What I'm interested in knowing is the reason that many MUDs go through the trouble of creating an RP MUD, working out many of the details, writing nice room descriptions, and setting up an otherwise realistic atmosphere only to leave levels and experience in place? If the point is to create a realistic feel to a game, why leave obvious elements of the game mechanics in place?

Almost nothing ruins the feel of an RP MUD like seeing "level 2" or "2486 exp" or "108 hp". Those things are fine on a hack-and-slash, but those MUDs aren't about role-playing. They have more in common with Super Mario Brothers than role-playing. But an RP MUD isn't supposed to be about those things, it's supposed to be about creating a character personality and living it within the fictional world of the MUD. So why not make that world to the same standards as expected from those that play it: realistic.

I've tried out over 800 MUDs and have found only a handful (I believe I can easily count them on two hands, if not one) of MUDs that don't destroy the atmosphere they want to create by leaving such elements in. Needless to say, those are the MUDs I play. The others, well, I wouldn't recommend them to people I don't like much less my friends.

Just interested in seeing some perspectives on this.

Take care,

Jason

It's important to remember that, for the majority of players, it's still a game. As a result, there's a desire to see progress, a score of some kind to quantify their devotion to the game.

Sadly, it's not always enough to just offer quality roleplaying to keep people coming back - and coming back in larger crowds. So, yes, it can be seen as catering to a lowest-common denominator - but, it works if done right.

Quite a few RP games have this but don't hurl it in your face all the time - you have to look it up using special commands. That helps prevent the break in immersion and realism.

Oh.. you want to play a MUSH ? Go ahead. After all that's where you'll find non-combat oriented RP possibilities.
Most muds are games, based on tabletop RPGs. This means they have a means of advancement (exp/levels), and a means to obtain this advancement (RP/killing of monsters). There's nothing uncommon in playing a tabletop RPG, and having precise knowledge of your characters' stats. In fact, in D&D (and AD&D, Call of Cthulhu - which are the games I've played myself), stats are said out loud often during a session.
Even in a live RP situation, stats are obvious to the player.

About realism: If, in a battle oriented game (be it with RP in focus or not) you can't see if your opponent is substantially larger than you, you have no way of
a. acting out RP (since you can't tell by the name if 'A large bull, grazing by the barn' is easy or hard to subdue).
b. brag to your friends about the fantastic deed (emote just killed a huge slabbergast.)
c. making strategic decisions.

Many 'strong RP' muds outthere go about it another way, by hiding the numbers from the players. Instead they give the user some feedback in text form ("You ARE mad!" comes to mind).
This works in the beginning, but at a point, people will learn just how much damage they're doing (ie. barely hit = 4-7 dam, extremely hard hit = 20-24). And then it's back to the drawing board...
The thing is, that since MUD is a battleoriented environment, you can't take away all the battlerelated information. Some has to stay. And obscuring the numbers only works for a while.

I'm not sure what MUDs you've had experience with, Welcor, but the systems you described are disgustingly primitive.

Indeed. I meant it as examples. I've seen examples of muds using several different schemes to hide the numbers from the players. The examples I chose were meant to illustrate my point, rather than be ideas for future development.

Some MUDs have a full database of substitutions of a particular number/situation. As far as I can tell, this is for two reasons: to avoid mud clients which can quickly figure out the damage done be able to trigger on the line first time it's used and of course for diversity.

There's not much difference (code-wise) in stating 'You are not hurt, and as far as you can tell you have no ailments', 'hp:Fine, no affections' or even 'hp:120/120, no spells'.
It depends what kind of players you wish to attract. Only a few muds outthere seem to wish to attract prof1515. Perhaps the others are better at dealing with the information they get (ie. ignore what they don't care about/differentiate between character and player knowledge, what have you.).

If one is really annoyed by numbers, one should go to a mud (or mush) that doesn't use them - which it seems that prof1515 has done. I still suggest playing a mush or two, just to try it out. After all, they don't have the game mechanics in the open in the same way.

I've been playing DM a long time, and none of the players have ever known how many hp they have. (With the possible exception of this one guy who used to code there.) Some of us can take a stab at guessing what numerical value our stats are, because we know that 300 is the highest stat value a mortal can have, but most people are too new to know that, and even those of us who know that don't care about the actual numbers.

