Messages

1

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Races

« on: March 12, 2012, 11:26:35 am »

  Anyone have any ideas?

Some more thoughts on this.

I do not believe that you need to have the same number of races from every dimension.  Indeed, I think it would be just fine to abandon the Gringo/Indian distinction and have a single race "Human" that can come from any of your four dimensions and is the only race that can be native to the Wild West.

If you want more "races" for the West, I suppose that you can use professional or social backgrounds where they don't conflict with classes - Cowboy, Miner, Englishman, Yankee, Mohawk, Cherokee, whatever.  What mechanical differences you could introduce to distinguish these, on the other hand, is a very difficult question.

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Suggestions & Ideas / Re: A newbs life in school, quest academy and after.

« on: March 12, 2012, 11:07:31 am »

In the Medieval part of the 4D school, you would possibly have come across the greetings needed in all 4 dimensions.

That's good.  However, I think this quest is problematic.

If I forgot something that was made clear in 4D school, that's one thing.  It is fair to expect players to know things that were made clear in MUD school (like that you say "May the force be with you" in the future)

On the other hand, if this is really just something that I might possibly have picked up in 4D school, I don't think that it is a good idea for the first quest in quest academy to hang on it, at least, not without a clue to lead me back to 4D school to pick up this information.

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Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Game Design

« on: March 12, 2012, 10:39:29 am »

Another suggestion: Don't let areas trap the player so that they can't recall out (or teleport back to their clan).  If someone is enjoying the puzzle, they can stay to try to solve it.  If someone isn't, let them go and enjoy something else in your MUD that might appeal to them more.  Importantly, modern MMORPGs don't do this sort of thing and there is a good reason for that - in order to keep players, they want to constantly tempt them with things they might enjoy rather than tempting them to quit and look for something to enjoy in another MMORPG.

Your splendid MUD has the advantage of offering a variety of things to enjoy.  If you like puzzles, there are puzzles.  If you like hack and slash, there is hack and slash.  If you like role-play, there are people doing role-play.  But the zones you can't leave take that variety off the table - you have to solve a puzzle, and a specific puzzle, before you can do anything else.  That's alright if you want to limit the MUD to a specific kind of player, and there is nothing wrong with that.  On the other hand, if you are happy for a wider variety of people to enjoy your mud, it would be good to give them the option of quitting on a puzzle in order to go do something else.

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Suggestions & Ideas / Re: A newbs life in school, quest academy and after.

« on: March 10, 2012, 11:53:07 am »

I mentioned this in another thread, so I hope I'm not beating a dead horse, but my number one recommendation for keeping newbies rather than having them flee in confusing is doing what all the successful MMORPGs I can think of are doing and allow the player to see exactly what a piece of equipment does just by looking at it.

Everyone likes powering up, but forcing people to hunt for changes in their Score sheet seems like a needless complication.  This is especially so given the wonderful variety of zones that there are to explore in 4D.

[On a much more minor note, I agree that the final helper voucher in Quest Academy is too hard to find.  The "smell" command is almost never used.  In fact, in most rooms where the room description specifically mentions odor, the "smell" command reports nothing unusual.  Also, I don't understand how it is possible to solve the first quest in the quest academy without saying "solution".  Is there some clue I am missing, for instance, regarding the fact that you should say "hail" in the prehistoric world?]

5

Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Races

« on: March 09, 2012, 05:54:28 pm »

Speaking for myself, I find races fun when playing as a member of one race feels different (for reasons other than role-playing) from playing as a member of another race.

Modifying numbers that are relevant to combat (especially to every combat) can only take you so far before combat balance goes right out the window.  This makes it hard to build races that feel distinct in play without building uber-races that are simply much better than the alternatives.

One way around this might be to give each race the opportunity to learn certain skills or spells regardless or what their class is.  As long as you can put together an interesting set of these skills and spells, you can produce a race that will feel mechanically different in play.

Maybe this is already the case to some degree?  The webpage says, for instance, that Dwarves can see in the dark and that Martians have some sort of ESP, but it isn't really spelled out.

For example, for the 8 races that are presently in use, the package might be something like the following.  The benefits of a race shouldn't become redundant if combined with any particular class, so there should ideally be a Rogue skill, a Caster skill and a Warrior skill in every race package.  I haven't made sure that this is so below - in fact, there are all kinds of things wrong with this list, but it gives the basic idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about:

Centaur
Charge
Kick
Sanctuary
Trample

Dwarf
Infravision
Pick Lock
Tinker

Elf
Bow
Identify
Sneak

Faun
Charm
Drunk
Sneak

Gringo
Firearm
Mount
Mounted Combat
Riding

Indian
Antidote 1
Forage
Tracking

Martian
Foresee
Fortify Mind
Meditate

Spacewolf
Detect Invisibility
Detect Poison
Trap Aware
Tracking

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Suggestions & Ideas / Re: Game Design

« on: March 09, 2012, 05:02:19 pm »

I'm a real life noob to 4D.  I've raised 1 character to level 47.

I'm not going to be around forever because that's just not how I play games.  It says good things about your fine MUD that it has held my attention this long and that I'm still very interested in it.

I have no idea if my feelings represent noobs to 4D in general, especially the ones who will eventually commit to the long haul.  Still, here they are.

I'm an explorer, always looking for something different.  A huge advantage of 4D is that I'm not stuck in an endless rehash of D&D.  Your focus on history, and on a variety of historical periods (including the wild future) gave me a reason to explore your world(s) when the other worlds out there were boring me to death.  Your MUD is unique and a MUD has to be unique to get and hold my attention.

What keeps me interested is new areas to explore and interesting skills and spells to play with.  New combat skills and spells are usually significantly less interesting than utility skills and spells, just because new combat skills and spells tend to do pretty much what the old combat skills and spells did.

Your wide variety of different areas to explore is splendid! 

I have two concrete suggestions for making your MUD more attractive for folk like me.

1.  Abolish the experience penalty for death.  I don't know any popular MMORPGs that still have an xp penalty for death.  When your character advances backwards, it is frustrating and is an inducement to give up.  Also, it discourages exploration, because the more you explore unfamiliar territory, the more you lose xp, and the less fit you are to go exploring because your leveling slows down.  Kicking people back to recall when they die is penalty enough, and is the sort of thing that modern MMORPGs do.  Instead of discouraging people from checking out your wonderful zones, let them enjoy entering and getting royally squished by some horrific mob, without the frustration of losing xp.  Being eaten by a dinosaur should be fun!

2.  Consider getting rid of the need to identify equipment to work out what it does.  Instead, the stats of the equipment could be obvious just by examining it.  Again, this is what the popular MMORPGs that I know of do.  For someone like me who is not a crunch-head, it is confusing enough to weigh the bonuses and penalties of different equipment already without having to search through your SCORE sheet to try to work out what the modifiers are.

Anyway, thanks for building and running this terrific MUD.  It really is excellent!