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18002: Re: [MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.
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From: Neil Brown <neil_1_brown@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: nu.kanga.list.mud-dev
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 06:20:33 -0700 (PDT)
References: [1]
Organization: Kanga.Nu
--- Travis Casey <efindel@earthlink.net> wrote:
> I think you've got a hidden assumption in here -- that the game in
> question is using a D&D-style "damage capacity increases with
> experience" system. For a game which uses fixed damage capacity,
> but varies damage according to how well an opponent hits, you can
> have both things -- damage colors that are constant, but are still
> meaningful across characters (as long as you have some idea of what
> the character's relative combat abilities are).
Ahh, correct you are. Yes, I was assuming exactly that style, with
damage increasing over time based on some skills or raw experience.
With a more constant damage over the range of the game, the colors
become more meaningful as they can be consistently interpreted by a
player at any stage of his character's virtual career.
> Something else that could be done is visual overlays on
> characters... Niven and Barnes' Dream Park mentions something along
> those lines -- when you stop to check your condition, moderately
> injured body parts are limned in yellow, severely injured in red,
> and ones that have become useless in black. There's also mention a
> few times of a flickering effect being used to indicate borderline
> conditions -- e.g., red and black flickering together for a body
> part that's about to become useless, but can still be saved.
This logically leads to targeted attacks ( or at least a bunch of
whining by players that there SHOULD be targeted attacks so they can
concentrate on disabling that flashing yellow arm with the sword in it
). I went over our thought processes regarding this in another post -
Suffice it to say that while I think it adds a lot of extra dimension
to combat, we're not considering it for our current project for
technical reasons.
-o-
Neil
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