[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?"

[camlorn]

Hi,
So, i've essentially done the same thing you have: jumped around between muds for a very long time.

Would I play your mud? No,.

Here's why:
If there's no actual combat, and if it's only telling me I won, it'd be just about the same as rolling a dice rl; the progression has meaning in that the range of acceptible win probability goes up. I can get the same enjoyment out of rolling a dice and posting the results.

If you don't like automated combat, consider a manual system. Good examples are dark legacy with it's jab/slash/thrust system, for which every attack has an associated timer after which you can't do anything, and godwars 2 which is a good example of what to do in a mud, despite the administration problems I think it has (KaVir's great, but the no rules thing sucks imho).

Essentially combat is why I'd play your game. With an instant win/lose system like you describe, I can theoretically get to the top in an hour, if I know what I'm doing; if you like that system, then you'd have to implement the "adventures" system seen in so many browser games, or something similar, and at that point it might as well be a browser game and not a mud.

Progression appears to be fine; you'd probably want to implement stats as floating point values and show the decimal, with a nonlinear scaling system, however; that is, it takes longer to get from 99 to 100 than it does to get from 20 to 21. Also, make the decimal worth something. 21.5 should be noticeably better than 21; not unbelieveably better, but enough that the player notices it. And, you might have spells/skills follow the same system: using them raises them and, for instance, fireball is dependent on a skill called pyromancy and raises pyromancy as you use it, unlocking more fire spells and making those you do have work better.

You might consider an unlimited progression system; I've seen it done well in the one mud I know of that has it. Given that your entire mud is going to be bare-bones and that you're going to have random dungeons anyway, it doesn't matter where the top is as there's never a lack of end-game content.

On the topic of random dungeons, great idea. In fact, I'd go so far as to say make that the main feature of the mud. You've surely seen diablo-esk item generation, so that's random eq for you; you've obviously played nethack or at least know how it woriks. Imho, take some of the ideas from nethack and put them in a mud, and then add some that only make sense to a mud: mystical pedistals that, when something is placed upon them, destroy that something and affect rooms within five units, for example. On that topic, multi-room combat isn't something I've seen too much of; I'm not talking roomless here, but multi-room, if you get the difference.

Finally, blind accessibility in this day and age of gaming is a plus. I myself won't play your mud if you require that I read an ascii map, to navigate or to fight, overuse non-alphanumeric symbols, the list goes on; togglable blind-mode, which has been used with success on some of the major muds, is a good idea. This opens up a whole demographic of players which are becoming a significant portion of the mudding community; I place estimates at somewhere around 3 or 5 percent, atm, but it's probably higher. There's also web sites devoted to blind gaming on which you could post, which few muds do, gaining yourself a pool of potential new players.

And the final point, as this message is huge, you've not shown commitment yet. If you actually don't abandon it and finish it, you'll get players then. I, personally, would want to see more than I wrote this in a couple hours, and am now going to make a mud from it; does anyone want to play?

[groovy9]

Good Stuff, Camlorn. The devil will be in the details when it comes to the battle system. On typical combat-spam muds, I find myself fairly mindlessly typing "bash" or whatever supplemental attack makes sense, or "heal" if it looks like I'll need to soon, etc.

Basically, it'll take very little effort to make a battle system smart enough to do what I do (which is based on what I can visually skim from the ridiculous wall of battle spam) 99% of the time.

It won't be like you're simply rolling a die to see if you win. It'll be more like you've designed your own die with significantly fewer sides than your enemy's.

What'll make it a skill game rather than a dice roll is to give the player enough control to get his character to do what he wants it to inside the automated battle. But maybe it'll still turn out to be unfun. Hrmmm...

By the way, I wasn't asking for players for my pre-pre-alpha stage whim. Just soliciting commentary on features before I go to the trouble.

[groovy9]

Or maybe a compromise is to give the player the option to fight either manual or automated. The code for that would be trivial, as the battle is happening round-by-round anyway, it's just not displayed.

