The following is the scope of the game left open for players. It describes
the goals and methods used in relation to keeping people playing the game.
One of the goals was to have players keep playing rather than reaching the
position of creator where they player no further part in the game, or go around
creating poor quality castles for lack of a better thing to do. While it is
true that some people write very good castles, a lot do not. The system running
here should remove this problem. Being able to look at other rooms in your
domain will allow you to write rooms that are copies of rooms that are already
reasonably good. Also, with the lord reviewing the work that people are doing,
there is the opportunity for the lord to fix problems in your style.
To facilitate the problem of players leveling out and no longer being able to
go any higher except to the point where you can become a creator, we have
attempted to make being a creator a statusless position. While this is an
idealogical goal, it is not possible as there will always be some status
associated with being able to add to the mud. What we have however done is
try to limit the interaction based commands of creators. We have also made a
lot of the commands previously only available to apprentice wizards and above
available to players as reward for a quest, or if the god deems it suitable.
Examples of this are the emote, and echo commands. Players will be allowed to
get these commands gradually. Emote will come fairly easily, while echoall will
require the finishing of one of the toughest quests on the mud (which should
really be dynamic) to gain. The reason for giving players these commands is
to make it so there is little advantage gained in becoming a creator. Your
creator will only have the powers that your player half has, and the player
half will have abilities and commands that your creator half will not.
The ultimate goal is to make players want to stay players. The other way we
will do this is to make it so that high level spells exist in each of the guilds
so that by using spell points, ANY player will be able to create an object
suitable to their guild. Mages will be able to create simple objects, while
clerics will be able to create food and drinks. Fighters will be able to cash
in spell points, to build weapons in a blacksmiths. Thieves will be able to
use spell points to create (purloin) simple treasures, or small amounts of
coins. Whatever your guild, you should be able to create objects that add to
the atmosphere in the mud at that time, but require no access to LPC.
