Subject: Re: Premature concerns about spell system
From: Timothy Little (tim@lilly-villa.little-possums.net)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2000 - 06:53:54 EET
On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 07:20:06PM -0800, Paul Toompas wrote: > This may be something no one has to worry about for a while... > > I don't know if you all have ever played Asherons Call, but in early beta > they were trying out a spell system very similar to what is described on > this web site... people bought spell components and learned different orders > to put them in to make different spells... the less people who used a > particular spell the stronger it would be which was to be a deterrant to > people wanting to distribute lists of component sequences... This is universally a bad idea. Trying to prevent out-of-game activities via in-game penalties always fails. There are many ways in which it fails. 1) Some people don't play for in-game power. This may seem alien to a lot of people, but it happens. Curiosity is a pretty strong motivator too, and all it takes is one person curious enough to research all the spell combinations and publish the results. 2) People stop playing games. Even if they powergamed, once they stop playing there's no longer any reason not to publish what they know. 3) Out-of-game incentives. Being known as the first person to discover all the spell combinations can be a pretty good reason to publish all your work. 4) Game wreckers. Some (hopefully few) people like to wreck other people's games. Again, for this type of activity all it takes is one person. Now, onto a more general discusssion of such in-game activities. The general problem here is how to encourage players to follow reasonable social norms for the game world. In this case, information hoarding. In character, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect given the world rules. Powerful people tend not to voluntarily dilute their own power. Furthermore, they tend to act against others who attempt to reduce their power. Presumably a well-guarded secret spell formula increases a character's power. A number of diferences between this situation and typical games arise. A) The sorts of settings in which such hoarding takes place are typically low-tech, with poor communications. If some rogue discovers an important secret, it is very easy to stop the secret from spreading. Disinformation, outlawing, or plain physical violence work. Furthermore, word-of-mouth is inherently unreliable and after a few steps from the initial source coudl be pretty close to useless anyway. Contrast this with the ultra-fast, massively parallel and reliable internet transmission that undid your work. It's impossible to prevent the information getting out. B) Consequences. In the game world, someone who defies the norms by revealing dangerous knowledge are likely to suffer some sort of reprisals, or at least a determined effort to find out who they are. The biggest factor here is, it's the only life they've got, and they can't run forever. However, a person playing a game always has (at least) the option to stop playing. Usually they also have the option to start again, or just switch to a different character. Even that only comes into play if anyone finds out their in-game character and acts appropriately (in game). C) IC/OOC blurring. This is the biggest problem. For most players, there is no or little distinction between in-character and out-of-character knowledge. Even given everything else mentioned so far, if all the players only used IC knowledge in game, there would be no problem. Even OOC knowledge like "it's only a game" interferes when applied to thinking about the possible consequences of their character's actions. From the character's point of view, it's their whole life. These points lead me to believe that the only case in which in-game consequences have the expected effects on players' actions is when the players make a strong committment to only take in-game action based in in-character knowledge. Given that a large fraction of players will be using OOC knowledge in game, what possible solutions are there? Certainly no amount of in-game consequences will work by itself. Point B (consequences) can't really be addressed (at least within any reasonable legal and moral bounds). About the most you can do is kick out players who do undesirable things. At that, it's ineffective and too late anyway. Point C can be addressed: make sure that the majority of your players don't mix IC and OOC knowledge. By itself, not very good and places a fairly heavy cognitive load on the players. Some players won't mind though. Point A is about all you can really fix. Make in-game communication very difficult, by introducing game mechanics which ensure that the only way the characters can use dangerous information is through in-game channels. Then tailor those in-game channels appropriately to the world. For example, a low-tech world would probably require physical proximity of an existing holder of such information, whether it be a person or an object like a book. That way, even if the spell list is on the web for anyone to see, players can't use it. Furthermore, you can make sure that there is always a chance that something goes wrong with the in-game transfer -- misreading, forgetting, someone discovering that you're giving away their secrets and getting very cross, etc. That's my angle on the situation, anyway. -- Tim Little
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