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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
 Posted - 07/02/2008 : 06:10:48
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So me and my buddy are entertaining the idea of making a new text MUD(Standard D&D style game), since I know there are some veterans around here I thought I might get some input from you.
What I'd like is a list of things you found to be lacking or inconsistant with your old MUDS and any other ideas or reccomendations you might have. Im looking to flag the details which unbalance a MUD and correct them before I even start.
Some of the issues on my list so far,
-All classes will have a method of gaining EXP/Money while playing solo at all levels.
-Teleport restrictions so when the world respawns, certain classes do not always get to the desirable locations first.
-small towns, have a few smaller towns out of the way, Midguard will not be the only town. (though it will be the only start location, I think)
-Automated special events which require no GM supervision.
-More realistic MOBs, you should not be able to kill a rabbit in an open field with a dagger without some aid, magic or otherwise.
-A method of removing high level PCs from the game, which does not piss people off. Im thinking of a quest which will allow their PC to become a permanent MOB if they so choose...
etc..
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2008 : 06:37:59 [Permalink]
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Do you have a special setting in mind?
Any particular rules system?
Will you use some pre-existing software like NannyMUD, or write your own?
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2008 : 06:54:32 [Permalink]
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Edit: the setting will be a the last great border town on the edge of the dark territory(large wall runs the length of the MUD world intersecting the city), not sure which system we will use, but the content will be all new. I refered to Midguard, but there will not be a Midguard. Not sure if im going to include oddball areas like Wizard of Oz/Dune etc.
Standard classes/races, no Vampires, Werewolves, Monsters or other weird creatures.
All classes will start out as basic (Fighter, caster, healer) and evolve from there into more specialized types, this will prevent people from playing 30 days before discovering their class doesnt work for them. Probably on a 100 level system with no remorting.
NERFing will be restricted, no giving your buddy who just started a set of epic armor and Excalibur. Speaking of Excalibur, special artifacts will be restricted to one and one only. This means that other players will have to be able to take these items by force if you choose to use them. If you dont use them I need to find a way to get them back into circulation. I'll probably limit these uber items to one, max. So if you have Excalibur, you would not be able to have the Spear of Jesus in the bank...This will be tricky.
-Bounty hunters will be the only PVP(I think) If you were to say, go kill Zeus, then other players who are still friendly with the Olympus faction can get a quest from Olympus which would allow them to hunt and kill the criminal PC. It may seem harsh, but not that many players will be on friendly terms with Olympus as they would never be able to hunt there and may need to do quests to gain faction.
Not sure which software we will be using, thats my buddies department, Im design and content. |
| Edited by - BigPapaSmurf on 07/02/2008 06:59:48 |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2008 : 13:56:23 [Permalink]
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This "faction" terminology is new to me. I've been out of circulation for more than 10 years, can you explain this?
As for powerful (magical) items, you can have all items have a magic-weave instability factor, or Chaos factor. If a character collects too many items the concentration of instability may cause trickling bodily harm and other undesireable effects like items randomly crumble or fall into a dimensional rift only to appear at random or pre-defined location. Or, a demon picks the item up in his dimension because he doesn't want it polluting his realm, and returns it someplace.
This would prevent someone from wielding Exalibur and the Spear Of Destiny at the same time. These items when brought together could just burn the wielder to a crisp, or simply teleport away. |
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 07/02/2008 : 17:56:40 [Permalink]
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What we decided was to make those items intelligent, thus they cannot have 2 conflicting intelligent items(its like a love affair)
As for factions, we are eliminating alignment for faction only, so each major group of MOBs falls into a faction such as Olympus, Titans, Orcs, Midguard Protectors, Midguard merchants etc. So if you kill a gypsy peddler, your faction with the merchants might go up a bit, your prices down a bit, If you kill the minister of trade or something, you may never be able to shop in Midguard again. Killing Zeus might make you kill on sight to most Olympus MOBs and make it so that Titans will no longer kill you on sight. Kill a ton of Olympians, maybe you could start getting quests from the Titans, and so on.. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Ricky
SFN Die Hard
USA
4907 Posts |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 07/03/2008 : 05:06:10 [Permalink]
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Nah, not much penalty for croaking. EXP loss and Im a fan of having to go retreive your corpse from Zues's room. Though you may need help to get it. Some MUDs have a jail system for screw-ups, I dont like those but I suppose the different factions could impose different penalties on those captured by bounty hunters. I will probably just have you bring the criminal's head to claim a bounty.