When you come up against something you wanna kill, you really have no way of knowing how hard it is, unless you've killed similar things before, or unless it's something everybody KNOWS is hard like Guido (and the uber-hard things generally have something in their descs that would influence you not to try fighting them unless you're REALLY good). When advising a fighter about a particular opponent, the typical tactic is to say well if your skills are worse than blahblah, don't try it, or if you can't kill a such and such, don't try it. HP never comes into it at all really. And damage messages don't equate to a certain amount of hp damage, but to a certain % of the critter's hp. Maybe you just hit that landshark for the same amount you hit a mouse for earlier, but you killed the mouse whereas the landshark only gets damaged barely.

The only problem with DM and numbers is that most players know the number of improves you need to get to the next skill level. (Skill levels are expressed in words too, but people make "imp counters" and so on so it's not really as numberless as it might be.)

I think that the most important thing to remember is that there are different types of players.  I agree with a Brody in that this is a game - that has at it's roots Tabletop RPG's.  That might not mean anything to people, but in my experience (here comes the match to the fuse) some of the best RPers are experienced "Pen and Paper" or "Tabletop" RPGers.  That's because they are used to knowing out-of-game information about their character, but are still able to Role-play the character very well.

Although I tend to agree that leaving in this information will attrack players that are more inclined for H&S, I don't think it always has to be like that.  I feel an RP atmosphere is a total experience.  It's about all the elements in the game.  If you go the distance to build a great RP atmosphere in all aspects, and leave in the stats for your game - in whatever way you want, real numbers or phrases as Welcor suggested - I think you will attrack players that are able to handle the information.

I hate to say it Jason, but I think you might have formed a biased opinion about certain characteristics of MUDs and then went out and accused all MUDs who have those characteristics of being "non-RP"!  800 MUDs is a lot.  Even for a player and non-admin type MUDer.  I have been playing MUDs for 11 going on 12 years now, and I haven't even tried half that many.  And, as an admin of my own MUD, I try and go out to see what other places are like, to see what the competition is like.
There are many MUDs guilty of what you accuse, but not all.  I would suggest not instantly leaving MUDs who have numbers or phrases, and instead maybe try them a little more.  You might find some good RP MUDs even though they don't have all your qualifications.

Exactly, Welcor. It's human nature, and ultimately no matter how cute you get at trying to hide the numbers, players will find them. They're like water, finding its level.

As Richard Bartle writes in his great new book, Designing Virtual Worlds - get it from Amazon.com if you haven't already! - he basically says that it makes little sense to try to hide such things from players.

And players really do love numbers and statistics, as a whole.

We leave this in intentionally for lack of a better way to provide effective feedback (DM's head admin has a chart of improves -> skill level description posted on his website). The method of training that a player uses under a given set of specific circumstances affects a players' rate of learning dramatically. Without providing some sort of objective way to evaluate ones progress, DM would be far too frustrating. In other words, this is, as far as we know, the most effective user interface for this particular aspect of the game.

With respect to combat and "hp", however, raw numerical data is actually quite inferior at conveying complete information in a complex system. How do you quickly evaluate what kind of damage a 789hp hit to the head of a creature when the creature's head has 9875hp, the attack does "splash damage" to the tune of 32-54% primary damage to the 3 nearest limbs, and the overall health of the creature is tied to the head's health such that it is also reduced based on a logarithmic function of the damage done to the head (similar functions associated with each limb)? It's much easier to have a smart parsing engine turn that into a reasonably terse English description than to try to figure out what exactly you just did by looking at a list of numbers. Also, if we decide to tweak the granularity of health, we can arbitrarily scale the number of units of health up and players wouldn't even notice. The same applies to stat values (Onyxflame is mistaken in that 300 is most definitely not the maximum value for a given stat for mortals, though it once was).

Our philosophy is simply to try to design the most effective user interface possible without sacrificing critical feedback. We have found that raw numerical feedback is only useful if the associated game systems are so simplistic that a player can interpret their meaning in a useful way in realtime. Pen and Paper RPGs (which I also enjoy, btw) are obviously bound by this limitation as players do all the calculations themselves. MUDs, on the other hand, need not be.

