numbers

after addition, double letters are dropped

all rules exist only for their multiple of ten in addition, and their power of ten in multiplication

the w(x) of 1 is one

2 is two

3 is three

(4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 30, 50, x00, x000)

10 + x = w(x) + “teen”

10 * x = w(x) + “ty”

n0 + x = w(n0) + “-”w(x)

100 * x = w(x) + ” hundred”

I kind of wish there was a system smart enough to understand this post, although it almost certainly wouldn’t need it (since i rely on a number of undefined terms).  But also that would be terrifying.

reputation

“cred” – Characters get “cred,” which is of no direct use to them.  Instead, cred is spent on other players.  Giving cred to a player raises that player’s rep; burning a cred on another player fully restores that character, but the cred is lost.

Players can alias their own cred.  It can be cookies, or laurels, or karma, or brownie points, or sexiness, or whatever they want to call it.  This has no mechanical effect but the player will see the alias when they are given the cred.  Also, ‘rep report’ shows a player all the cred they’ve received from whom, and displays it as the alias (so, “You’ve gotten twelve cookies from Janet and six sexiness from Brad”).

“rep” – rep can be given, like cred, but can’t be burnt.  It also passively benefits a player, boosting money gained by twice its value (so 10 rep = 20% more money), reducing vendor costs in shops, and probably other charisma-y things.  It also extends some of its benefits to party members, and cumulative rep improves a clan.

Cred is given to newbies, by immortals, on the monthly anniversary of a character’s join date (amount based on some earnings metric for activity in the past month, like 1-3), and at certain points of achievement (eg, every ten badges/achievements earned, every level, or something).

text effect aliasing

i should remember to set this up at some point.

/text/ = italics

+text+ = bold

_text_ = underline

-text- = strikethrough

i can think of more, like inserting a space between each character or putting each character in some form of brackets, but those are the core ones.

the newbie experience

In general, any player interested enough to check out your game wants to play it.  Perhaps not to the extent that, say, someone who walks into a McDonald’s wants a burger, but is at least considering spending their time on it.

But new players are skittish, and easier to lose than to attract.  So I’m writing down what I think about the new player experience as a chance to flesh it out in my own mind and to refer back to later.

First, the experience should occur in stages.  Almost nobody likes to read a wall of text.

Second, for the same reason, non-critical information should be opt-in.  This will lead to a little bit of frustration later as players go, “but nobody told me!”  That’s better than those same people just ignoring /all/ information available.  (Yeah, it’s the same people.  The people who would have read the information even if it was all available at once are the people who will look up that information at the start.)

Third, the newbie experience shouldn’t end abruptly.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone through a tutorial and at the end gotten, “Other players will be happy to help you!” and then been dropped into some town, only to find that either nobody was on or nobody particularly felt like helping.  This is particularly characteristic of text adventures, but even in popular MMORPGs I’ve gone through a tutorial zone seeing no one and ended up in a dead starting town at 3 AM (Eastern US time).  There’s no guarantee that there will be someone available, willing, and capable of helping any given player unless you pay people to do this (although…).

Fourth, experienced players should be able to bypass basically all of this at either no penalty or no ‘real’ penalty (maybe the newbie quests give characters some free food, a tiny amount of money, or some gear that will be immediately replaced anyway — less than what an experienced player could make in that time from scratch but enough to say ‘free gear this way!’ to get even overconfident newbs in).

Fifth, new players, immortals, and any other players that wish it should have access to a global ‘newbie’ chat.  I’m torn on possibly saying there should be a chatterbot on this channel that will give ‘prizes’ in response to questions, encouraging even nonsocial or highly stubborn players to use the channel.  (Prizes are either direct allocations of gear or points, or directions to an in-game way of getting these things.  Like, maybe some graffiti says, “Ask about our special deals!”, and “special deals” is a keyword that prompts, “I heard so-and-so will pass out free samples of his food to folks who give him a nod and a wink.”)  Actually I’m not all that torn, I just don’t know if I want to put the work into making this both functional and non-obnoxious.

