I have really seen the effects of that Scandum. There are some ways of involving player skill, but it is easily seen as an unfair advantage to those without it.

You've not played many MUDs?

Huh ? (again) I just wanted to know what he called bug fixing…


I agree with a part of that, though for me player skill is more about how to react to unknown situation more than apply a formula he learned through try and errors.
And that is by adding a lot of different skills that you can achieve that, so you have a lot of possible solutions at hand. (What you call high synergy I think)
Not by allowing ultra hit combo of a few ones, because in the end, everyone will learn those the very first second they see ONE person using it.
I just do not see how 'bug fixing' has anything to do with preventing players to diferentiate themselves through skills.

Once things get complex enough knowing intuitively what course of actions are the best is a useful player skill as well, especially when there's no time to apply a formula.


It was more so a tongue in cheek remark about developers reducing synergy in their games just to stay in control. It's an interesting question whether limited evolution is a lack of intelligence and creativity, or the inability to overcome psychological hang-ups, such as wanting absolute control over the game.

Ok we fully agree then, I try to make so that it is impossible to build a cookie cutter build that will work in any situation. If anyone would ask me :what is the best pk..I can honestly say: I do not know, and I think there is not one.

I disagree. Synergy is what creates cookie cutter builds. Synergy is easily min-maxed. Synergy certainly isn't "player skill" unless you mean "player skill at min-maxing." If you mean actually making real time tactical decisions, synergy is the enemy. It reduces the legitimacy of any other strategy lacking the synergy. It builds "cycles" that players mindlessly must completely to maximize effect, and it removes any type of artistic choice in builds.

I'd love to hear an example of how synergy between skills (or other player skills/affects) accentuates dynamic decisions in a battle. I suspect it limits it, though.

Also, it *is* a bug if relationships between skills/spells create a power vacuum where no other strategy is valid. It's usually the guys who think they were smart enough to identify it/exploit it that complain about this elimination of "player skill."

Yes but I do not think that has to do with synergy itself. (bad synergy and unintended result yes)
What I mean by synergy is how and when to use a skill instead of another. Meaning that using skill a skill b skill a wont always give the same result as it depends a lot on what your opponent has done while you were doing it.
It is not the relationship between your skills (that would be always the same if your opponent did nothing) but relationship between you and other people skills.
ie: it is better to use a bashing skill after a mage has used a very laggy spell, but then again, is it the best way to wait for him to use a laggy spell, will he do it ? And are you not yourself waiting for a skill to finish ;p And is it a good idea to use it at the end of a fight where you should better finish him of with damage than trying to bash him (though your damaging skill does not ALWAYs work…so better bash him and give him another round of fleeing possibilities or not…hum hard decision…)
It is more about synergy between you and your opponent than between your own skill. That is what I am calling synergy. again, not ultra hit combo that works everytime and that everyone is doing. Synergy is knowing perfectly your skills and be able to pick the best one in some very perticular situations that you cannot force on your opponent. A round later and your choice wont be the best one, just an average choice. You cannot script that because that would mean you wait for your opponent moves. And that is never a good idea to give initiative to your opponent.

Well, synergy is kinda a well established term when talking about game balance. It usually is the balance between your skills and your allies skills that are active at the time. If what we're talking about here is the relationship between your skills and what the other player is currently doing, I wouldn't really call that synergy. I'd call that just exploiting your opponents strategy holes. I think if this is what we're talking about then I don't disagree. But this didn't sound like what you guy were talking about.

Synergy typically means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. By that definition it's benefits acting in concert. Like your "ignite" spell increasing the power of your other direct damage fire spells for 5 seconds. The more synergy this gets, the more likely it is you'll never cast a fireball spell without first casting ignite. Another example of synergy is when two skills from two different players are so dominating that the synergy between the two classes is high. So high that the classes my almost always been designed to play together. This happens in PVE and PVP content all the time.

I'm not saying synergy is necessarily bad, but there's a reason why synergy needs to be carefully and thoughtfully balanced (and rebalanced if unintended consequences happen.) It's not something to bash when the thoughtful balance takes place as eliminating player skill.

I kinda think you and Scandum are talking about different things.

Heh I think the classes on my mud are different enough that a pair is way not enough to be the ultimate combo. But it is a very old mud, so most of the thing has been sorted through ages. So there are working synergy, but it is made so you cannot have them all:
high damage output but verly low discretion and fleeing prevention power
low damage output but high discretion and fleeing prevention skills.
kinda no damage output but quasi invincibility etc

As far as death goes, I think it provides another opportunity to emphasize what your MUD is about to your players.

For instance, you can have a standard exp penalty upon death, but a reduced penalty when another player uses a skill. Achaea (and possibly other IRE games) uses this to great effect, making healing type characters very valuable to the world, but not leaving people completely dead when they make a misstep and don't have healer friends. If you wanted to further make healing types useful, you could eliminate normal regeneration, and simply require that someone come to your aid.

