[Atyreus]

I spent quite a bit of time developing a combat system that I felt would offer a more interesting alternative to the standard hit point depletion system.

Without spending too much time going over the details of the system, basically every wound that a character received that was more serious than a graze had a certain chance of killing or incapacitating a character. The actual chance depended on both the severity of the new wound and the number of wounds which a character already had. Every wound a character received was more likely than a previous wound to put the character out of action. The more serious a wound, the more quickly its lethal potential increased with each successful hit.

The upside of this system was that it did make combat more exciting in that there were few matchups that would be so one-sided that one combatant would be mathematically guaranteed a victory. Also, combat felt more "realistic" in that no combatant could survive numerous serious and critical injuries. A single critical hit, while difficult to achieve, could end many fights.

The downside to the system was that it was too randomly lethal. In a mud in which a character can be expected to spend a considerable number of rounds in combat in any given gaming session, this level of lethality just wasn't going to work.

However, as I began to adjust the combat's lethality curve, the system began to feel more and more like a regular hit point depletion system. Unlike a hit point depletion system, however, it lacked any way for a player to accurately gauge how much damage they could still take (at best, a player could guesstimate his or her odds of surviving another successful hit or two).

All of which has given me a real appreciation for the good old-fashioned hit point model. While I think alternative models can certainly work and are worth looking in to, it doesn't hurt to give some thought as to why the system is so pervasive. There are plenty of things that can be done to make mud combat more exciting and engaging and which can give the mechanics of a fight a new feel without necessarily dumping the use of hit points as an abstraction for a character's health and fitness.

I don't like guild/class systems generally, but this is largely because of the way such systems are usually implemented. Given that the goal, whether implicit or explicit, of many muds is the development of a character that in some way stands out in the crowd, I don't understand why such games would then throw a tremendous obstacle in the player's path in the form of cookie-cutter classes.

While guilds can certainly serve a useful social function in muds, it is worth considering that perhaps a character's abilities should determine guild eligibility rather than a character's guild determing his or her abilities. In general, I tend to favor games that give the player as much leeway as possible to design the character they want to play without having to be limited to a fixed range of classes or guilds with narrowly defined skill sets.