What I don't like is having a *character* with low INT make decisions based on the intelligence of the player, for example. Obviously, you can't completely decouple the player from the character, but maybe a solution is to do normal round-by-round combat and for the character to give more general battle commands. Instead of "bash," you simply tell it to do a supplemental attack or cast an offensive spell and the engine chooses one based on your stats.

If you want to, while working through an area you know isn't a big challenge, you flip it on auto-fight and save yourself from the wall-of-spam.

[camlorn]

Well, yes and no. The problem as I see it with most muds isn't that you're always entering the same command, or rather, that's not the root of the problem.

Consider. I cast fireball. Great. Nothing else happens, so just cast fireball again. Boring.

Instead, I cast oil. then I cast fireball. Now, the greece gets lit, and continues to burn. But, my opponent wants to counter it, so he casts rainstorm, a weather control spell to wash it off before I can send the fireball. So, knowing that he will do this (a trivial ai for mobs, or so I think), I cast fixed weather, a high level spell that counters weather magic...etc. Perhaps I threw the oil, or it's napalm, or something; the point is that imho that's a better way than some sort of automate the combat even further. The trick is to slow down combat, i.e. add a range element, so I can get out of melee range, lowering the ammount of spam and damage I take, or just outright making combat slow (not my favoured sollution, but it would work).

In short, don't look for less player input, look for more; I could come up with a ton of examples. Maybe a warrior has techniques that increase a stat called cuts (not something the player can see, just a convenient conceptualization), and carries around saltwater to throw on foes. Not realistic, but fun, and something that I'd probably do. It's your mud and your choice, however, just saying what I think.

And sorry, thought you were hoping for players to all come running or something; that's just the impression I got. I didn't mean to be patronizing, but it seemed to me you were asking for someone to come play your mud after like 6 hours of development. That said, most of us couldn't write even a basic mud codebase in 6 hours and a large number in 6 days, so congrats.

[camlorn]

So, heh. looking at this:

The congrats wasn't disbelieving sarcasm in my last post; I meant it.

And, I realized that I'm providing little hope and motivation; if you open, I would at least check it out, as you have a lot of features I'm looking for in a mud.

Anyone else have comments on this? I mean, I'm feeling rather loanly on this thread, being the only person giving design feedback; I'm also not the most qualified...

Speaking of, I'd listen to KaVir or Dentin, if you're looking for someone with the experience; KaVir has written two complete codebases, and Dentin is running a mud that's been giong strong since the early nineties.

[plamzi]

I have some comments related to content creation as mentioned in #2, 5, and 6.

In a nutshell, I think the OP severely underestimates the importance and ease-of-creation of quality game content. For example, importing areas from TBAMud sounds great on paper, but an area is much more than some imported text, and a world is much more than a bunch of areas.

Also, areas from a certain codebase bring with them the individual sets of properties that their entities have. If you go with TBAMud imports and try to build a from-scratch codebase that uses these properties, many months later you may find yourself looking at a Perl port of TBAMud instead of something original.

User-contributed content is also great on paper (especially when the paper is in the hands of a dev who by his/her own admission doesn't care much about world creation). In reality, a new MUD with unoriginal or non-existent content is going to have a very hard time attracting players who can go next door for something ready to consume. If a sandbox is empty, it doesn't matter how great the tools are that you've scattered in it.

I think that excitement is absolutely mandatory in a "write from scratch" project, and I realize that underestimating certain challenges helps to get the ball rolling. That said, it's important to set the parameters of a project in realistic terms. Assume that everything is hard, especially if you haven't done it, or don't care to pour thousands of hours into it. Realize that there are no shortcuts to a deep and original world. And if you go with random dungeons instead, realize there are many tradeoffs, compensating for which will require a lot of creative coding on your part.

[groovy9]

So to plamzi's point, I was thinking of importing the room/text/story/puzzle aspects of the TBAmud zones and bolting on my own mechanics. But yes, I get that this is a nontrivial challenge.

