Re: Guidelines for an RPI mud.
To say that a game requires a "slower" pace is simply a crutch being used because a player can't type fast enough to react to a situation or the environment around them. It is a lot like being pumped up with painkillers and trying to deal with a conveyor belt. Does anyone think that a real life soldier under fire in a foxhole in Afghanistan is in a "slow" or "controlled" environment? Effective communication in any kind of environment is a skill in itself.
SOME people can type as fast as they can speak, others can't. This same problem exists even on graphical muds, hence the usage of Ventrillo and other speech programs for combat-intensive and other "special" situations.This is also why a good number of commands in muds are abbreviated.
As for levels...life is made up of patterns and numbers; there is math everywhere, completely invisible to most. I could sit down and speak to someone about my management experience/ability for an hour and still not get them to understand (for whatever reason). However, if I say, "On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm an 8," anyone that can speak English will likely understand right away.
Quantifying oneself with numbers in any fashion isn't unrealistic at all, they are simply a tool to understanding. I might be an "A" student, have a 1650 SAT score, have a 185 IQ, etc. These are all ways of personally quantifying myself. Heck, in traditional D&D, a character's intelligence score multiplied by 10 was supposed to represent one's IQ. Since I have been a gamer for years, I often quantify myself with levels by how many years I have spent in any particular field (level 6 soldier, level 13 manager, etc.).
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