In short, what I meant by saying "the systems you described are disgustingly primitive" is that the numberless interface in your example is actually a hinderance, and an inferior UI to raw numerical data. If, however, the interface is superior to raw numerical data, players won't even care what kind of numbers are being thrown around in the backend, much less try to figure them out.

I'll use your wolf example to explain why numbers (or at least -some- reference to mechanics) are useful in a RPG:

The staff can't be there 24/7 to moderate every hit taken on every adventurer. So they add mechanics to do some of the work on their behalf.

So how about that fight with the wolf. You get one bite. "Realistically," if you were an elf.. oh wait. You can't be an elf realistically. Elves aren't real. So now we're back to "how do you know it's time to flee?"

Without mechanics, you don't. I'm not talking numbers, per se. But at least some reference to mechanics.. such as "You feel like crap" or "You are bleeding profusely and if you don't flee NOW you are gonna die."

We've got the screen scroll of the fight itself, then add into it any outside interference, such as other adventurers coming to your rescue, or the rest of the pack of wolves running into the frey.

And during all this, you're supposed to keep track of every message that appears on your screen in case you get that one message that reads, "Get the heck outta there!"

For the *player,* it's much easier to see a number in the middle of text scroll. Yes, it distracts from the RP. But in real life, we have a method of knowing when it's time to run. We HURT. We can feel our blood dripping down, we can taste the ripped cheek dangling on our lips. As players, we have no way of doing that in a text game. Except to read whatever it says on the screen.

I'd rather be interrupted by a quick number showing up, or a beep, or highlighted text in bright red, or the word *BLEEDING!* outlined with asterisks, than to have to wade through the regular screen scroll in the middle of a battle just to make sure I didn't miss something important.

Again, yes it does interrupt roleplay. But so does the fact that you're typing commands, reading text on a screen, dealing with your ISP lagging, or your cat jumping on your lap, or any of a thousand other things that interrupt roleplay. If I allowed all these outside interferences annoy me, I wouldn't be able to play RPGs at all.

The numbers, if they are done discretely and the player has the ability to squelch them if they so choose, is just another minor distraction that can be easily overcome, in my opinion.

Jazuela wrote:Exactly. And, the fact is, in a day and age when free-to-use client software easily edits out stuff *you* tell it to ignore, a player can eliminate everything from room descriptions they think are spammy to the very messages we've been talking about.

Jiles: Oh ####, here I am trying to sound all knowledgeable and stuff and then I find out they changed the stat limits while I wasn't looking. *snicker* But see guys, it just illustrates my point. We care so little about the numbers that we don't notice when they're changed.

Some other guy: Actually the number of imps is very important in some circumstances. Players have gone so far as to discover some of the formulas used in the code, therefore knowing their exact amount of imps enables them to use these formulas to their advantage when learning the skills.

General comment: Armageddon has some of the best RP I've ever seen, and yet it uses numbers for hp and some other stuff. Most people just tend to RP out what it feels like to lose 6hp vs. how it feels to lose 20. They at least do it right. (And I don't think you can ever raise your max hp during the game either since there's no actual levels.) In fact my main problem with Armageddon is that there's *too* much focus on RP...you can't really stand around talking ooc to some guy to get to know him as a person rather than a few lines of code.

Although some people, including me, can have as much fun in taking their charecter out to buy some clothes as in killing the Imperially Mandated Zombie Kobold, most people who end up playing roleplaying MUDs enjoy something in between, where their charecter does engage in RP and politics and such, but also goes out and kills kobolds for little reason beyond seeing You have reached the illustrious level 6!. This, again, goes back to MUDs roots in tabletop RPGs. Role-playing games generally fall somewhere in between storytelling, where the main charecters are like charecters in a play, and door bashing, where the kill and loot and kill and loot and kill a little more. This is the same for MUDs.

