Re: alternative goals

From: jonmmorris@aol.comnospam (John Morris)

Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2001 02:47:40 +0000

Enno wrote:
>> > you can be a mighty warlord, an explorer or a rich trader". Now, from
>almost
>5
>> > years of experience, I must admit that that's not entirely true. There
>may
>be
>> > secondary goals, but you won't live long if you don't follow rule #1: "Be
>> > strong, or others will kill you". The powergamers can ruin the game for
>> > everyone who sets himself an alternative goal. Why is it so hard to make
>a
>game
>> > where that's not the case? Waht are possible goals?
>>
>> Reminds me of a quote by my International Law professor, "There is no
>> international law.  The strong do what they will and the weak do what they
>> must."
>
>It's worse. In the Real World, there exists such a thing as a moral system.
>If
>you do something that all others consider an offense, you are punished. Not
>so
>in a game. Players can do the most outrageous things, plunder, pillage and
>xenocide, and if they have at least a little diplomatic skill aside from
>that,
>they usually go unharmed by the others, who'd rather keep out of trouble.

Actually, the Real World moral system is not too far from your game systems.
Diplomatic skills are not bad but if you really want to get away with torture,
rape, and murder, you just need to do it in a part of the world without
'valuable' resources and/or outside the American-European orbit.
Obviously, I'm not condoning this behavior, but we Americans responded to Haiti
and you Europeans (broad brush here) responded to Bosnia and Kosovo but none of
our countries have done much about Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, and Chechnya just
for a handful of recent examples.  Then there's the Chinese crackdown on the
Falun Gong (sp?).

I remember being outraged at PolPot and Idi Amin but I don't remember the U.S.
govt. doing anything (effective) about their genocidal actions.

But, I think you've got a point - individuals who might be outraged at PolPot
might be indifferent to similar actions by a player in a game.

<snip>

>Eressea has most of these traits: Power is not the only thing you can search
>for, but it is necessary if you don't want to get trampled. A powerful player
>can wreck another players game, but not vice versa. There are usually no
>negative sides to being powerful -- maybe that's what I'm looking for:
>downsides
>to being powerful, and good alternative goals that make the game worthwile -
>longterm.

I think that some games do penalize the powerful positions by making it harder
for them to advance in other categories (magic, science, etc.)  UO does it on
the individual level by giving everyone a maximum of 100 points - if you spend
most of this week working on your sword skills, it might go up 3 points but
those 3 points will be lost from other areas.  Maybe something similar could
work on a strategic level?

>Our weekly newspapaer is now regularly around 128 K plaintext, we can't
>complain
>about the volume of submissions. However, the overall quality is going down,
>as
>I said before, 90% of the postings revolve around some local war nobody's
>interested in.

--choke-- 128K a week of plain text? Wow, that's a lot of chaff to sift...
Have you thought of any alternate publication methods?  A discussion forum, or
e-mail list for the player-generated stuff?

How about an online database where players (and you) could submit their news
with a headline, time/turn #, player name/# in addition to the body of news -
this might help the players find just the news they need and would help new
players get caught up on past game news without having to sift through years of
128k text files!

I don't claim to have found the perfect newsletter myself but I've found a
similar solution to work for me.  But, my scale is much smaller than yours.

>> 4) Building - Absolutely.  Build more stuff, new technologies, improve the
>> efficiencies of what you've already got, expand your colonies, (and of
>course
>> build up your military to go attack...)
>But do they build to gain more power? The ultimate goal behind most building
>activity is increased strength.
I publish the top ten rankings each turn in various categories - the  players
seem to like this as they can concentrate on climbing in different areas, or
they can target the folks ahead of them!

> There are some exceptions, like Eressea's
>monuments: Monuments are nondestructible, name-once buildings of unlimited
>size
>(you can keepon building forever). They serve no purpose whatsoever, but the
>7
>biggest monuments show up in the weekly publication: "The seven wonders of
>the
>world". Plus one random additional monument, in the "noteworthy" section.
>It's a
>small thing, and hardly a goal, but one of the many "little things".
>
Those sound like some great features.

>> The official 'winner' of Gunboat Empires, the guy who gets the plaque, is
>the
>> player who is voted 'Best Player' by his fellow players for that game.
>
>In a game of 1400 players, where you only ever meet about 50-100 or so,
>that's
>something that would be heavily influenced by roleplaying. A nice idea,
>really.
>We might steal it :-)

I'd be honored if you considered it a gift.

-- John

*** (AD) Gunboat Empires has moved from PBM to PBeM
     http://www.gunboatempires.com                      ***

References

Re: alternative goals
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Sat, 03 Mar 2001 12:50:38 +0000

Referenced By

Re: alternative goals
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Sat, 03 Mar 2001 12:50:38 +0000