I favor a newbie experience that walks the player through the bare minimums of using their interface, and then starts to push them into the action.  A lot of games use this and I see no problem with that.

Lastly, on incentivized mentoring.  Prize-driven mentoring — where a newbie gets to mark a sponsor or tutor of some kind, and the sponsor gets rewarded — is an obviously exploitable system.  Many games make it worth very little in response, while others put a verification process in place that means players who help newbies don’t get an immediate reward.  And as Pavlov will tell you…

I think that there are a few possible ways around this.  One is to link the benefits directly to how much time the mentor spends with or talking to the newbie, and put the point at which the reward can be given fairly late in the process.  So a mentor that barely helps their charge won’t get anything.  This is problematic because it’s hard to directly measure the time spent “assisting,” which could mean a lot of things.  It’s probably best to link it to certain milestones of newbie-clearing, like every level or each ‘stage’ of the newbie experience.  Maybe a small ‘patience bonus’ if it takes the newbies a long time between stages, but the mentor is still helping?  Still, how to determine… (Letting the newbie ‘mark’ the mentor and ‘unmark’ them at any time is tempting, but this can yield some counter-intuitive activity since the mentor may have to ‘politely remind’ their newbie to mark them a few times before they start helping).

One I like a little more is to give the game a ‘rep’ system.  I think I’ll flesh this out in its own post.

A third is to use the verified rewards system but give it a little granularity (the newbie first nominates their mentor, and the mentor gets a notification of this and then, at the end, is asked if the mentor really did help, and if someone else helped them more; the nominated mentor does *not* get a notification of their answers) and a significant prize after verification — some kind of credit players will really want, of which helping a newbie is one of the easier ways to obtain.

Or lastly, a straight combination of the two more common methods; minor rewards up-front, larger ones after the interaction has been verified.

combat resources, veering into some thoughts on magic

quick thought :

focus : begins high, tends to decrease as combat continues.  Mostly for magey types, who get abilities to refocus, but leave themselves vulnerable while doing so.  Having high focus also passively makes attacks more accurate and makes magey type attacks more powerful.  Being shaken (an effect caused by losing too much resolve, and occasionally directly by hostile effects) reduces maximum focus.

initiative : begins moderate, increases or decreases during combat based on actions.  For everyone, but especially roguey/swashbucklery types.  Being patient or clever tends to increase initiative, and it’s consumed to use powerful or disabling attacks.  Having high initiative passively gives the character’s attacks priority — their attacks are resolved earlier in the round without reducing their ability to defend themselves.

fury : begins low, tends to slowly(!!) increase as combat continues.  For fightery types.  Very few things actively reduce fury — that is, special attacks rarely ‘cost’ fury, they simply require a certain amount of it as a pre-requisite.  Things that increase focus or that ‘exhaust’ the user do reduce fury.  Having high fury passively increases physical damage, but also increases the costs of characters’ abilities; characters who specialize in it also very frequently (moreso than characters who specialize in focus or initiative) have abilities that passively increase other traits as well, such as damage resistance or accuracy.

—-

vitality : hit points.  taking damage to vitality also causes penalties representing pain.

stamina : resistance to exhaustion.  taking hits reduces stamina, but most actions also consume it.  stamina continually replenishes, but exhaustion (and to a lesser extent, being shaken) reduce the rate at which it does so.  overdrawing stamina causes exhaustion and deals damage to vitality, converting a point of vitality into a percentage of maximum stamina.

resolve : the character’s soundness of mind.  Many magicky abilities lower resolve, as do hostile effects that seduce or frighten.  Resolve also continually replenishes; like stamina, overdrawing it can cause the character to be shaken, reducing their maximum focus and dealing damage to vitality, and being shaken (and to a lesser extent exhaustion) reduces the rate at which it replenishes.

