On Fri, 10 Oct 1997, Chris Proctor wrote:
-+Hmm, someone implementing who's never mudded before? I would have thought
-+that alias arguments would have been one of the first things you'd have
-+learnt as a player.
That's a bit of a presumptious leap. There are some things I don't
know about CircleMUD's outward mechanics, because I actually haven't
played a CircleMUD since 2.2 (that is, *truly* played, instead of
just sitting around doing nothing as a player). While I agree that
an implementor should know things about the mud, it'd be better to
fault the person with not bothering to look (something we've all been
guilty of, especailly me; let he who has no sin, cast the first stone).
-+Yeah, the $* takes the rest of the line, sometimes that's not very useful
-+though.
-+$1, $2 etc can be used for individual words, e.g.
-+alias mmm cast 'magic missile' $1; cast 'magic missile' $2
-+would cast magic missile at two targets, when you type:
-+mmm fred bill
-+Anyway. Maybe more info than you wanted.
I don't like this idea, BTW. To clarify, I don't like the idea of
people being able to cast the same spells routinely, or that fact
that all spell-casters of the same level have the same spells.
I think that some mages would be more inclined to particular types
of spells, and thus learn more of those than other types. If a
mage is inclined to violent magic, he is more like to have
fireball than fireshield. Even two violent mages of the same
level shouldn't always have the exact same spells (or even
possibly, number of spells). The simple fact that two mages will
always have the same number of spells, and exactly the same
spells, is one of the leading factors in people using the same
spell time-and-again.
Some people might not see this as a problem, but I think a lot
of implementors don't realize how little respect magic in muds
is paid. While I am normally one to suggest adding a ton of
manual spells to make things interesting (and I'm certainly not
suggesting you do otherwise); I might also go so far as to
suggest making generic copies of spells like magic-missile that
are the same except for some details.
For instance, if you have a wizard that came from the frigid
southern pole of your imaginary world, then perhaps his spells
would be more themed towards ice and cold, than fire and heat.
Instead of fireball, give him something like 'snow blast' or
'iceball', that serves the same amount of damage, though any
spell affects it does (if you, say, have fireball ignite
flamable items) should be reversed (freeze their water supply).
What's really fun about this idea is imagine our ice mage in
the desert, sweating and cursing the heat, when he encounters
a foe. Smartly, our mage uses his natural abilities against
his enemy; freezing the other's water supply, and leaving them
out in the desert with no drinkable water for as long as the
spell has frozen their water. This can also give more meaning
to actual beverage types and a reason to purchase alcohol over
water (because alcohol has a lower freezing tempature than
water)...
So many become possible with this, it's just a fun idea...:)
Take it and use it, if you are so inclined.
--
Daniel Koepke -:- dkoepke@california.com -:- [Shadowlord/Nether]
Think.
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Ensure that you have read the CircleMUD Mailing List FAQ: |
| http://democracy.queensu.ca/~fletcher/Circle/list-faq.html |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/08/00 PST