PBM design: scenery design From: frits@cp.tn.tudelft.nl (Frits Kuijlman) Date: Mon, 05 Jul 1993 15:06:07 +0000 I'll just post this here, but please, don't flame me for not posting on rec.games.design. Before I get to the point I want to make I'll first do a short summary of what I think the whole discussion is about. Games (whatever the setting) can be categorised through the following list of factors, which is probably not complete:-) 1. strategy vs explore-and-do-what-you-like 2. open-ended vs close-ended 3. entry-at-beginning vs entry-at-will We all agree that a game should be well balanced, and if it should favor some aspect more than others this should be mentioned. Obviously:-) The above three factors don't have to be black-or-white choices. Especially 1 and 2 can be more or less a sliding scale. So, to turn the discussion away from whether formulas are really necessary or not, I wan't to try to start a discussion on the following subject: What I have missed until now in the whole discussion in the creation of interesting history and scenery for games. I know that for the pure strategy game, where the only purpose is kick everybody else out of the game, this isn't much of an issue. In the late (and to be resurrected) Olympia there was an attempt to have some artifacts and some monsters(not that I have found any of them). I have also played in some MUD's where there were several possibilities to get ahead in the world : - killing lots and lots and lots and ... of monsters - finding real nice artifact - doing some quests and solving puzzles (Probably some of these things are also present in Legends, but I have not been playing that game for that long yet) There are of course people who have enough fun creating large empires by magical, economical, military or whatever means. For other people the challenge in a game will be much more in the exploration of strange lands and the odd encounter with Merlin the Meddling Mage. So, bluntly said(BIG SMILEY!), everybody can create a game system consisting of a database with a nice balanced rule set. It won't even be that much trouble creating the odd random Space Orc invasion. But, outside of commercial systems or MUD's, has anybody ever worked on a game system where it is possible through some sort of scripting system to create quests and other kinds of puzzles? I won't even mention the creation of intelligent NPC's which would need huge amounts of AI code to give them some semblance of realism. And no, for the moment I am not volunteering for coding:-) Frits -- Frits Kuijlman frits @ cp.tn.tudelft.nl Delft University of Technology The Netherlands Referenced By Up