—-

both exhaustion and shaken-ness occur iteratively (so, crudely, there is ‘exhaustion 1,’ ‘exhaustion 2,’ and so on).  they have diminishing returns, so the first stack is the worst.  i’m thinking that any given two stacks cumulatively have 75% of the effect of the preceeding one.

say exhaustion 1 is “100%”; adding exhaustion 2 and 3 is “175%”, and exhaustion 4 and 5 would be “231%.”  i’m too brain-dead at the moment to figure out what the proper math to make this work is.

—-

i’m tempted to make high fury reduce Resolve losses, and high focus reduce Stamina losses.  yay for ragemages and jedis.

—-
other resources:

certain abilities require some other kind of resource.  there is no special definition of all possible resources, but the most common one would be whatever generic mp are called — i’m leaning towards ‘elan,’ ‘ashe’ (from Yoruba), or ‘dunamis’ (greek, “potentiality,” my favorite term for magic, and the root for ‘dynamic’).  Most others would be whatever the character’s faith or expertise allows them to generate in the world.

notably, these all require the character to do something.  even the most advanced mage must at least meditate to generate… we’ll go with dunamis for now.  More exotic energies require more exotic methods.

housing

My ideal system for player housing would work like this:

There are points in the ‘overworld’ (low-threat, high-traffic sections of the game; ie, nondungeons) which the player can link to their home.  Any one of these points can be used to return to the home.  The player can link to at least some of these points from their home, such that they can return to those points from their home.

The player can use an emergency ability to return home at any time, but at some cost.  Players can develop (or innately possess, or automatically receive at a certain stage) an ability to return home from any point with a much lower cost, but less frequently.

The home has, or can have, an exponentially larger amount of storage than the player can carry.  They can send items to this storage from outside their home relatively easily, either from certain (common) points or an ability — such as via a mail system, or with a spell.  Retrieving items from this storage requires visiting the home.

The home will automatically provide a link to all or most communal halls available to the player — guildhouses, etc.

The home is shared by or accessible to all characters on an account, and can be made visible to any other character in the game.  The game’s rules determine to what extent other players are able to affect the home; my preference is that hostile players are able to graffiti the home, disorganize it, and steal or destroy cosmetic objects or “targets,” but cause little other harm.  Homes can be trapped or have security features.  Homes can have insurance policies (30-80% of value of destroyed/stolen objects returned to player).  Homes can be hidden or relocated, and have limits (hardcoded beyond player-developed security) that limit how often they can be the targets of vandalism.

“Targets” would be transient objects of value.  For instance, the home may automatically produce some resource at a slow rate, and an unsecured home could have this resource stolen.  Or, certain objects may provide small passive benefits to their owner (“1% more damage caused in combat”); these objects could be stolen or disabled, and are moderately time- and resource- consuming to replace or repair.

item storage

Ahh, the notebook of the Interwebs.  Now I’m going to talk about game dev ideas for a while.

Inventory and storage.

Player file inflation isn’t the concern it used to be for text (or even graphical) adventures, since “cold” storage space has increased exponentially since the days of the genre’s inception.  There is nonetheless a legitimate desire to minimize the number of permanent objects in the game, and also to limit what players have access to at any given time.  A lack of scarcity leads to a lack of challenge, and thus a lack of interest.

I’m also kind of torn on the inventory system.  On the one hand, I’d really like to make item storage logical and quasi-realistic.  I don’t like the inventory system because it just doesn’t feel ‘cool’ to me.  Carrying around twelve sets of armor, a ladder, a few hundred arrows, some toolkits, maybe some livestock… it feels cluttered, plodding, and undesirably metagamey to me.  I value a sense of desenrascanco, the art of being unprepared.  Carrying around a few tools, some weapons, maybe even a camp pack, okay.  But probably not a ladder, or another full set of armor.  And the livestock is right out.

On the other hand, that can get really frustrating.  Characters have to be able to interact with their environment.  And a big part of adventure games is killing everything you come across that’s even slightly hostile, taking its stuff, and reselling for a few pennies somewhere in town.  If you can’t carry even a full set of armor, how are you going to get that epic pile of loot?

