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Spoke · 06-07-2006, 02:11 PM

I think you answered your own question. When implementing the game you can set up a very accurate world and laws, you can set up a trade system that resembles the time you wish to portrait, you can avoid all the fantasy themes and make your game as realistic as you can have it.

The problem with this becoming a "historical" MUD is that this game genre requires players playing the game, and as such, they will inevitably develop their own social interaction that is bound to be different from the historical accurate description. In the real world you have a handful of people dominating thousands or millions, cases where the faith of nations is ruled by the decisions of two or three. You cannot implement that in a MUD realistically, mainly because you do not have access to the same number of people. Then you are left with two options, model the crowd with NPCs and news-comming-in-from-the-kingdom or you can try to isolate your setting so that external and broader aspects of life will not have impact in your game. Once again, this will make your game steer away from historical accuracy.

I doubt there is any actual way to implement this, since you have to have a good number of RPI players, savvy in the tricks and twists of the trade (ie. knowledge of the different social status, trade customs, religious beliefs, etc); you need a way to balance for the fact that you will never be able to reproduce a realistic social structure out of players alone, and so you need a team that activelly works to steer events to keep them in line with the timeline you wish your game to take (via PCs controled by admins for example, or via strategically placed NPCs who can interact with the PCs). There is a third option, I guess, which would be re-enact some specific historical event. You could set up the environment very acuratelly if you know where things should take place and how things developed; you then set somewhat strict guidelines on how the main events must unfold; you split the roles among your playerbase and let the people (who knows the whole broad story) play out the gaps.

I think the last option is the only way to keep it historically accurate and reasonably easy to control.

Your dutty as admin would be to set up the world, and maybe some global events through NPCs. Then you would have to monitor the storyline so that you know the benchmarks are reached. I did this some half a dozen of times with friends, we would meet and pick up a story we wanted to enact (in our case D&D setup), someone would be in charge of sketching the general setup and split the characters, then we would RP the time between events. We usually steered away a bit from the original intent, since our characters were sometimes affected by their alter-ego's way of thinking (ie. ours) , but a few times we managed to have it done the way it was "meant" to be, and we all had a good time.

06-07-2006, 02:11 PM	#17
Spoke Member Join Date: Oct 2003 Posts: 101	I think you answered your own question. When implementing the game you can set up a very accurate world and laws, you can set up a trade system that resembles the time you wish to portrait, you can avoid all the fantasy themes and make your game as realistic as you can have it. The problem with this becoming a "historical" MUD is that this game genre requires players playing the game, and as such, they will inevitably develop their own social interaction that is bound to be different from the historical accurate description. In the real world you have a handful of people dominating thousands or millions, cases where the faith of nations is ruled by the decisions of two or three. You cannot implement that in a MUD realistically, mainly because you do not have access to the same number of people. Then you are left with two options, model the crowd with NPCs and news-comming-in-from-the-kingdom or you can try to isolate your setting so that external and broader aspects of life will not have impact in your game. Once again, this will make your game steer away from historical accuracy. I doubt there is any actual way to implement this, since you have to have a good number of RPI players, savvy in the tricks and twists of the trade (ie. knowledge of the different social status, trade customs, religious beliefs, etc); you need a way to balance for the fact that you will never be able to reproduce a realistic social structure out of players alone, and so you need a team that activelly works to steer events to keep them in line with the timeline you wish your game to take (via PCs controled by admins for example, or via strategically placed NPCs who can interact with the PCs). There is a third option, I guess, which would be re-enact some specific historical event. You could set up the environment very acuratelly if you know where things should take place and how things developed; you then set somewhat strict guidelines on how the main events must unfold; you split the roles among your playerbase and let the people (who knows the whole broad story) play out the gaps. I think the last option is the only way to keep it historically accurate and reasonably easy to control. Your dutty as admin would be to set up the world, and maybe some global events through NPCs. Then you would have to monitor the storyline so that you know the benchmarks are reached. I did this some half a dozen of times with friends, we would meet and pick up a story we wanted to enact (in our case D&D setup), someone would be in charge of sketching the general setup and split the characters, then we would RP the time between events. We usually steered away a bit from the original intent, since our characters were sometimes affected by their alter-ego's way of thinking (ie. ours) , but a few times we managed to have it done the way it was "meant" to be, and we all had a good time.