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Old 06-12-2007, 07:05 PM   #1
ladygrace_of_elysium
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everyone wants to watch me go into labour & have my baby in the MUD its so exciting. Do many other muds have a feature for having children grandchildren etc?
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Old 06-12-2007, 09:19 PM   #2
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Some have coded things, some have IMM-supported things, and some leave it up to the players to RP out. Personally, I would never EVER play a game where pregnancy, childbirth, and newborns were hard-coded. If I wanted to be surrounded by children, I'd have some of my own.

Also the roleplay of motherhood is SO ridiculous in most games I"ve played, where a mother will give birth, RP recuperating for a RL day while showing everyone her newborn, then toss the newborn in a coded apartment and going hunting or whatever else. In the meantime, everyone has to be subjected to the new mommy carrying her newborn into a crowded, smoke-filled bar occupied by filthy drunken smelly people, having fist-fights in the middle of the room, and mommy dearest pretends everything is just ducky with her bouncing baby object.

Kind of makes me wonder what kind of "roleplay" people are thinking about, while their newborn babies are starving to death in their apartments while mom's outside killing banshees. Motherhood is a 24/7 job, until the kid is old enough to go to school. I've rarely seen anyone play a mom realistically, where they were in "mommy mode" for at least the first game-year of their kid's life.

Nor would I want to, heh. Because realistically, that kid's going to be teething, and puking, and crapping green liquid all over the place, and if the game doesn't have the technology for disposable diapers, that mom's gonna be going through a whole lot of money buying cloth ones. And - is she going to be walking around with a pack full of disgusting filthy diapers all day, or is she going to just assume the bartender doesn't mind his wastebins filled with them?

And we won't even get into projectile vomit, which is the bane of all mothers with newborn babies.

Personally, I suggest a very heavy-handed "just say no" policy for game admins who are even considering implementing coded motherhood.
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Old 06-13-2007, 12:48 AM   #3
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It's possible to "craft" your kin - but not just babies, although babies are an option. We also let you make grandparents and other NPCs (as well as minions of various kinds).

We don't have a hardcoded childbirth system, though. It's just a matter of RP.
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Old 06-13-2007, 04:53 AM   #4
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Self-acclaimed "hardcore roleplayers" often object to hard-coded systems, with combat being one of their prime targets.  Unlike combat, however, pregnancy isn't something that people can force on you (well I suppose they could, but I doubt any serious mud developers would want to walk such a contraversial path).  Assuming the system is consent-based, it's not going to impact you unless you want it to.

In the original God Wars mud I had a fully hard-coded system, which included a sex minigame (complete with an exp reward for achieving a simultaneous orgasm), pregnancy and childbirth (children had their own player file with the mother's password and the average stats of the two parents, resulting in many female characters actively looking for powerful 'studs') and marriage (a way to ensure your other half wasn't unfaithful).  I've discussed this system before (such as ), and there are around a hundred GodWars muds using it, so I won't bother going into more detail.

While the system certainly resulted in many entertaining situations, it also changed the entire social dynamic of the mud, which caused a major impact on the "feel" of the game.  Explicit sex, like gratuitous violence, can easily overwhelm the mud and become the central focus of the game if not handled with care.  As a result, I made the conscious decision not to have sex, pregnancy or childbirth in God Wars II.
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Old 06-13-2007, 08:47 AM   #5
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eek I wish Id never said anything now ......erm Ill go hide in a corner
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Old 06-13-2007, 08:50 AM   #6
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well in our mud we dont have sex we get married then set coding for children or no children. Then pregancy results if you spend sufficient time together. That makes it without sexual language so it keeps any problems at bay
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Old 06-13-2007, 09:15 AM   #7
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So what happens if one of the two married partners is infertile? Does the game provide for that possibility? And what if the wife has been having an affair with a fertile male for the past several years? Does the code provide for that possibility too?

Also, why would everyone in your game want to watch your character go through labor and give birth? That seems to me a rather bizarre experience for people who aren't extremely close to her, to want to witness. I mean, it isn't like you get people going to the local hospital in real life just so they can sit in the birthing room of random pregnant women to watch them have their babies. Even if it was a home birth, would you open your door to let the neighbors come in to watch? Do you set out punch and cookies for this or something?

I can understand wanting the immediate family (spouse and possibly mother, with the remote possibility of interested siblings-to-be) coming to witness it. But I mean - this is REALLY messy stuff we're talking about here. You realize that in some situations, the woman loses control of her bowels during the "pushing" phase, right? And the placenta is particularly unattractive, and labor can take anywhere between 5 minutes and 40 HOURS...and if your game doesn't have modern technology and sterile hospital conditions, the possibility of still-birth and the mother's death are pretty high.

