <!--X-Subject-Header-End--> <!--X-Head-of-Message--> <UL> <LI><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:mud-dev#null,net">mud-dev#null,net</A></LI> <LI><em>Subject</em>: Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ] </LI> <LI><em>From</em>: "Travis S. Casey" <<A HREF="mailto:efindel#io,com">efindel#io,com</A>></LI> <LI><em>Date</em>: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 08:16:07 -0500 (CDT)</LI> </UL> <!--X-Head-of-Message-End--> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-Begin--> <HR> <!--X-Head-Body-Sep-End--> <!--X-Body-of-Message--> <PRE> On Wed, 8 Apr 1998, J C Lawrence wrote: > Travis Casey<efindel#polaris,net> wrote: > > > I know... it's been a while since this was posted. I've been > > working two jobs and my wife is pregnant, so I haven't had time to > > reply to any interesting mail in a while... > > Congratulations! First kid? Yep... we practiced parenting on our two cats first. We're expecting our new arrival at the end of August, and have no plans to find out the baby's sex until it's born. > > On Monday, 23 March 98, J wrote: > > Could you make sure you get a bit more compleat attribution than just > the first initial please? Whoops... I'm not sure how that happened. My mail software is usually better than that. > >> Character development is fundamental to the concept and definition > >> of a MUD. The only variation in application of this definition > >> between games like Tron, and say LambdaMOO, Duris, Sojourn, MUD2, > >> etc, is that the character development occurs solely in the human > >> player for the former, and partially in the virtual character for > >> the others. This creates a scale of development locale with some > >> MUDs having the balance of their character development in the human > >> player, and some almost utterly in the virtual character. > > > It should further be noted that "character development" doesn't have > > to mean "an increase in character power." It could mean *any* kind > > of change to a character, including personality development. For > > that matter, character development could include a *weakening* of a > > character in some way -- although most mud players would probably > > not enjoy playing in a mud where their characters get weaker with > > time. > > True. An idea I've been playing with for a while now for more > "typical: MUDS is the idea that the character as a net whole never > changes, but that the balance of allocation of stats changes. If you want more traditional advancement, but don't want characters to grow too powerful, you could combine this with a slow "growth" system. This would keep characters from getting powerful too quickly, but also give the players the ability to rearrange their characters over time to adapt (e.g., if the player discovers that they'd like the character to have more capabilities with magic, the player can sacrifice some of the character's other capabilities to gain them). A few random thoughts on character advancement/generation... Some paper RPers prefer to develop characters in play rather than generating them at the start. The idea is that the player may not know enough about the gameworld when the game starts to be able to generate exactly the kind of character he/she would want. Thus, some aspects of character generation are delayed. A more concrete example of this is to give the players the ability to "hold back" a few attribute/skill/whatever points and assign them when they want to. Of course, some muds already use a variation on this sort of system -- allowing players to choose such things as guilds after their characters have entered play. Skill decay has been mentioned here before, I believe, but since we're on the subject of advancement... the idea behind skill decay is that if you don't practice something for a while, you start to lose your ability at it. The paper RPG Harnmaster requires players to spend advancement points on maintaining skills, or else they will decay. On a mud, it's fairly simple to keep track of how long it's been since the last time a skill was used or its value checked and adjust it downward based on that. Of course, you may wish to have different skills decay at varying rates, and there's also the issue of whether it should be easier to relearn a skill that you used to have. Something that's been noted on the RPG groups recently is that skills rarely seem to decay all the way back to zero -- for example, I recently started riding bicycles again, and had no problems with mounting, stopping, keeping my balance, etc., but I can't do wheelies, jumps, balance on it for a long time without moving, etc. like I could when I used to ride bikes. One possibility with skill decay is to have decay be the reverse of gaining a skill -- skill advancement is normally easy at low skill levels and gets harder as you advance. Skills should decay quickly at high levels (a world-class anything pretty much has to practice every day to stay in top form) and more slowly at low levels. Some paper RPGs have set limits on how much a character can know; AD&D with the limit on "spells known" for mages; The Fantasy Trip, which limited the number of skills a character could have to his/her intelligence score, and others. The Fantasy Trip allowed characters to forget skills in a couple of ways so that others could be learned, but none of those ways were easy. An alternative to class systems that I've come across recently is an aptitude system. When a character is created, the player can divide up a few points among various aptitudes that the character can have. For example, in a traditional fantasy game, the aptitudes might go along the lines of the