Re: PBM design: scenery design

From: gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)

Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1993 01:24:49 +0000

In article <frits.741884767@draconis> frits@cp.tn.tudelft.nl (Frits Kuijlman) writes:

> 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 had considered such for Greg Lindahl's Ultimate Game (GLUG), which
has been in design for the past 13 years (not that it's ever going to
be written...)

The goal is to create interesting puzzles where the player has to make
decisions over a series of turns, and have the right equipment to
solve some sort of puzzle, at the end of which they receive a reward.

The challenge is creating interesting puzzles. Obviously you can sit
down by hand and write up something where the player has to choose to
knock on the front door verses looking for a back door, or try to
bluff that ogre or attack it. If you succeed you get the pot of gold.
But how can you make a bunch of them without it being obvious that
it's a script?

I had planned on writing up a bunch of skeleton adventures, with
bunches of nodes and multiple paths going between the nodes, each with
a probability attached. Then, to generate a specific quest, you roll
some dice. Unfortuantely the players will eventually figure these
things out: they'll realize that 20% of the times that they go into
the dungeon they meet a Gibbering Idiot, and 60% of the time that you
bluff it it works, but 45% of the times you attack it, it runs away,
and so on. So you would want to have enough adventure skeletons so
that they don't repeat too often. You would also like to give the
players a clue as to what the smart thing to do is, but in a way that
it isn't more obvious to experienced players.

Writing puzzles that require player thought is even more difficult. If
you (the designer) have a personal bias that it's better to use subtle
methods than batter down the front door, then the players will
eventually figure this out and start thinking like you do. After all,
that's the secret of standardized tests (at least in the USA...)

References

PBM design: scenery design
frits@cp.tn.tudelft.nl (Frits Kuijlman)
Mon, 05 Jul 1993 15:06:07 +0000