My first "home" MUD had levels, skill numbers, stat numbers, the whole nine yards (except, no exp).  Personally, this was fine.  The game had OOC channels that were available, took out tell (except for staff) and was very much an original world.  The beautiful thing was, after the first 5 levels or so (after you got out of the newbie phase) the game took on a whole new dynamic.  Those first levels were for new players to get oriented, and gain some abilities.  After crossing over, the hack'n'slash feature got old quickly (after level 7 it took an average of an hour to raise a skill up a point) and so RP became the next best thing.  There was a language barrier, and so emotes were used very often to deal with foreign players (although not the twelve line emotes passed off as proper use of the command).  The point of this being that RP is not dependant on existance or lack of game mechanics, numbers, OOC elements, or even storylines and dynamic elements (this was several years ago, and the biggest dynamic thing was that the sun went down and the sun came up which altered how well one could see, either too bright, too dark or just right).  RP is entirly dependant on the people in the game.  Personally, some of my more meaningful RP adventures centered around NPCs.  Quick example, I happened to walk into a town when another PC was taking out the citizens, and after chasing the char away, I started to act out a reconstruction scenario (fixing houses, mending wounds, funeral rites for the dead).  After about a quarter of an hour, a small group of players (mostly youngins) happend by the town and were very curious about what was going on.  I then spent another hour in the town before taking off with one of the other PCs (the one that spoke my IC language) and went to a nice tavern for some ale, where another scenario with a bard developed, but that's another story.  

When the Pbase is RPing with your NPCs, then you have an atmosphere condusive to RP.  On my longest running character, I only made it to level 11, but I spent many hours doing odd things in RP.  Hack'n'slash was a way to kill time or a good hook to get to know someone (vs standing around the well sipping muddy water).  If you can't start up an RP session because you see some numbers, then it is a personal problem, and not the fault of the code.

"RP is entirly dependant on the people in the game."--RikeDeJeanVonLe

Agreed, but here's the problem. I'll use your example below as well.

"Quick example, I happened to walk into a town when another PC was taking out the citizens, and after chasing the char away, I started to act out a reconstruction scenario (fixing houses, mending wounds, funeral rites for the dead). After about a quarter of an hour, a small group of players (mostly youngins) happend by the town and were very curious about what was going on. I then spent another hour in the town before taking off with one of the other PCs (the one that spoke my IC language) and went to a nice tavern for some ale, where another scenario with a bard developed"--RikeDeJeanVonLe

Now, the RP of such a situation is indeed possible, but there are limits within a hack-and-slash that would ruin the RP of such a situation. Somebody kills the King of the Kingdom and fifteen minutes later, he reappears again like magic, standing in the same room as his corpse, only to be killed again. It becomes ludicrous to think that you can look at such a situation and not have difficulty maintaining a sense of realism.

Player 1: "Yeah, I and a group of four of my men arrived at the town to find all the citizens dead. The murderer was still there."
Player 2: "Did you capture him?"
Player 1: "No, he got away."
(After all, he was level 80 to each of our level 11s)
Player 2: "How many people did he kill?"
Player 1: "Over twenty people in the streets."

Now of course, it's not hard to just change the circumstances of the events to suit your RP, but let's go back to my original question, shall we? I personally don't expect anyone on a hack-and-slash MUD to RP. That's why they acquired the nickname of "hack-and-slash".

But I wasn't talking about hack-and-slash MUDs when I asked my original question. I asked why RP MUDs go through the trouble of creating a realistic world only to leave hack-and-slash style elements in.

"When the Pbase is RPing with your NPCs, then you have an atmosphere condusive to RP...."--RikeDeJeanVonLe

Very true, but let's say you're interacting with the NPCs and someone comes through and kills them while you are because they want to get to level 84 and the NPCs you were interacting with are easy kills with lots of exp.

Player 1 (to NPC citizen) says, "Lovely day, isn't it? So peaceful and serene."
Player 2 arrives.
Player 2 slashes at a citizen, ripping open her chest.
You hear a citizen's death cry.
A citizen is dead.
Player 2 leaves east.

"If you can't start up an RP session because you see some numbers, then it is a personal problem, and not the fault of the code."--RikeDeJeanVonLe

No, it's the fault of the coder. They're the one that went through the trouble of creating a nice world to interact in but left in unrealistic elements. It's like throwing a magnificent dinner, asking everyone to attend in tuxedos and evening gowns, renting a French chateau to hold it in, and then serving McDonalds food.

Take care and avoid the fast food,

Jason

To RikeDeJeanVonLe: I think the reason why numbers are typically removed from Role-play heavy games is that it is an easy fiction-breaker to remove.