I should restate, killing Zues doesnt get the faction hit, attacking him does, that way if he kills you there are still consequences. |
| Edited by - BigPapaSmurf on 07/03/2008 05:09:41 |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 07/03/2008 : 08:18:29 [Permalink]
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My own goal, which I now admit I'll never reach because I'll never have the time to do all the MUD coding, was to go both classless and levelless.
Instead, players could simply "buy" skills a la cart with the experience points they'd accumulated. By focusing on particular areas of knowledge, they could effectively make their character into a thief, fighter, wizard, etc., or they could become a jack-of-all-trades by learning the basic skills in every field.
Of course, certain skills would have prerequisites. Of course they'd have to learn "Hand-to-Hand Combat I" before they could learn "Hand-to-Hand Combat II," for example, but some skills would also come with the requirement that the player have certain (high) stats (like the most-intense spells requiring a very high intelligence to learn). But there would be other places where players could, for a lot of experience points, build up their basic stats, too (like a gym for strength, or a library for intelligence).
There could even be, for example, weapon-specific skills, and players would get penalized for trying to wield weapons in which they're not specialized (for example, trying to use a battle axe when you've specialized in daggers would be bad). A "General Weapon Use" skill could minimize the impact of the penalty, but not eliminate it entirely. And "Shield Use" would almost certainly be required before a player could use a shield effectively (and it would be a prerequisite for "Shield Bash").
Various "stores" would be training grounds. A player would go to the Medical Clinic to learn healing skills, or to the Dojo to learn martial arts, etc., etc. If I remember the outline I'd done for this, many years ago, there were eight or so "realms of knowledge." To really make it work, each field needed to have about the same number of possible skills as every other field, and there needed to be many dozens of skills in each one (tough to do for some of them) so that players had lots of choices.
And racial differences could, with this system, not only be expressed as +/- points to basic character attributes, but also (or instead) as +/- adjustments to certain skills or skill sets.
So that's the classless part. The levelless part comes from the fact that there would never be any sort of automatic promotion of skills. Players would have to go back to town and train to get more skills. And of course, players could choose to go running back to town as soon as they'd collected enough XP to buy the next skill they want, or they could keep tooling around the countryside collecting millions of XP and then buy three dozen skills all at once. (Or not. To avoid giving fast typists an advantage, every time a player buys a skill, the game would "simulate" the time spent training by refusing to accept input from the player for 30 seconds or so.)
And since the various skills didn't necessarily cost the same, a raw number-of-skills measure wouldn't be useful in comparing one character to another. Instead, players would be ranked by the total experience points they'd spent on skills. All sorts of cost/benefit analyses were going to be required between the "realms of knowledge" to ensure that every player who'd spent 50,000 XP on skills (for example) would be about as powerful as any other player who'd spent 50,000 XP on skills. In other words, given a specific monster, someone who'd specialized in fighting skills and spent 50,000 XP should have an equally easy (or difficult) time defeating that monster as another player who spent the same amount all on wizardry skills.
As an extra bonus, death, spells and traps could remove or inactivate certain skills in particular (or randomly), temporarily or permanently.
And here's another bonus: if someone were to do this right, mobs would be built the same way as the player characters, from the same skill sets. Players "possessing" mobs (and controlling them) would be a snap to code that way. And the number of XP a player gets for beating a mob could be based upon the cost of the mob's skills.
Ah, it's a dream, all the above. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 07/03/2008 : 09:30:42 [Permalink]
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Another thing to consider regarding skills is this:
You could have a check for skill usage, and require a minimum about usage of that skill before improving it. If you've collected a massive amount XP you wouldn't simply be able to suddenly advance from Beginner to Master in one swift stroke, since that does not happen in real life: For each level of skill, you'd have to successfully use your skill a few times to "understand" how it works before you can advance. Just like homework at school, or hours practical training after a session with the karate instructor. Repetitive training makes perfect, just look at my avatar... 
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
| Edited by - Dr. Mabuse on 07/03/2008 09:32:21 |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 07/04/2008 : 09:11:54 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Instead, players could simply "buy" skills a la cart with the experience points they'd accumulated. By focusing on particular areas of knowledge, they could effectively make their character into a thief, fighter, wizard, etc., or they could become a jack-of-all-trades by learning the basic skills in every field.