If you're looking for a hard core, gritty world, perma-death does that, but it's not very fun. Mostly, it promotes people staying indoors and away from each other. It's especially hard in level based MUDs for newcomers to have perma-death, since they won't really have a chance to get established. In theory, it should support strong, trust based alliances, but honor tends to be at a premium in MUDs, due to the anonymity factor. It's probably best in RP-focused MUDs, where there's a social contract type element keeping people from running amok with a blade.

Another way of dealing with permadeath is making characters disposable. Make character generation fast, quick, and requiring less time to get established. This is like the FPS style already mentioned. I think it would be neat to make a MUD based around this concept.

For my personal use, I would like to try a system where when the player dies, they become a spirit bound to their corpse. They can exist in that form indefinitely, but they can only stray so far from their body before reforming again at their corpse. The range that they can travel increases over time, so they never get truly stuck. Their goal is to find someone, lead them back to the corpse, and have them perform a revival, after which they can continue with only a little penalty. Players dying in an area declared "safe" can be revived by roaming friendly NPCs. This way, I can inject a sense of danger in exploring areas far from the safe zones, while not completely making the MUD a death trap. I'd have to handle groups of players tackling those zones somehow.

Synergy can be seen as a healer and a fighter being greater than the sum of their parts when grouped together.

I was more so talking about the synergy between distinct game elements. Is there for example a good reason that a door object and a player object aren't interchangeable on most MUDs? Imagine there is also a spell that turns a player to stone for 5 minutes, making it impossible for them to do anything, as well as making them nearly indestructible. Now someone is going to combine the two to make temporary nearly indestructible doors. It'll be rarely of much use, but an experienced player will know when to use it, while an AI will use cookie cutter strategy.

Provided this solution does not become a cookie cutter solution. ;p

PS:yes there is a reason: you really want someone to be prevented to play at all for more than 30 seconds by another player ? :p

PS2:that leads me to another DEATH subject:I personaly hate it when I am prevented to play for such a dumb reason that I am dead. You should always have something useful to do with your character (going back to your body, some place to reeq, respell, get resurected etc)
Because there is not always someone to help you there, and it is like forced FBI warning on DVD: loss of time for absolutely no reason.

Always a fun subject to debate! :)

As a player, my personal favorite was the BatMUD death penalty system. When doing stuff in the game, you accumulated experience which sat on your character as unspent. Whenever you felt like it, you could visit a trainer and choose how you wanted to purchase upgrades to your character with some or all of it. You could apply it to physical stats, levels, class abilities, class levels, etc. As you raised things, they of course became more expensive.

Now, when you died, you lost all the unspent experience you had on you, and you acquired a scar which lowered your ability scores. If a player ressurected you, you got up to 50% of your unspent experience back. Because clerics gained experience in performing a ressurection, they would often bid on who would rez someone, and thus gain extra experience. So, perhaps after the biding, you find a cleric willing to do the rez for 5% of your lost exp and 100 gold. Thus, you gain 45% of what you lost back, they gain an extra 5% and some cash.

The scars could be healed as well, although I remember they became more difficult to heal the longer you ignored them.

To me, this was a fun system, because you could choose to save up your exp to try and upgrade something BIG, at the risk of losing a chunk of it… or you could spend it as fast as you could to play it safe.

Over time, the trend has been towards smaller and smaller penalties for death. The ones with the big who lists seem to consistently be the ones in which you can fully recover from a death within a few minutes.

It'd be hard to make any particular recommendations for the OP without knowing more about the goals of his particular mud.

I don't think the OP is looking for particular recommendations. My understanding is that he was just interested in what players expect.







Oh yeah, I'm sure it did.

Cratylus: I should use a death model that rewards skill and makes exploration a challenge.
Sinistrad: hater
Cratylus: coddler [link to obscure image hosted on lpmuds that somehow fits this conversation]
Sinistrad: yeah

Since when do we refer to Cratypus as "the OP"?

Do you prefer the OG?

we have a winner

Since he made the original post in the thread, maybe… :wink:

As a player I actually like what MUME does with player death - You die to a mobile and you lose one level worth of experience and need to retreive your corpse. If you die to a player you lose xp based on your level, with higher levels losing much more than lower levels. After your death there is a random chance that a shadow mob will protect your corpse from looting or other molestation - But that shadow can be killed. Additionally, the higher level you are you have more of a chance of receiving the Shadow of death (SOD). SOD reduces your stats to the point where you cannot cast spells and you will pretty much die if you get into any kind of fight.

For the troll race if you walk in the sunlight you go to level 1. That race is also the easiest and fastest to gain in levels as a consequence. They are also extremely fun to play! :)

This makes the game dangerous, and consequently, interesting. When you have something significant to lose it makes the game much more exciting - I think this is very important and on MUDs where death means little it is very easy to just lose interest.