Does your game have formula, or wet-nurses, or is the new mother expected to keep her kid at the breast for the first year? Does that hinder or help roleplay; is your character expected to keep her lactating breast hidden from the public, or is exposure acceptable? Does your character have plenty of clothing changes, so that the milk-drenched clothing doesn't sour between feedings (since I'm assuming your game doesn't provide nipple-pads to protect the garments from leakage)?

That's what I mean by realistic motherhood in games. If ANY of this stuff is taken into consideration, I'd think your game is a step up from most. If none of it is taken into consideration, then it sounds to me like this whole baby thing is a 10-year-old girl's fantasy ideal of being a mommy, complete with her own plastic dolly she names Princess who wets herself with plain water whenever mommy shakes her or turns her upside down.
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Old 06-13-2007, 09:27 AM   #8
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omg this forum is horrible..... goodbye
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Old 06-13-2007, 10:21 AM   #9
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Jazuela, you're looking at this from a roleplaying perspective, but there are plenty of game design reasons why a mud might want to support childbirth, and no reason why you shouldn't leave out elements that are irrelevant to that design.

For example you might want to turn the birth into a bloody and messy minigame, where a botched effort by the player could result in a stillbirth or even the death of the mother, and where a skilled midwife would be in great demand. This is certainly a viable approach that could benefit from attention to detail, and could result in some interesting reactions from the players.

On the other hand, perhaps the birth part is just a means to an end, and the real purpose for the system is to represent the merging of royal bloodlines or magical races - or maybe the child is your insurance in a permadeath environment (you get to play the child when you die, inheriting your former character's titles, assets and alliances). In this sort of situation you may decide that there's no benefit in going into detail about the birth, and abstract it away (in GodWars it was simply "You give birth to a little boy!").

As with any game design concept, there are very few right or wrong answers. It really depends on the goals of your mud, and your reasons for creating the feature.
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Old 06-13-2007, 10:56 AM   #10
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I have to say I'm a little troubled by the tone Jazuela's taking in her tirade against in-game childbirth. What's so wrong with a character wanting what amounts to a doll to play with? Isn't that what many characters are? Dolls you dress up and put into play? Isn't that just another aspect of pretending - the very foundation of RP itself?

Providing a process for creating life should be considered just as valid on a MUD as providing a process for *taking* life. Like combat, coded pregnancy might not be everyone's cup of tea, but that doesn't make it disgusting or vile.
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Old 06-13-2007, 11:40 AM   #11
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Old 06-13-2007, 04:21 PM   #12
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Old 06-13-2007, 04:57 PM   #13
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Gotta love people jumping down my throat for having an opinion, then coming up with their own opinion they expect to be respected.

First, don't feel sorry for my child. My choice not to have one is fully intentional.

Second, I didn't say pregnancies have to all be gorey and unpleasant, though I've witnessed a few (and was coach for one) and I can't think of ANYTHING pleasant about watching a placenta come out. The only pleasantry I can think of, is on the mother's part, for not having that last bit of pressure on her back and bladder.

Second, I never said it had to be hyper-realistic, and in fact some of you even quoted part of my point: that if ANY of what I had written was considered when implementing hard-coded pregnancy, I would think that game is a step up from most.

If you're going to hard-code pregnancy, then it just makes sense that there is also a hard-coded "unpleasant" side-effect of pregnancy. Just like in hard-coded combat - there is a victor, and there is a loser. That's the whole point of hard-coding it. In crafting skills there is success, there is failure, and there is severe failure (such as busting a rock, or ruining a hide, or shattering a blade, or even getting poisoned by taking a hide out of the tanning vat too soon).

I was asking - are there hard-coded effects to hard-coded pregnancy, that would provide for the POSSIBILITY of some sort of failure? If so, then awesome. If not, then it seems pointless and people should just go to the nearest store and order a ready-made baby, because that's all it amounts to other than a couple of snazzy echoes.
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Old 06-15-2007, 11:22 AM   #14
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Does anybody remember 'Age of Reptiles'?, in that game there was a hard-coded 'pregnancy', female dinosaurs were able to lay eggs and there was a chance for the egg to be fertile. The actual process was controlled by very few commands (I never got to try it so I report from the help files, because it was a skill you had to obtain through becoming an alpha male). As a skill, the more you had used it the better you were at it and the higher the chance for the egg to be fertile.

The point of this is that the whole process was hard-coded yet it was controlled by very few commands, letting players focus their attention in the actual process, building the nest, etc through role-play and having the actual event occur through the (you could say 'not necessarily realistic' code).

Anyway, I do believe that different levels of detail are possible in different aspects and different MUDs, I actually believe that exactly this is what can set apart two MUDs originating from the same code-base. At the end, anybody playing MUDs is not looking for a real-life experience, come-on, you are playing a text game, so, it just makes sense that there are going to be aspects of the game that will be more or less 'realistic' without that implying anything on the game as a whole.
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Old 06-15-2007, 11:32 AM   #15
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Age of Reptiles is missed!
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Old 08-01-2007, 03:22 PM   #16
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Re: pregancy & parenthood ic


Did you not jump down her throat for being excited about having a baby in Elysium? I'd say so. Did you not come up with your own opinion as to why you thought it wasn't a great thing to have a baby in a game? I believe you did. Did you also just raise your hand and yell, "I'm a blazing hypocrite!"? Yes, you did that as well I do believe...
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Old 08-01-2007, 08:07 PM   #17
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Re: pregancy & parenthood ic

I missed this thread the first go-round, so I am glad someone bumped it.