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Thanks for the ideas guys. My buddy used to play a game called God Wars which used a similar system, though I think they only had the abilty to train HP/Mana/Stamina with the EXP points.
Im more of a traditionalist, where a Thief Guildmaster would spit in the face of a wizard before teaching him any thief skills. Not that he couldnt learn them elsewhere though.
Edit: they way they had it set up If you had 9999 HP it would cost you 10000 exp to increase it by 1, then 10001 etc. |
| Edited by - BigPapaSmurf on 07/04/2008 09:14:32 |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 07/04/2008 : 09:59:29 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf
Im more of a traditionalist, where a Thief Guildmaster would spit in the face of a wizard before teaching him any thief skills. |
Only idiots walk around openly advertising the fact that they're a wizard, or a thief, etc. It just sets 'em up as targets (and for denial-of-service from other guilds).| Not that he couldnt learn them elsewhere though. |
There's that, too. Only the most dogmatic of Guildmasters would refuse a person's coin.| Edit: they way they had it set up If you had 9999 HP it would cost you 10000 exp to increase it by 1, then 10001 etc. |
Yes, and the skills within each "realm of knowledge" in the system I describe would cost more XP as they become more specialized. In a levelless system, it's the only way to make it more challenging to "level up."
In DikuMUD, if I remember correctly, they made it go the other way. Each level took the same amount of XP, but as you went up in levels, the lower-level mobs would become devalued in XP. A kobold that was worth 10 XP for a 1st-level character might be worth only 2 XP for a 5th-level character and only 1 XP for a 10th-level character. I didn't like that very much, but it makes sense if you realize that with exponential amounts of XP needed to level up, a 90th-level character could require many billions of XP total, which is hard to represent with 32-bit integers (if it takes 10 XP to go from level 1 to level 2, and then each level takes just 121% more XP than the previous - level 3 at 22 XP, level 4 at 37 XP, level 5 at 55 XP, etc. - you'd roll over a 32-bit XP counter trying to go from level 96 to level 97). Lowering the amount of XP received per level effectively turns XP into a log scale instead of linear, where a character with 2,000 XP actually has (maybe) five times the "real-world" experience as a character with 1,000 XP, not twice the experience. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Ricky
SFN Die Hard
USA
4907 Posts |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 07/04/2008 : 13:20:42 [Permalink]
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| Design some quests with opponents/obstacles that are close to immune against different kinds of attacks, to inspire cooperation across classes. A stone golem that need a wizard turning into mud with a spell before the warrior can hack it to pieces with that sword that the wizard is too weak to use. |
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 07/04/2008 : 16:26:16 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Ricky
| and for denial-of-service from |
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Denial of service: "...a Thief Guildmaster would spit in the face of a wizard before teaching him any thief skills." It's like a plumbing school denying service to an applicant for being an electrician.| For me, a requirement in any MUD is a percentage of failure, or even partial hits as well, especially with ranged weapons. Why they never include this in any RTS is beyond me. Of course, you also have the ability to decrease your POF and increase it for everyone else ("blocking"). |
One of the other things I wanted to work into a MUD was a hugely complex armor-and-hit-location system. Well, it wouldn't have been complex for the players, but it would have been for the software. Anyways, an attacker's accuracy and weapon skills get compared to the defender's speed and blocking (with weapon and/or shield) and/or dodging skills. An even match gives a 50% chance to hit (and the math could be worked so that it would never be either 100% or 0%). A miss would be a big "swoosh" of a miss, and not a D&D-style "miss which could have been a non-penetrating hit."
So hitting doesn't necessarily mean damage. The next step on a hit would have been to consult a "body map" for a random hit location (head, right leg above the knee, left hand, neck, etc.). If the attack has a high awareness attribute, the hit location may get shifted to a nearby, less-heavily armored location. If the defender has high speed or good dodge skills, the hit location might get shifted to a neighboring more-heavily armored location.
Once hit location is determined, the weapon and armor types are compared. Weapons break down into three broad groups: slashing, stabbing and clubbing. Every piece of armor is rated for all three, as percentages of how much damage the armor can absorb. Chainmail might be excellent against slashing, so-so against clubbing, and hardly any good against stabbing, for example. So an amount of damage is determined for the weapon (with bonuses for high strength, only for hand or thrown weapons), and then is split into two amounts: the amount absorbed by the armor, and the amount done to the defender (ouch).
