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59: Re: Just a bit of musing

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From: "Travis Casey" <casey@NU.cs.fsu.edu>
Newsgroups: nu.kanga.list.mud-dev
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 08:22:39 -0500
Organization: Kanga.Nu

> I mean RPG in the style of the commercially available paper & pencil
variety
> games.  I have yet to encounter one that did not have a combat system.
> This type of display would be suitable for AD&D, Rolemaster, Warhammer,
> Rifts, Battletech, StarTrek, Vampyre, Werewolf, T&T, Gurps, Wraith, 
> The Morrow Project, Legacy, Champions, High Fantasy, CyberPunk,
> and C&S to name a just a few. =)

Well, it's not commercial, but SLUG doesn't have a combat system.  It
could be argued that the first edition of Vampire didn't have a combat
system either... just a GM nightmare pretending to be one.  :-)

There are paper RPGs with combat systems for which  "meter-style" 
readouts wouldn't be suitable... CORPS, for example.

ions, High Fantasy, CyberPunk, and C&S to name a just a few. =) Actually the player display and metered controls could be used in a non combat environment. I don't see anything in the display that precludes it. The metered controls are not hardwired. They could represent anything the mud wished to provide and in any order (eg. hit pts, gold, mana, wizard pts, RP points, fame points, hunger, logon time, storage used, etc.) The character line drawing kind of assumes the player has a body that they can adorn with various items, descriptive text, etc. Yes the program sent to the client handles all the display and is configurable by the mud "contextually" and fetchs needed are to load the client and its controls. Typically this is only done once. > > Sounds do-able, but you're gonna have trouble with security firewalls! > > With a custom MUD protocol, the players only have to convice the sysadmin > to allow that port through. Lots of folks are disallowing Java through > firewalls. Also, aren't some systems now disallowing a script in the > browser from making any other network connections? Some allow back to > the same address the page came from, however. If you're aiming for home > PC's running Internet Explorer, then it probably doesn't matter, unless > the individual user is cautious and doesn't allow ActiveX (is that the > right name?) programs to run locally. I know I wouldn't, unless I could > physically write-protect my hard-drive! (But then, I'm known to be > paranoid about such things!) No I won't. Some users will. That is their loss I guess. I should point out that there are millions of "browser only" users out there. Almost every other page you hit these days seems to contain some flavor of Java, ActiveX or what not. If people weren't accepting this, I doubt anyone would be writing it. I am also working on a remote builder/program editor in a similar vein. I do have some security concerns on my end. Nothing that can't be overcome though :-)