traditional classes: combat, magic, religion, and stealth. All characters get a default aptitude of 1 in each category, and are given 4 extra points to divide up among the aptitudes. Thus, you could put all 4 into combat and leave the others at 1, or you could go for being a generalist and make them all be 2. When a character applies advancement points to a skill, the points are multiplied by his/her aptitude in the area the skill falls under. This allows a warrior-type to learn magical skills -- he just has to spend more points to do so. Last thought -- traditionally, players choose their characters attributes and classes/skills separately, although possibly within certain limits. (E.g., you must have at least X strength to be a warrior.) An alternative possibility is to have skills/classes/aptitudes/whatever give attribute points. The attributes would then be at least partially pre-set for each character -- the player wouldn't have to worry about any minimums, since the character would already meet them. I think that's enough rambling for now... if people are interested in these sorts of ideas, say so and I'll see what else I can scrape up out of my memory. -- |\ _,,,---,,_ Travis S. Casey <efindel#io,com> ZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ No one agrees with me. Not even me. |,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'-' Keeper of the rec.games.design FAQ: '---''(_/--' `-'\_) <A HREF="http://www.io.com/~efindel/design.html">http://www.io.com/~efindel/design.html</A> </PRE> <!--X-Body-of-Message-End--> <!--X-MsgBody-End--> <!--X-Follow-Ups--> <HR> <ul compact><li><strong>Follow-Ups</strong>: <ul> <li><strong><A NAME="00111" HREF="msg00111.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong> <ul compact><li><em>From:</em> Vadim Tkachenko <vt#freehold,crocodile.org></li></ul> <li><strong><A NAME="00095" HREF="msg00095.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong> <ul compact><li><em>From:</em> Marian Griffith <gryphon#iaehv,nl></li></ul> </UL></LI></UL> <!--X-Follow-Ups-End--> <!--X-References--> <UL><LI><STRONG>References</STRONG>: <UL> <LI><STRONG><A NAME="00079" HREF="msg00079.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></STRONG> <UL><LI><EM>From:</EM> J C Lawrence <claw#under,engr.sgi.com></LI></UL></LI> </UL></LI></UL> <!--X-References-End--> <!--X-BotPNI--> <UL> <LI>Prev by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00090.html">RGMA</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by Date: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00092.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] GRUMPS</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Prev by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00079.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Next by thread: <STRONG><A HREF="msg00095.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></STRONG> </LI> <LI>Index(es): <UL> <LI><A HREF="index.html#00091"><STRONG>Date</STRONG></A></LI> <LI><A HREF="thread.html#00091"><STRONG>Thread</STRONG></A></LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> <!--X-BotPNI-End--> <!--X-User-Footer--> <!--X-User-Footer-End--> <ul><li>Thread context: <BLOCKQUOTE><UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00030" HREF="msg00030.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] internet connections</A></strong>, Chris Gray <a href="mailto:cg#ami-cg,GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA">cg#ami-cg,GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA</a>, Sun 05 Apr 1998, 16:41 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00026" HREF="msg00026.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] (fwd) Re: Roleplaying</A></strong>, Travis Casey <a href="mailto:efindel#polaris,net">efindel#polaris,net</a>, Sun 05 Apr 1998, 04:00 GMT <LI><strong><A NAME="00025" HREF="msg00025.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong>, Travis Casey <a href="mailto:efindel#polaris,net">efindel#polaris,net</a>, Sun 05 Apr 1998, 02:42 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00079" HREF="msg00079.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong>, J C Lawrence <a href="mailto:claw#under,engr.sgi.com">claw#under,engr.sgi.com</a>, Wed 08 Apr 1998, 23:56 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00091" HREF="msg00091.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong>, Travis S. Casey <a href="mailto:efindel#io,com">efindel#io,com</a>, Thu 09 Apr 1998, 13:12 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00095" HREF="msg00095.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong>, Marian Griffith <a href="mailto:gryphon#iaehv,nl">gryphon#iaehv,nl</a>, Thu 09 Apr 1998, 17:19 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00098" HREF="msg00098.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong>, Travis S. Casey <a href="mailto:efindel#io,com">efindel#io,com</a>, Thu 09 Apr 1998, 19:03 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> <LI><strong><A NAME="00111" HREF="msg00111.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong>, Vadim Tkachenko <a href="mailto:vt#freehold,crocodile.org">vt#freehold,crocodile.org</a>, Fri 10 Apr 1998, 00:46 GMT <UL> <LI><strong><A NAME="00114" HREF="msg00114.html">Re: [MUD-Dev] Character development [was Re: ]</A></strong>, Travis Casey <a href="mailto:efindel#polaris,net">efindel#polaris,net</a>, Fri 10 Apr 1998, 02:33 GMT </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL> </LI> </UL></BLOCKQUOTE> </ul> <hr> <center> [ <a href="../">Other Periods</a> | <a href="../../">Other mailing lists</a> | <a href="/search.php3">Search</a> ] </center> <hr> </body> </html>