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« on: September 01, 2005, 01:05:27 am »
Our noble Miya decides he wants to fight a rogue! He sneaks through the trees, careful not to alert the foul man of his presence, he sneaks up behind him and.... A popup! A little flying lizard with a slate board pops into thin air in front of him. It clears its throat loudly, and says, \"What is the proper way to polish your blade?\" and then holds out a small claw with a piece of chalk.
Miya looks confused. The rogue turns around and begins beating poor Miya into the ground. Poor Miya...
lol, seriously. If you\'ve ever taken a quiz, and most of us have, you\'ll know that they have no resemblance at at all to anything close to something that might possibly be in the general area of fun.
As for watching people fight giving you experience.... well then everyone would just sit their characters at the spawn points and go eat popcorn while their character levels.
And you absolutely MUST give some indication of the severity of the damage being dealt to you, your enemy, your friends. It\'s just basic game design. Otherwise you get no sense that you\'re getting stronger. No sense that you\'re using a better weapon. No sense that the enemy is going to kill you and there\'s nothing you can do about it, that sort of thing. In a MUD I used to play, they did this by using different damage messages for ranges of damage. For example,
You barely nick a rat with your slash on the paw.
You slash a rat on the paw.
You slash a rat hard on the paw.
You massacre a rat with your slash on the paw.
You obliterate a rat with your slash on the paw.
You annihilate a rat with your slash on the paw.
You SMITE a rat with your slash on the paw.
But, just so you know, most people on the mud HATED this, and complained about it daily.
And it is my belief that just because a game is geared towards roleplayers, doesn\'t mean that the game has to be a glorified 3d chat room. Although I call myself a roleplayer, I think we can sometimes be extremely masochistic when it comes to MMORPG\'s. It\'s like there\'s some unsaid moto that if it\'s fun, it\'s not RP. And I don\'t think that\'s true. Heck, I play World of Warcraft, on the RP server. That game is geared towards power gamers, and yet I have a blast roleplaying. It doesn\'t matter to me that I can see exactly how many hit points I have left. It\'s my job as a roleplayer to translate all these numbers into roleplay. If I crit for 1000 damage, I can say, \"/me watches the head of the beast roll off into the bushes after that last blow.\"
lol anyway I\'m rambling beyond the scope of this thread so I\'ll leave it at that.
-Miya