Most newbies to the game are going to be looking around for cues as to how to act. Hopefully they'll pick up good habits from the existing players, but this is often to much to hope for. So instead you must present it to them via the code. If they see 5/5hp 5/5mp at every prompt, they're going to start developing dependencies on numbers right away.

If they're worrying about numbers they are going to be much less immersed than the person who is worrying about how the character is behaving.

To address prof1515's issues with ooc channels: I have to say I agree with OnyxFlame on this one. As long as the ooc channels can be toggled on or off, I think its a highly beneficial feature for a game. It builds community, as well as keeps players from leaving your game to go chat somewhere else. Everybody, every once in a while, wants to just relax and chat. And this is especially true for the players who have been with a game for the longest, and these also tend to be the most valuable players for a game to have.

-Ryan

Actually I'm not talking about ooc channels, I'm talking about an ooc command that works like say: only those in the same room can hear the ooc comment. I don't think I'd go for ooc channels either, they'd just degenerate into total crap. But as long as it's a local ooc thing, if you don't wanna hear it all you gotta do is move, or ask the people having the ooc convo to do so.

What a neat idea! You could have a command for players to toggle OOC on/off so even if they're in the same room, they won't hear the OOC comment.

Hmm...that is a good idea. I think I'll do that.

Ogma, would you let us know the player response to it?

If you aren't already using it for some other purpose, maybe a whisper command would be a good idea. For example, the syntax used in the MUD I play is whisper <person> <message>, minus the <>, of course.

Oops, sorry for the double post, folks! Not fully used to these boards...

Just to clarify a bit. DartMUD has always implemented OOC as behaving in a similar manner to the traditional "say" command as OnyxFlame described it. What Ogma was referring to was allowing players to turn even that off if they wanted to.

re: Songsworn_Draconita
In general, all of our players consider our implementation of OOC to be preferable over global OOC chat channels. Those who do not tend to be newcomers who are having a difficult time learning the game mechanics, though the majority of those eventually reverse their position on the matter after they have become acquainted with our UI.

DM's "tell" command is also local, except in the case of creators, however it's an IC command. The cool thing is that depending on the hearing of the whisper recipient and the hearing of others in the room, and maybe some other factors, the whisper may be overheard, either as gibberish or in its entirety.

I believe we rather got off the topic though. I just wanted to say that I tried Feudal Realms yesterday (due to DM being dead because of the blackout), and it really annoyed me that it had levels/exp, which you can only get for killing stuff as far as I know. Now I realize this mud is attempting to change to a fully RP system at the moment and I have no idea what changes will be implemented in order to do this, but I think it really destroys the feeling when you hafta kill crap whether you want to or not.

"...I tried Feudal Realms yesterday...and it really annoyed me that it had levels/exp, which you can only get for killing stuff as far as I know...I think it really destroys the feeling when you hafta kill crap whether you want to or not."--OnyxFlame

Agreed completely, Onyx. Feudal Realms was one of the 800+ MUDs I tried and one of the biggest disappointments. I'll probably give it a try again in a few years, when they've hopefully converted it into a RP MUD without the H&S crap of levels and exp.

It's a classic example of what I was talking about in my original post. F.R. has a nicely developed world, but they've left elements in the game which are ridiculous and contrary to realistic role-playing.

Take care,

Jason

I don't mind so much seeing numbers and levels in my score information. It doesn't hurt RP if players will refrain from mentioning the numbers and levels in character. I prefer when the numbers are hidden or transformed into text, although I'd rather see a number than ***DECIMATES***. Gah. I think it would be more difficult to establish a culture of not mentioning that ooc information and then continually training newbies to follow suit, than to just hide or remove the numbers.
Sure people can figure out the formulas and learn what their numbers are, but typically in that process, they realize that it is ooc information, and keep from talking about it ic. Because that is the key. It isn't what your player knows, but how your character behaves. If everyone behaves as if there are no numbers, no levels, then it's all peachy.

The thing that I can't handle in so-called strong RP games is seeing the name of someone I've never met. Nothing kills RP like walking into a room full of strangers and having them say, "Hi Jane Doe!" And really how many times can you startle and stammer, "How did you know my name?" (then go through the ensuing ooc discussion about how they shouldn't know your name, but they think they have some way of knowing it because word gets around) before your character starts to get really paranoid?

