[groovy9]

Hi, all. Brand new here. I've been mudding on and off for probably 15 years (Circlemuds the most, probably), sat down a couple weeks ago after a long hiatus and realized I was going through probably my tenth cycle of look-for-awesome-mud-but-find-major-annoyance-with-every-single-one-and-quit-again-within-weeks.

As it happens, I can crank out Perl code in a hurry, so inspiration strikes and a few hours of coding later, I have a rudimentary mud engine up and running.

So I come here to bounce some ideas off you. Here's what I'm thinking. Feel free to share your thoughts, pro or con. These are rough ideas, so don't get bogged down in the details. We're talking general principles.

* Levelless, classless. Everyone starts out with the same base stats (say 10 each int/wis/con/dex/str) with a 100-point max in each. As you win battles, your stats increase randomly, but heavily weighted toward which ones you USED. If you're casting spells, your int will grow much faster than str, for example.

* Automated combat system with player guidelines. Tell it no preferences and your character figures out the best decisions (melee vs spell, kick vs bash, etc) based on INT. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to make the best decisions. Tell it you prefer melee and you won't cast many spells. If you think bash wins you more battles than trip, tell it you like bash.

* Uber-terse battle output. You say "kill mob." It says "you win/lose", essentially. Detailed battle logs are saved to review afterward. Review, tweak preferences, kill. Repeat. I rather hate the typical battle spam and think it's rather silly to be able to script your client to better automate fights. So let the mud do it.

* I love EQ. Hate fixed-stat EQ. Love the possibility of finding useful EQ pretty much anywhere. So there'll be, to a significant degree, randomly loading EQ with randomized stats.

* Weapons' effectiveness may simply modify your own stats, e.g. a "+10 sword" simply takes your punching power and adds 10% or something. So a good sword is equally but appropriately useful to a newbie and a 500-stat-point beast.

====== ZONES =======

Zones might be the weirdest plan I have. On Aardwolf, there's a command to figure out which mobs are killed most by your level and where to find them, and there's a command to automatically run to that zone from recall. Translation: you grind by basically saying "I want to kill high-EXP mobs" and you're killing them within seconds. It's overly easy, but I also hate the opposite of having to hunt and search and die looking for what amounts to battle training.

So ideas, all of which can coexist:

1: a fight arena. You say "fight a mob about my size" and BAM, you're fighting one with some randomly loaded EQ that may or may not be neat to have. With the insta-battles, this will probably have to be throttled or you'll be loaded up with awesome EQ by the end of day 1.

2: I'm not an area builder. Don't really even care about the story lines of zones. They're there for me to kill stuff, collect stuff, and maybe do the occasional puzzle. So I'm not going to spend time building zones. BUT, players want zones. So I'm thinking of building in an area-parser for other mud engines. Tbamud, for example, has a whole bunch of zones included with it. So I'll have a whole stash of imported zones that lots of folks are already basically familiar with.

3: I hate that most zones on most muds are inaccessible to me until I level way up, which can take a huge amount of time. So I clear zone A 400 times while wishing I could check out zone Q. Screw that. You want to play zone Q, you say "Play zone Q." Mobs and items load appropriate to your character's ability. You don't have to search for zone Q. You just teleport into it and have fun. Problem to be solved here: multiple players in the same zone. Do they each get their own copy by default?

4: Randomly generated zones. Think Nethack. "play random" or somesuch and you teleport into a randomly generated zone populated with mobs and whatnot. Maybe a puzzle/maze/riddle/whatever. Maybe just mobs to slaughter.

5: Back to #3, if a player automatically gets his own copy of zone Q when he plays it, it's not much of a stretch to let him edit and save his own copy. And after that, it's not much of a stretch to make his copy available to other players. POOF! User-generated user-shared content.

6: Editing for #5 can be pretty simple, since players don't have to worry much about game balance. While walking around your copy of your zone, you "roomedit description" or "mobadd mob mob_args," etc. Impossible to make it too tough or too easy because it'll be auto-sized for the player that plays it.

Problem with zones being automatically sized for your ability is that there's no longer much need to become more powerful. So I'll need to build in some sort of incentive. I'm thinking leader boards (toughest mob killed, most killed, fastest kill, best magic-only kill, etc). Maybe some kind of PVP. etc. Maybe prizes for leader-board appearances.

So the main question is: "Is this a mud that sounds fun to play?"

And the following: "Which of those design ideas suck rocks and why?"