Howdy everyone!

I was stoping by to get alittle input from everyone.

What are the key things that make you happy when creating a Char on any given mud?

ex. I really love being able to apply my own stats, as opposued to the game allocating them for me.

Thank you all very much for you time!
Chris

The number one thing that makes me happy is a system that lets me into the game before I determine all the attributes of my character, or barring that, a system that lets me change the attributes easily when I get in the game.

I like depth to the creation. I like to be able to choose the way my character looks, and just about everything about them when I make them.

(Sidenote: Could an Admin move this to an appropriate forum?)

The number one thing I like the most in regards to character creation, is having a series of questions posed to me that can effect anything from stats to alignment. (Or in The Elderscrolls case, class.) But generally depth in the process also.

If I'm familiar with the mud, I like to be able to fully customise my character. If I don't yet know what I'm doing, I prefer to be given a choice of predesigned characters to choose from. Ideally the mud should allow me to choose which creation process I'd like to use.

I prefer to never see any numbers, but figure out how "good" my character is by trying to do things. If I smack things with a club and they don't die very fast, then I probably have a pretty low strength. If I try to learn a spell and fail all the time casting it, and never seem to improve, I probably have a pretty low int.

Having numbers makes me feel like my fate is sealed right from the start. I don't know which class will be the most appealing, but I'm supposed to allocate points to things at launch anyways? Personally, I hate rigid class systems, but I also don't care for pure skill-based systems where everyone ends up being a cookie-cutter of each other. I prefer what used to be called guilds, where you would join classes as you wanted to, throughout the game, and leave them if you didn't care for them. If I wanted to be a dual-wielding sword fighter who casts fire magic, I could – provided I could find a sword-specialist guild and a fire magic specialist guild who weren't mutualy exclusive.

So, for ME, I'd rather answer some storyline questions to decide which race and/or starting area I am, and jump into the game with neutral alignment and unknown stats.

That might be better summed up as "I hate poorly designed methods of arbitrating character abilities", and I think most people would agree with that sentiment. Personally I enjoy flexible class systems, as well as pure skill-based systems in which almost every character ends up being unique.

I'd also like to add that I strongly dislike hidden numbers and question-based character creation for any mud which involves competitive gameplay. I don't mind having them as optional forms of character creation, as long as I don't have to pick them.

I think you'll find two major axis here - RP vs Game, and Newb vs Veteran.

Even on an RP mud, though, where I tend to play supporting roles, I like to get through Creation as quickly as possible. But, I understand those of you who want depth, are willing to spend days writing a background story, and weeks waiting for it to be approved. On my own game, which like KaVir's is highly competitive, you can create a character in three clicks. Class, skills, hometown, etc, happen once you're in the game and playing.

For me, the Nanny has always been a problem. All these questions, and you haven't even seen the WHO, yet. I hate being given choices between things that are meaningless (to me). Hometown? God? Even with skills I have to assume the names mean the same thing as on the same as the last game I played. Hair color? Eye color? Sounds like a "Make the Perfect Boyfriend" quiz in a teen magazine. On a MUSH, even before choosing your name you can see the WHO so you can choose something appropriate.

Marrcon:

So what you are seeing now is there's no consensus here. Everyone will want something different, so the best you could do is implement what you enjoy the most and hope others feel the same way :p

I prefer detailed character creation that asks me things like hair color, eye color… I like to know that out of the gate, there's a high chance some of my choices has made me different than other Human Warriors that have come into the game. With my game, picking your fighting styles (ie: weapon skills), innate elemental alignments, merits/flaws from the beginning, among other options in creation, creates diversity even among the same race/class combos coming into the game.

My biggest pet peeve has been coming into a game where most characters are relatively carbon copies of one another… have the same skills, using the same equipment, etc.

Edited to add: One of the reasons we've added in the hair/eye color, hair length, body type, etc. is to provide some means of a description for lazy people. I hate going into a game and looking at someone w/ no description, and thus having -no- indication of what this character looks like. On my game, when you look at someone, you see their character description, and then the last line is something like:

He is an short, obese Human adolescent with long blue hair. John is in perfect condition.

I don't mind choosing some things up front, but I dislike having to make game mechanic choices before knowing anything about the game. Without trying to truly optimize all decisions, some choices are simply bad even though they sound good, but that won't be revealed until you know at least a little about the game. I often find myself making a character, playing through for some time, and then making another to fix the glaring mistakes of the former.

Now, if the game gave a way of fixing this inside the game itself, for instance as the Elder Scrolls games tend to do to some extent, I don't have to waste all the time in the middle getting back to where I was.

I think the best way to accommodate everybody if you want the option of in-depth character creation is to let people create the whole character by hand, choosing from an unmodified template, or choosing the template followed by customization. (I'm talking about game mechanics here, not things like hair color.)

That's part of the reason I dislike numbers. It never ceases to amaze me how so many people I know feel that being able to pin down hard numbers to your abilities somehow makes the game play better.

