To answer your question, Mr.Fish, static attributes will not end minmaxing. I remember in one of the AD&D campaigns I used to play in, there was this one guy who did just that. As you know, AD&D has static attributes (unless your DM is really nice). He still had to have the best weapons, the best armor, the best horse.... you see my point. He didn''t care that the DM thought that his swashbuckler shouldn''t use a two-handed sword, it did the most damage, and that''s all he cared about.

Real role-playing is the only way to truly prevent people from minmaxing. There is no DM in CRPGs, so you have to hardcode all these things in and hope they work.

The Senshi is totally on track here. If someone makes a hero character, they should be penalized for attacking helpless/innocent beings. Evil characters should be punished for not doing these things. If heroes let the evil people do these things, they should be penalized again......

However, allowing charachters to grow will make heroes band together to fight the more powerful villian, and vice versa. There are tons of ways of MAKING people role play, why try to change something that aint broke. Sure, *urp* leveling is abused sometimes, but done right, it is rewarding and fun.

On another note, Landfish, I really hate hit points. They are so stupid, they make no sense, and they piss me off. I''ve always tried to avoid them, but I still don''t have a good system on paper (that isn''t too much like another game''s system ). I was just saying that player stats, weapon stats, etc. don''t have to be non-numerical to be effective.

I''m interested in everyone''s thoughts on this (3rd and 4th par).

/*initiates shouldn't have signatures*/

quote:Original post by The Senshi

I see what your saying Raskell, but the point is not to make a perfect system, but rather to make one which encourages roleplaying and rewards it for the most part.

Heck, no system IS perfect. Even human ops wouldn''t work perfectly. The idea is just to make an incentive to keep players in their roles, not to make a police system .

-------------------------------------------
"Don''t worry about it sir, it''s an eye-dee-ten-tee error -- takes too long to explain -- have a nice day."
I d 10 t

Yeah, again, I totally agree. What would be ideal is if the system would govern itself. If the actual players can possibly ifluence others to Role Play and not ruin the atmosphere. As long as the majority of the players understand what is trying to be accomplished and they Role Play, then new players will see that is the way they''re supposed to act. What seems to happen in MMORPGs is that the majority of the players speak OOC all of the time and it just perpetuates itself. New players mimic that behavior, and a vicious cycle is born.

Senshi: I have to reiterate, I have no interst in preserving the kind of gameplay which powermaxers consider to be fun. Yes, I know I will lose most of the MMORPG audience, but those who remain will be pretty cool.

Playing Everquest myself, I''ve long ago discovered what exactly it is that makes me play...friends in my group.

It is NOT gaining a next level (my last ''level-up'' last week didn''t even register until someone asked me an hour later out of the blue -stranger..yuck!- what my level was) it is NOT gaining items (I''m still running around with empty spots all over my body), it is NOT doing quests (give item to person whoever...give ''m more...and more...keep on giving).

I have to admit that I DO enjoy close fights (usually I hunt at about 30% health just to make fights more dangerous).

What does this have to do with the topic?

Well...I would be one of the players that WOULD play a no-advancement or low-advancement game. Why? Because I play a character...yup, I actually bond to my character. And my character bonds to me. Thus, usually my characters don''t care about material things, don''t care about power. They do care about friendships though...

And friendships is what a non/low-advancement game will thrive on. Social interactions will become more important. Certain players will not join in games like this...others will. And I think that when the game is good enough, those few that start it will quickly gain a larger following as other players start to catch on that there is a game out there that will give them something else, a relief from hack''n''slash.

Then, because the game is NOT based upon visible progress (levels) but on interaction, character development in a mental way more than in a physical way, you just might be able to keep gathering small numbers of gatherers while maintaining the ones you have.

A real virtual world might be a possibility (which actually sounds somewhat creepy, as people will more and more be able to ''escape'' real life, which isn''t necessarily a good thing), a world where characters really come alive, where fighting comes with a great risk, where death is not just ''respawn and lose some experience'' and where your reputation is worth more than your power. Politics might pop up and players might actually want to take part in it. A real history of the world might develop as player''s decisions and actions decide the course of events...

Dreaming isn''t bad is it?

Silvermyst

I was posed with a fiarly similar problem with a persistant actiojn quake liek game we were designing.

My solution was to make skills equal in importance at their highest level and to allow everyone to have a basic skill in everything. Then the idea was to have a sliding scale(imagine knots on a spline).

So,if you used your submachine gun skill very often your other skills say medic would suffer due to neglect. The skill allocation wasn''t linear either. The more you specialised the more skill you sucked from your other skills. A player with maximum skill in say sniping would be pretty useless at everything else.

I was planning on doing the same thing with attributes (running speed, pushing\kicking strength, jumping height).

All of this was calculated at runtime, so a player who spends most of his time running will become faster but will bulk down.


On futher thought I suppose I could have allowed some kind of training mode that will help accellerate the changing process.

The whole idea was to stop my players from becomming walking tanks with every conceivable item and max skills in everything. A ''good'' player just joining should have an equal opportunity of killing a llama who had been on for a while.

gimp