So I think there’s a couple of solutions that really work here.  For graphical games, I like grid storage.  Your character or, better yet, every ‘pocket’ your character has, has a grid.  Items take up a logical amount of space in this grid, so gems and such are easily pocketable while  breastplates and greatswords take up quite a bit of space.

Text games can’t really use this, but they can at least have a concept of volume.  Pockets (bags, backpacks, etc) can only store so much; even if the ladder is incredibly light, it’s still huge, and it won’t fit in your backpack.  Too many text games use weight when they should be using volume.

Grasping appendages, like hands, would still use weight over volume.

Items can and should be able to be broken down or dissolved.  This has to be excused, but it’s a lot better than forcing characters to carry around bulky quantities of nearly worthless items just to make a buck.  Whether it’s offerings to divine powers, magical dissolution, or clever craftsmanship, character should be able to turn just about anything into nearly-as-valuable raw components (and ideally, from those components back into a value-added object, if they invest in those paths of development).

Lastly, characters should (/usually/) have rapid access to a home, and the home should be able to store things.  I think that’s worth its own post.
A note on ‘doing it well.’

Grabbing something should never be a problem.  If the game is ‘logical’ enough to check if the player has free hands to get something, it should be logical enough to figure out what they would do with whatever’s already there.  People tuck things under their arms, set it down, or slip it into its holster automatically; game characters should too.

In graphical games, the UI is pretty much the first priority.  If you can’t make a grid system without making the UI painful, then it’s probably worth dropping.

No, no, I’m sure it’s no stain, just a touch of shadow.

What’s the use in setting all the toys to dancing if their eyes are drawn to that and not the hands that do it?  Well, I suppose there is the obvious answer…

infinite choice

I typically act as though I were free.

I don’t believe it, of course.  I mean a liberal interpretation of freedom of the will is nonsense; it requires committing to acausal occurrence, which is rationally …difficult, at best… to justify.  But it’s also pointless to itemize causes for any given course of behavior.  So I let it lie beneath the hood, and occasionally fall well into the comfortable lie that the invisible is truly nonexistent.

So it was in its way surprising, and yet also delightful, last night to have a discussion about the many worlds theory that unlocked the causal structure of behavior to rational sensibility again.  My companion questioned me about the sort of every-day interpretation, which is that peoples’ choices cause other universes to come into being.  I reflexively responded that no, most other universes, if the most well-described theory is accurate and the universes diverged at the point of creation (the Big Bang), would be incapable of sustaining life or possibly even macroscopic physical structures at all, and of those that remain many would be completely alien to us.  But then I thought, well, what if the number of universes is truly infinite?  I of course can’t really wrap my head around the difference between “very very large” and “infinite,” and it may simply be the former.  But either way, the variance of physical start conditions could be very very very small.

So we may in fact have worlds that represent ‘divergent choices,’ in some sense.  That is, for any given event, the ’causes’ in play may be so subtly different that the universes are identical up until a point fairly late in the timeline at which they become distinguishable because one very small thing has changed.  This is almost identical behavior to the populist ‘divergent choices’ idea but philosophically reversed — that is, those so called divergent choices are a by-product of the cause, not causes unto themselves.

Fun to think about… although I will still act as though I were free.

entries in a lexicon with no words

To deliver a message as though to a gravestone.

To be grateful for all that has come before.

To strive for completion; to set goals.

To do that which you yourself have chosen to do.

To find that which it is worthy to serve.

To leave servitude.

To bind to the will; to guide, as a projectile.

To release; to know the correct time of things.

To be silent with the knowledge of names.

To be silent in good humour.

To speak as though unfolding a map or a portrait.

To create; to become genius.

To open, as with a ribcage; to be in the moment of the exhalation of a great breath; to tighten the strings in a system of pulleys such that release is created elsewhere.