Anyway, at the moment, I'm coding up a dungeon generator (which is fun in its own right) and will worry about importing zones later (if ever). But my brain keeps coming back to two concepts over and over. One is a Nethack-esque autogenerated dungeon/puzzle/quest or whatever you want to call it.

And the other has to do with the mob universe. Rather than enumerate all the specific types of mobs that may load in my dungeon, it seems like it could be fun to define a collection of "rules of the universe", which include such things as

* general mob types (elf, dwarf, orc, dragon, lizardman, dog, fairy, etc, )
* characteristics of said mob types. e.g. elves hate orcs, are ambivalent to dwarves, and are protective of fairies. Dwarves love axes and fear horses.
* applicable adjectives - dragons can be red or green, dwarves can be hairy or fat, etc

So as a player, you might log in, type "play middle_earth" and be thrown into a dungeon with a middle earth universe in which the mobs act according to the rules of that universe. Elf mobs may attack orc mobs, orcs may run from elves if alone, hobbits may eat a lot, etc. Maybe your goal is to make it to the "end." Or to kill all the orcs. Or maybe you load as an orc and have to kill 10 elves.

Or you might "play star_wars". Or you might spot a neat addition to middle earth and "suggest middle_earth elf adjective arrogant". IMMs and/or player base votes, characteristic gets added and on future middle earth loads, you may encounter an arrogant elf.

Because the dungeons are auto-generated, some will be better than others. If you load a particularly awesome rendition of star wars, maybe you suggest it for the hall of fame. Players vote it in, and then anyone can play the specific dungeon that loaded for you. Before long, you have a collection of really-good-dungeons, as voted by the players, alongside the ability to load random dungeons.

The world may start out fairly basic, but the potential complexity would quickly grow as players add to the lore. As a coder, I might add an item combining feature with a few basic rules (water + flour = dough) and after players run with it, you wind up with a complex alchemy system usable by players and mobs both.

I just don't know how complex the universe would have to be in order to attract players in the first place.

[Kiore]

Would I play your mud? Hell yes I would.

When I first read the original post, I thought to myself "Do I have a split personality that posts on these forums!?". I've been mudding for approximately 15 years as well, and I always go through the look-for-awesome-mud-but-find-major-annoyance-with-every-single-one-and-quit-again-within-weeks phase. I also have ADHD, which is probably the cause of this, but eh.. whatever.

I love random items, and random dungeons, and basically everything you said. The extremely simple combat would be my only problem. I want a bit of challenge, so a crappy player can't kill this elite/boss mob thing, but a player worth his weight in gold can smack it in the face with a bit of effort. Use certain skills, and/or spells correctly and you will win the majority of your fights.

Honestly I want to play your mud right now, right freakin' now. So, uh.. gimme the address :P

[KaVir]

If there are no classes, and everyone ends up with 100 in each stat, doesn't that mean everyone will be identical? You can't have a strong guy, or an agile guy, or a smart guy, because all the top characters will have exactly the same stats.

How will you break down skills/spells/powers/etc? Can people learn them all? Or will you have some sort of skill tree/web?

Many players love being able to customise their characters. What options will they have for making their character different from everyone else?

If everyone ends up with 100 in all their stats, won't they all fight with the same degree of effectiveness?

If combat is automated, what does the player do while their character is fighting?

As I mentioned , "Mechanics may be the meat of the game, but cool cosmetics provide the flavour. Even the most well designed of games can feel lifeless and barren without the appropriate cosmetic touches."

I like random magical items as well, but be aware that if not designed very carefully.

What will be the incentive for players to look for new equipment, if their old stuff is always cutting-edge?

If the mobs and items are scaled to your ability, what's the incentive for players to explore new areas?

Won't they just walk into the first area they see, and stay there until they hit 100 in every stat?