Let's suppose you are fighting kobolds with a copper short sword, and it usually takes you 8 or 9 hits to dispatch one, and you probably hit 4 out of 5 times you swing. Now, you find an iron short sword, and after equipping it, you notice you're able to kill them in 6 or 7 hits, with about the same accuracy. You give the old copper sword to your friend, and notice that he's able to kill the same kobolds in 7 or 8 hits, but only hits 3 out of 5 swings.

How is that any more useful to playing the game (as opposed to stroking your ego) than knowing the copper sword does 1d6 damage, the iron sword does 1d6+1 damage, and your character has a 15 STR while your friend has a 17 STR?

If you play the game, you'll discover that you're good at the melee combat mechanics, or you're not. If you can't tell what your numbers are, maybe you'll discover another class you enjoy more, as opposed to re-rolling until you get that 18/99 STR, 18 DEX, 18 CON twink that you feel you NEED in order to compete.

In short, the game should be about beating the NPC's, or beating the other players… not about beating the random number generator and whining that you lost because your stats were lower than Johnny's stats. Be a better player and you should be able to win anyways. If that's not true, the combat system relies too much on random numbers and should be fixed. :)

Because the one tells you up front, and the other requires you to go through potentially lengthy (and expensive) trial and error to reverse-engineer the game rules. It has nothing to do with stroking one's ego, IMHO.

It's not to say that everybody who wants numbers has this attitude. There are certainly many people who display the attitude you describe. I just don't think it's an argument against the numbers per se, but rather against the people with the silly attitude. :wink:

Some players go as far as demanding an item database, speedwalks to every area, and zone maps on the website. Typical achiever behavior. I prefer the Diablo system where you have two or three skill/spell branches per class. If it's too open ended people just pick the best stuff and copy each other whenever possible.

My opposition to your argument, quix, is that I can determine a difference in seat height on my bicycle of less than a millimeter. Yes, I ride a lot, and I realise most cyclists never adjust the seat after "fitting" the bike in the shop when they buy it. But nmy point is, for those who are highly skilled, minutiae are observable and are important to success.

Put me in a game where all I know about my AC is 20 different descriptive phrases, and I feel like a kid playing war, not a real soldier. As a heroic warrior, I should be able to feel that +2 difference in my slash protection. Words are for chunking, numbers are for thinking about complex problems.

Not to mention that pretty much anybody has at least some idea of how strong they are, if anything due to lugging stuff around during daily life…

I was on a mud that had a problem like this, and the imp actually asked us what we preferred.

On one hand, our damage description could be based on the amount of damage we do, like, 1-2 = tickle, 3-20 = brushed, 1000-2000 = wrath of the gods, etc … so it would be like, "Your accurate swing does the WRATH of the GODS to the dragon" and whatever. But then we ran into the problem of doing multiple wrath of the gods and the dragon not even down by 10% of its hp. The other option was percentage based, where less than 1% would be tickle, 1-5% is does a good chunk, etc etc … but now we have problems where we consistently tickle high level monsters (and each other) to death.

Our MUD ended up having an option to show you the damage numbers or to keep them hidden. Most of us didn't care whether we had +2 protection and whatever, because we didn't even read the combat spam. Our mud was more skill based than equipment/stat based anyways. Stats only contributed to our hp/mp, and level/skill determined the damage.

I was on another MUD that let you reroll your stats. It was much more equipment and stats based than the previous one I just mentioned. You should've seen the last room in the newbie area, just filled with zMUD triggered bots that rolled for the perfect alt. On one hand, I felt really stupid, because I know if i didn't roll good stats, I'm going to be worse off than the people who spent the time to do it …. but on the other hand, I wish it wasn't like this … i felt i was forced to roll good stats.

I agree with the previous posts about RP and non-RP, achiever and so on, makes a good point. Everyone'll have a different preference, everyone will have a different view on it. Your job as the administrator is for your system to reflect what sort of game you are trying to make, and which one the majority of your players prefer. Extremely difficult to make a game where nobody will complain.

IMO, it is a mistake to add randomness to the character creation process, precisely because it encourages stat rollers, and punishes people who do not endlessly reroll their stats. I think that everybody should start on an equal footing, and everything that will have a life-long effect on the character should be a result of the player's choice.

For the same reason, I am against randomized HP gains, for example. If my performance relative to Bob over there really matters, I think it's very unfair for me to be penalized just because of bad luck. I want my skill at creating my character to be in play versus his; it is not interesting to compete in the game of who's the most lucky. It'd be kind of like having a slot-machine face-off.


I completely agree with this.

But if you hide the numbers, it'll instead be about first trying to work out the mechanics, because otherwise combat will be based on luck instead of skill. You cannot properly play a competitive game if you don't even know the rules.


Precisely - and such information can frequently become outdated or redundant. I vaguely recall when I was very young, playing games with other children at school where we would make up the rules as we went along. But while might work for children (despite being the source of many arguments), it's not the way I play competitive games as an adult.

With repeated pseudo-random rolls it averages out leaving little to luck.

The law of large numbers doesn't really apply in this case, since the number of rolls isn't exactly all that large…