I think that changing the entire game-world conception of time just to deal with healing damage and "remembering" spells is a little misguided. The most obvious problem with it is that it removes any sensibility of other game activities that take time.

Here's an example: Let's say I own a game mine that produces one unit of iron every day, that I can send to my blacksmith who will produce one sword every day. So I go out adventuring, get banged up, and want to rest it up. Eight hours fly by for me but not for everybody else. My production chain has just advanced 33% for free.

There are any number of other examples, like travel costs, but it boils down to time shifts between players causing some serious confusion. In fact, you also eliminate role-play opportunities like "let's meet at the clock tower at noon" because time has no real meaning anymore unless you're in the same group. (Talk about a form of special MUD space-time relativity!)

Here is how I'm handling it. After combat ends if conditions are met hp geometrically begins regenerating. Specifically, players must defeat all opponents and stop bleed effects and poison. It takes about one minute for a full heal to occur with most of the healing happening at the end of the minute.

I'm not a fan of games that require big "afk break" regen fests.

The usefulness of a customizable normal prompt and battle prompt cannot be overstated on just about any MUD where combat is important. But I disagree with your interpretation of traditional RPG design: traditionally "riskier" players, those who shoot through a dungeon, find common fights to be fine – up until they reach the boss, which is tough because they didn't take the time to level up within the dungeon. These people will find the game's difficulty scaling dramatically as they advance through the game quickly, without, say, going on side-quests to get more experience and special things (items, weapons, skills, summons, etc). I would rather reward those who play cautiously in other ways that do impact the exact same fight someone who rushes through could get: maybe they find out that if they go right at that last intersection they can come up behind Monster Group, or maybe there's a switch back there that floods the room with poisonous gas.



You're more talking about controlling powerleveling, which is a whole different issue all together. Having health regen quickly out of combat doesn't mean you don't control it, or levels, or stats in any different manner than any other system; in a sense actually you're controlling them much more because you can assume players approach each situation with 100% hitpoints. Journey and Storyline can also be controlled, they just can't be controlled in the "traditional RPG" sense of "You must powerlevel this long to enter" that is far, far too common.

Though as far as pacing goes, you can actually control it quite well with a bounce-back health system that worries more over an idea of "being in combat" than not. I guess I should mention that "combat" doesn't refer to the act of just swinging your sword: you're in combat just before and for a time after you fight, though not a major amount of time. Creating fights that last a long time can drastically change the way people play, especially with regards to expecting how fights play out. For example, you can have 4 Lesser Demons be in a room the group comes across. The group might expect to only have to fight these 4 lesser demons, but you can make it where their death instantly summons forth a much Greater Demon, meaning that if these people were recklessly attacking these guys thinking they'd get a break in combat to regen, they'd be caught with their hands in the cookie jar and might not have the resources to fight off a sudden boss fight. But if they had read Some Book in the Last Room they'd know that killing these guys would summon the Big Bad Guy, encouraging them to be slow and advance through the dungeon.

That, actually, is one thing that tends to irk me in video games: the concept of advancing through the Dungeon. Certainly it makes easy sense from a developmental point of view: you give players something easy to do at the start of the dungeon, a mini-boss at the middle, and a bigger boss at the end. It's a progression that eases players into the system, challenges then in a scaling manner, and give a sense of accomplishment at the end. But what if we changed that, made mobs react to the deaths of their friends in the next room over if you let them scream? I think doing that holds a lot of potential in a MUD world, where we can simulate AI and give area-wide reactions in a quicker manner than graphical games. Certainly it's something that would have to be approached carefully, because you don't want to make the game just one big swarm of people, but why not make it so that Big Bad Boss come to the player before they might expect, for once?

As a funny (to me) aside: In my dungeons there is typically a boss mob that is located at the end of each level. One of the designs I was toying with was an Orc Warlord boss that started pathfinding to the player as soon as you entered the dungeon and along the way forced any other orc mobs he ran across to follow him. I was pretty happy with the deviousness of the design until the first time I ran it and he tracked my player down a little more than a third of the way through the dungeon bringing with him 32 other orcs (bearing in mind that typically if you fight more than 1v3 battles you are in bad shape, and there are usually about 60 mobs spaced out over an entire dungeon, and even your FOV/LOS will usually show about 30 tiles in a fairly wide open space). Needless to say the idea needs some tweaking…

I do think that unless you are using console RPG style encounters where combat is basically an entity outside of normal movement that the concept of combat being "over" seems a little unwieldy. If not handled carefully it would ruin some of the favorite strategy aspects I enjoy with exploration on typical mud designs.

I think the problem is not how fast you are healing, but WHY you would need to heal fast.
And that is totally tied to your areas. If you force peopel to continuously fight through an area without any need of a downtime (no riddle no maze no looking at description) yes you need fast healing. If not, why care there would be enough downtime so they heal while thinking.
And you can have area where you only fight, if you just put a healer you can go to complete heal for some money.
This is why you have areas you can teleport in and out easily and just fight, heal come back, and some when once you entered you need to walk out of them, and most likely only have very few exits, that will all take their toll in time (hence force people being more careful about healing)

I don't know if I am clear enough, but healing is not the real problem, area design is.

I think you're being clear, but I don't fully agree. It should be noted that I don't think anything is a "problem" that has to be changed but rather I think it's a feature that could be changed if the right system was designed wanting to use it. Obviously, in most MUDs and Video Games the system wouldn't make any sense and would only serve to hurt the game. But I wouldn't say that the suggestion is centric around area design - why is quicker healing necessary only in areas where fighting is the only point (which, I should go ahead and admit, is the primary goal of my generic area. I don't want every goblin cave to have Mysteries Of The Hidden Deep locked away within it)? Some people are very quick at deciphering puzzles, and many people won't advance in a maze with enemies without mostly full health.