Sorry, but no, it doesn't. It sounds like players will remain in the first area they find, and grind their way up until they've got 100 in every stat. As combat is automated, and the messages extremely basic, there won't even be any incentive to watch the action - they might as well just set up a bot. Then once they've finished, they'll have a maxed out character that's identical to everyone else.

1. Allowing people to max all their stats isn't necessarily a bad thing, but most players hate cookie-cutter builds, so at least give them some other way to customise their characters.

2. Automated combat doesn't have to be non-interactive. Even the typical Diku-style combat (which many people already consider boring) allows you to execute manual commands such as kick and disarm.

3. Cosmetics can make or break a game. It's one thing to offer terse combat messages as a configurable option, but if players only ever see "you win/lose", combat will be completely flavourless.

4. If players never need to find better equipment, or areas with harder mobs, they'll just stay where they are...and complain that the game is repetitive and boring. If you're adding new content, there needs to be some incentive for players to go and find it, or else only the most hardcore explorers will bother.

[groovy9]

Thanks for the input, everyone. I think what I'm going to do first is see if I can make auto-generated zones interesting. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of being able to just conjure up a zone/dungeon with whatever theme I want, that's dynamically sized to be fun (not easy, not impossible) for my character, that'll be different every time (OR repeats of my favorites), and that has a clear goal required to "win" it. Each zone would be like a custom micro-Nethack, but not impossibly difficult for new or casual players.

If I manage to come up with something I'm happy with, I'll then figure out how to tie to that the item drops, character progression, and general incentive to keep playing.

I'll be back with Ideas Rev 2.

[SnowTroll]

Part of the fun of muds is character growth and development. When I start the game, I'm weak. It takes me 45 seconds to kill a snail, I don't have any special abilities to help me at the task, and I nearly die in the process. When I've been playing for six months, I'm strong. It takes me 1 second to kill that same snail in one hit, and 10 seconds to kill a super snail, because I have special abilities, cool gear, higher stats, and a lot more know-how as a player due to my experimentation with special abilities and the strategies I've developed. Turning combat into a one-liner takes that entire aspect out of the game. Instead of playing a traditional mud where I control my character's every move each round of combat, it's like I'm playing one of those sports simulator games where I give my team plays to execute and general preferences for passing or running the ball, then let some automated simulation engine play the game for me and hope the team does what I told them to do.

Another part of the fun of muds is exploration. When I start the game, there are a few zones I can go to, to fight certain enemies for certain rewards. As I play for awhile and develop a stronger character and explore a bit, I eventually reach a point where I have a huge variety of areas at my fingertips that offer a large variance of risks and rewards. The entire exploration aspect of the game goes away if I can just enter an arena, enter a command, and a mob scaled to my level fights me.

Another fun part of muds is growth as a player. As I play for awhile, I learn more about the mud. I learn the areas, the best places and strategies to advance, I learn the equipment avialable, I learn charater builds and gear sets that will work, and so on. If I go to randomly generated dungeons to get random loot, the usefulness of my knowledge as a player goes out the window. What's my knowledge and explerience as a player matter if I'm doing pretty much the same thing at level 5000 as I did at level 2, and everyone else is doing the same thing no matter how long they've been playing?

Another great aspect of muds is having a unique character that I can customize or somehow have unique abilities not every other character is going to have. If we all just have a set of stats that we can all grind to a maximum using the same abilities everyone else eventually gets, you're not going to want to group with me to go kill stuff. You'll be stronger faster if you just use the same abilities I have and fight in that arena that scales to you. You don't need me to forge you a sword or enchant your armor or heal you or spell you up or do crowd control on some mobs in an area for you if you have or are going to be able to access most of the same abilities already and can fight an area that automatically conforms to your current level. The whole unique character, team aspect of muds goes away.

This whole concept seems more akin to a fairly rudimentary, single-player online game than what we've come to think of as muds. Kind of like Legend of the Green Dragon or something. Fight in a generic "forest" against monsters scaled to your level, buy equipment that adds +X to your attack or defense.