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09-10-2006, 02:17 PM

I went quite out of my way to give the existent races at Lands of Aethar more uniqueness. The biggest change of those, was the ability for centaurs to actually be mountable, which took a fair amount of coding since stock SMAUG utterly abhors the idea. In the end, like Brody said, almost noone ended up using any of the "non-AD&D" races anyway. I guess it's particularly bad on a text-based game. In a graphics game, the players would go "hey I've never heard of any of these races before, but hey, that ones picture looks like it would make a good warrior". The last thing a bewildered MUD newbie wants is to have to permanently choose from a big list of totally alien races......

My advice is, if you go this route, strip the MUD down to 3 or 4 races instead of the usual dozen. In the race selection screen, instead of just a dumb list, list each race on a separate line accompanied by a blurb about the race. Maybe even throw in a race which is "obviously human" or whatever. Think "Starcraft", look how successful it was with the hitherto-unknown Zerg and Protoss. Blizzard would've never pulled that off if they'd tried to make 20 different playable races, and if it weren't for the Terrans, most SC newbs would've never gotten a foothold.

09-10-2006, 02:17 PM	#3
erdos Posts: n/a	I went quite out of my way to give the existent races at Lands of Aethar more uniqueness. The biggest change of those, was the ability for centaurs to actually be mountable, which took a fair amount of coding since stock SMAUG utterly abhors the idea. In the end, like Brody said, almost noone ended up using any of the "non-AD&D" races anyway. I guess it's particularly bad on a text-based game. In a graphics game, the players would go "hey I've never heard of any of these races before, but hey, that ones picture looks like it would make a good warrior". The last thing a bewildered MUD newbie wants is to have to permanently choose from a big list of totally alien races...... My advice is, if you go this route, strip the MUD down to 3 or 4 races instead of the usual dozen. In the race selection screen, instead of just a dumb list, list each race on a separate line accompanied by a blurb about the race. Maybe even throw in a race which is "obviously human" or whatever. Think "Starcraft", look how successful it was with the hitherto-unknown Zerg and Protoss. Blizzard would've never pulled that off if they'd tried to make 20 different playable races, and if it weren't for the Terrans, most SC newbs would've never gotten a foothold.