--- Mantar <mantar--2xtreme.net> wrote:

> About wet my pants the first time I saw a Jaggi..
> :)

I almost had a myocardial infarction the first time I
saw the alien. THOSE THINGS WERE SCARY!

> Well, kind of. Gothic did something similar. It had
> a 3rd person view, and you could see when your
> character
> starts that he doesn't wield a one-handed sword
> well. He grips it with both hands and kinds of hacks
> it at an
> enemy clumsily. With a bit of training, he learns to
> hold it one-handed and make light, quick swings with
> it.

I'm not sure if this is the same as the controls being
loose. Think of the mouse. It starts off with a loose
setting, a tiny movement and you're across the screen.
As your character goes up in level it slows down and
you can pinpoint your enemeies easier.

Not that I know that this is what the new d&d game is
like, I just read an article.

> Oh, and count me in on the "Too many stats ruins
> the roleplaying" camp. Speaking as a guy who spent
> several
> hours on UO (not) selling a llama, and enjoying
> every minute of it while others sat around clicking
> and re-clicking
> to try to boost one lousy stat.. (That's not to say
> the 'dull repetition' model of stat improvement
> wasn't partially to
> blame, but those people were missing out on the real
> fun to run on a hamster wheel.)

I was thinking of doing role playing games like Chess
rankings. Sort of like Amber, but malleable. This is a
relative rather than absolute model, and bizarre for a
computer based game but if nobody knows what's going
on behind the scenes....

Basically it works this way. You start out as a 1. The
odds of you beating a 10 are known. If you beat a 10
you get a point, and the 10 loses a point.

Now you're a two. The odds of you beating a 200 are
pretty slim, but if you manage to do so, your score
goes up by 5 points, and theirs goes down by 5 points.
Why? Because the odds of you beating a 200 are pretty
slim, so you should be raised up more and they should
be lowered more.

Say you work your way up to 500. You fight the Yuri
Kasparov of the game world - the Great Wrym. Against
all odds, you win. The Great Wrym is ranked at 2708
points. You gain a hundred points for beating him, and
he loses a hundred points.

If you lose, it was totally expected and neither of
you gain anything (some fraction of a point perhaps).
If the Great Wrym *knew* this was how things worked,
he'd never fight you because there's simply no
advantage to it.

On the other hand, you never tell anyone their
ranking, or even that rankings exist, because if they
found out, they'd find ways to subvert the system -
build up a character and beat him.

In public, you could do a similar but less
statistictical version for tournaments in the Arena.
(Y'all forgot about the Arena, dincha?)

Let's examine this from a gaming perspective.

You gain experience more rapidly if you go out with a
party of more experienced adventurers.

An upstart 'gets lucky' and beats a more experienced
fighter, the upstart gains a lot in this fight,
perhaps he's someone to be trifled with, and the game
plays this out - he begins winning more fights against
creatures and people that were on his level before.
The more expereinced fighter, on the other hand,
begins to have some doubts about his abilities and the
stats play this out. Dueling with people on his level,
he begins to lose more often (though the point spread
in these duels won't be enough to make a huge impact
on his ranking, so he stays in the same range, slowly
draining a point here or a point there, gaining a few
points every once in a while, etc.).

comments?



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