I have to say that Jazuela's above tirade rings extremely true to me. Whenever I have seen people RP pregnancy and childbirth, it always seemed to be more about "look at ME ME ME" than trying to create an interesting RP scenario. I am not saying it can't be done well (hard-coded or not), I am just saying that having observed it as both player and developer in 15-20 different games, I've never seen it done in a way that was interesting or that involved anything more than the "mommy" trying to hog the spotlight.

In general, I think pregnancy is a bad feature in games. Note that I said in general. I imagine there are certain types of games where it could actually be very well done and very awesome (especially games where it is designed from the beginning as a core feature, like The Sims).

I am not sure the actual childbirth process itself would hold any game value whatsoever. I wonder how many of the people getting offended by Jazuela's posts actually have children themselves, or have witnessed childbirth. I have two kids and I was right there for both childbirths. While miraculous and awesome, I can't see the process having any game value.
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Old 08-02-2007, 12:21 PM   #18
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Re: pregancy & parenthood ic

Please don't take this a personal attack on anyone, but my general feeling is that hardcore roleplayers often take roleplay far to serious and tend to forget the 'play' part of it. Don't forget that roleplay, like most other aspects of a game is there to entertain the players. Just as some people object to slaughtering hoards of innocent creatures, some object to anything that has even the remotest connection with sex. Yet there are other players that immensely enjoy one or the other - or both. To me one is as good as the other, so why not cater for all, as long as it can be done within the limits of good taste? And why would you demand realism of one aspect, when so much else in fantasy games are so totally unrealistic?

In in our game we have a mix of hardcoded, imm run and roleplayed 'family affairs', and it is actually one of the most popular of our many features - with all the flaws most of the players love it.

We don't have hardcoded 'mudsex' - (although I believe 'emoted' cybersex is fairly popular among some players) - but we do have a 'Romance' code, that allows players to date, get engaged, get married, break up and get a divorce, which all is displayed in their player info. It also allows them to have children, but you don't have to be married for it, and it is the female's choice whether she wants to. SHE seduces the male, and he consents - or not - to father the baby. After a rather long and partly tedious pregnancy - (it affects your movepoints negatively) - the woman goes into labour, and finally a coded stork delivers the baby (boy or girl is random).

After this certainly some females dump there newborns in a bag or a house and go hunting as if nothing happened. But for the onces that like to carry it out in roleplay, we provide the imm-run option to 'buy' a personalized desc and script for the brat, together with a place in our Daycare. After a while they can switch the baby object to a toddler mob, that follows you around when wanted. And after that, the ones that want to carry the roleplay out to its fullest potential get some other player to create an alt with the name of their brat, and then roleplay it into maturity, which often takes several months, since roleplaying kids, and in particular troublesome teenagers, can be pretty fun. For a new player, this can provide a rare chance to get accepted by one of the 'prominent' families, which is an extra bonus.

I 'm the first to admit that our brand of roleplay usually isn't of the highest quality, and probably would make hardcore roleplayers look down their long noses at us in contempt, since RP isn't enforced in 4D. But over the years some of the most memorable RP events have centred around the coded babies and families; dynasties have been formed, jealousy outbreaks have shaken the community, babies have been kidnapped from the daycare with demands for ransom, teenagers have run away from home and formed unwanted relationships with partners that their 'parents' disapproved of immensely. And when one player happened to get twins due to a code bug, it led to a long intrigue, where her estranged former husband kidnapped one of the twins to raise it within a rivalring clan. The mother's elaborate plans to get the girl back, which involved a proposed 'switch' to give the father custom of the boy instead, a baby doll look-alike provided by the imms, and a daring escape with both the babies, held the entire mud engaged and entertained for weeks.

As long as something is fun, and the players like it, who are we to scoff?
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Old 08-02-2007, 01:42 PM   #19
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Re: pregancy & parenthood ic

We have pregnancy and childbirth in Throes of Creation. It is the CoffeeMUD codebase method of "remort", and even allows a mixture of player-playable races (creating a new race on the fly if one does not exist. Example: half-drow). There are even druidic chants to speed birth along, and to speed aging.

Haven't had any major problems with it so far, though have had to fix a few smaller issues. Players seem to not mind, and it gives me a system to work on that differs from ones I am used to. I am sure we may have to modify aspects of it, and deal with issues as they arise, but it does seem to add to the player experience. We haven't had any complaints on it so far.
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