How are the two situations any different?  If you the player know the name of the people in the game that certainly doesnt mean that your character knows the names.  Introduction systems can be a convienience for players to remember with whom the character has come into contact with, but it has never bothered me personally if a game doesn't have it.  

Much the same with numbers, the people I spend most of my time rping with know their exact stats in almost every aspect of their character.   Of course we don't walk around talking about having a strength of 10 or a charisma of 20, but instead use the numbers to mold how we play the characters.

About knowing people's names... In the better RP muds you have a short desc which people see first instead of your name... then there are 3 main system for learning names

Greets: you type 'greet <person>' after they learn your name and they now see you as your codename. Big flaws in this as they wont get any aliases/nicknames you want to go by.

Remembers: My favourite. You type remember <short desc> name when you find out their name icly, or if you dont you cans till remember them as DrunkenMoron or soething like that

Neither: just short descs, remember it yourself (possibly using notepad.

I don't really care so much if I see numerical representations of my hp/stats/whatever else, what bothers me is that in level based systems you hafta kill stuff to get anywhere. Even if they have to have levels, why can't they at least make you able to gain levels from doing stuff other than killing random monsters? What if I'm playing a healer or a hippie or a total wuss and my char would NOT want to wander around killing stuff? Yet I'd hafta do it anyway, or I'd just be the little puny weakling who everyone bosses around because I suck.

The two are different. Both are cases where the player must keep separate what she knows and what her character knows, but in the case of numbers, it is ooc information, while in the case of names, it is ic information. 516 hitpoints is the link between the ic information that he is a big hard to kill brute and the code that determines how much damage he can sustain. The name is your character's name, directly linked to that character.
People can come up with plausible reasons why they might know your name: the bartender told me; I had a dream; You are famous and don't even know it. Stupid...but plausible.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for ic'ly talking about 516 "hitpoints", whatever they are.
And in practice, I've seen that in those rp muds with numbers, most people will not mention them. In those with names, very few make the effort to rp that they don't know.

I personally find that an all RP mud could be found rather boring occasionally. The mud would have to have a large, and very active immortal staff to monitor the roleplay in case people actually wanted to be stronger and what not. Not everybody is going to be fair if there is no way to monitor your strength, so if you incorporate these kind of things, I feel that roleplay can be much more organized when in comes to battling. It all really depends on what kind of a MUD that you are looking for. If you want one that is all RP, and you don't have to level, or look at your health and what not, then I guess there are those kind out there. If you want one that incorpoates RP and leveling, there are those too. Hack and slashes are always out, so it's just an overall perference.

Interesting topic

I play in the world of Accursed Lands and we handle the levels in an IC text based way. Levels are still important in an RP mud because we also have crafting & fighting that works hand in hand with the RP.

skill wind instruments
You are roughly above average at wind instruments.

As I'm playing my flute, if someone should ask how good a flute player I am, I am more likely to say...."Do you like my music" ?

But I could also respond based on my skill level.
"I'm roughly above average compared to most people. There are a few new songs I would like to play, but my fingers can't quite find the notes."

We have 26 levels of skill to each skill.

1 know next to nothing about | 14 are getting very good at
2 know very little about | 15 are getting extremely good
3 know a slight amount about | 16 are skilled at
4 know a few things about | 17 are quite skilled at
5 know a decent bit about | 18 are extremely skilled at
6 are beginning to understand | 19 are excellent at
7 are below average at | 20 are wise in the ways of
8 are almost average at | 21 have begun to master
9 are mostly average at | 22 have partially mastered
10 are a bit above average at | 23 are close to mastering
11 are roughly above average at | 24 have mastered
12 are proficient at | 25 have perfected
13 are getting rather good at | 26 know everything about

Having the knowledge of levels lets you know what you are capable of and what you shouldn't attempt.

In crafting you can't start out by forging a great war axe. You will not have any success, because you "know next to nothing" about forging. The levels let you know what items you have a chance to make and as you succeed in making smaller items, your level in the skill increases and then you can attempt to make items that require more skill to create.

Do you want to RP forging a war axe or do you want to actually make one ?

I could emote that I am forging a great war axe, but at the end of the day, I still won't have one.

Those that put time into their character and into their skills can create items that others players might want to buy and this create commerce.

If you have money in the bank, do you want to know how much you have in your account or do you just want to RP it ?