View Single Post
Old 11-09-2002, 03:26 PM   #4
shadowfyr
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 310
shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
I think the key issue here is that online RP is impractical no matter how you try it. In full RP systems you get forced to interact, even if the style you want to use to play is as a loner. In combat based systems it is kill the same thing 500 times in a row to get the next spell/skill, so that 'maybe' you can kill something bigger. There is no real middle ground because mobs are precoded, stupid and often do little more than stand around waiting to get attacked. There is no DM around to make the orc you run into speak with a lisp and offers to give you a magic ring, if only you can find something unique to add to its slug collection. Players can grow in the game, but the mobs by nature can't and that leads to a split between muds that force RP by eliminating mobs as targets, or those that force player interaction by making some mobs so strong they can't be killed alone.

Neither method works in the long run, because at some point you either get tired of standing around talking or you run out of things that are worth attacking. The mud I play on is more of the combat one. It manages to have a fairly loyal following because of special events, invasions and a fair amount of intereaction between players. No one is forced to RP, PK is limited to make life safe for most players and practically anyone can apply to design an area. However, some of the most loyal players spend most of their time idle (unless there is an invasion) and more than a few have left due to boredom.

One solution is to design some sort of AI system like in The Sims, where there is true interaction between the mobs and the enviroment. If they could change, grow and do things not hard-coded into them, then you wouldn't be killing the same thing over and over, you would have to plan and consider tactics (such as how to deal with a normally harmless orc that just picked up the Mace of Oblivion some player dropped), not to mention something more suffisticated than simply repopping the same identical mob every time. Wouldn't it be more fun after all if the new mob 'remembers' the player killing its parents? It is quite easy to install a mud, create a few standard mobs that stand around and look stupid, then throw players at them, but it doesn't provide true RP and can often sabotage any RP you try to introduce. The middle ground between the two extremes of mudding is practically a wasteland due to the apparent inability of anyone to design one that isn't either 'Myst - The chat room' or 'Doom - Now using full ansi text!'.
shadowfyr is offline   Reply With Quote