But we're not done. The amount absorbed by the armor is subtracted from the armor's "hit points." A piece of armor that reaches zero hit points is destroyed immediately. Repair shops in the MUD world will do a brisk business, "healing" armor as it gets used and abused, which should be far cheaper than buying replacements. (Weapons have "hit points" as well, and can break with overuse.) Randomly, damage to armor would reduce its effectiveness against that weapon type by some amount, too (plate mail that is 100% effective against stabbing weapons until it turns to dust is unrealistic).
A player would never be directly aware of these stats without a good ol' Identify Scroll. At best, a "look at armor" command would result in one of five or six messages, from "it's in pristine condition" down to "it's almost falling off you." And the player would never see any "hit points" for armor, even with Identify, they'd just see a percentage for how much more damage a piece could take.
You may have noticed the extra attributes above, including accuracy, speed and awareness. Any MUD that I would bring to life would include a lot of basic character attributes. Old-style D&D had just six, and (for example) dexterity did double duty for speed and accuracy, but I've always felt that one should be able to have both characters and critters that might be lumberingly slow but dead-eye accurate (or vice versa). The idea that beauty and charisma were one-and-the-same always bugged me, too, with guys like Hitler to look at as counter-examples. Also, more attributes offer more opportunities for spells and potions to have bizarre effects (the inexpensive version of an accuracy potion could boost accuracy while sapping speed and strength, for example, while the expensive version just boosts accuracy).
Finally, of course, weapons and armor (and every other object) need their own "mobprog" scripts. The scripting capabilities require the standard triggers, plus "repair" (so the extra-special one-of-a-kind armor self-destructs when you try to repair it, because the only way to do that is to pour onto it the blood of a virgin, for example). Weapon scripts need to be able to "know" what kind of armor they're impacting, and obviously armor scripts need to be able to detect what kind of weapon is doing damage.
In general, scripting is probably the most-important aspect of a good MUD, from an administrator's point-of-view. You don't want custom software within the MUD itself to handle special cases and oddball animated weapons, you want to do all that from scripts so your implementors don't bother your programmer with a zillion special requests. And that's where I got bogged down when writing my own MUD, because I kept on thinking up new scenarios for script use, and thus finding reasons to modify the basics of the scripting language itself, so I never got to the point where I had a completed mobprog that could do something as simple as say "hello." Last time I messed with it all, my scripts had sixty-something potential triggers, which was starting to cause a syntax nightmare.
If Graybeard the Wizard can eat some food, which causes his magical dagger to complain that it hasn't tasted blood in a long time and then shock Graybeard out of spite, at which point in time Graybeard's Tome of Magisteria comes to his defense and says, "hey, don't do that!" and casts a localized rain spell so the dagger rusts a little, followed by a slowly escalating battle between the knife and the book, during which the player can't do much but watch the text scroll up his screen until he walks into the Room of Tranquility which booms out "COOL IT YOU IDIOTS" at which point the dagger apologizes sheepishly and the book says, "he started it," all without a single byte of internal MUD software special coding for the dagger, the book or the room, then you've got good scripting capabilities in your MUD. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 07/04/2008 : 17:14:21 [Permalink]
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Oh, I've also always wanted to do a MUD with more-realistic money. Have gold, silver and copper pieces that actually weigh something (and so count against carrying capacity), and force players to make change as needed. For people with tons of cash, they can go buy gems and jewelry worth thousands of gold and which don't depreciate.
A bank would also be fine, but having in-game "homes" which nobody else can possibly get into shouldn't happen. Players should have to purchase the game equivalent of an alarm system (see my screed on scripting, above: anything above the most-basic door should be scripted, because you don't want any key to fit any lock, but you also don't want to make a million individual "lock" and "key" objects - ID numbers maintained internally within the script processors can check for matches, with only a single prototype object), and more-expensive systems (with the possible inclusion of instant-death mode) should cost more. No system should be undefeatable, but the most-sophisticated systems could force even the most-skilled thieves to spend hours (real-time) trying to defeat one subsystem and then another with no guarantee that the next move they make won't undo everything and release the hounds with bees in their mouths. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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New M.U.D. ideas
