Kevin's Watch

As some of you might remember, I posted back when this forum was first started about starting a Thomas Covenant MUD(Multi User Dungeon). Basically a text based, multi-player roleplaying game. For many reasons, the project never really took off, but regardless, I want to give it a shot again. The big difference is I'm asking for your help to do it.

The idea was to have the game set in the time between the first and second chronicles, when the clave had recently lit the banefire, and there are still many who understand earthpower still.

Now, like I said, I did this before, and it didn't work. This time around, I'm a lot more experienced. I have created and run two muds, with a third slated for opening soon (twilightmu.org). The past years have given me a greater insight into what I'd like to see in a perfect roleplaying game, and how to make it balanced, and fun.

If anyone is interested, post in the thread, and I'll go into more detail.

Thanks.

-L

I used to play the Shadowdale MUD in college ( 1995/6) and loved it, despite the textual interface. I had always wanted to be a God in the realm, and create my own areas complete with weapons and monsters, bosses and all the stuff that goes along with it.

I am a software programmer, so I understand what is involved. Will you use one of the pre-canned MUD engines or will you grow your own?

I am interested in this. let me know your plans.

And here I thought we'd be talking about Hurtloam!

I have zero interest in playing games. I waste too much time already just chatting online. You guys must be younger than I am.

Malik23 wrote:And here I thought we'd be talking about Hurtloam!

I have zero interest in playing games. I waste too much time already just chatting online. You guys must be younger than I am.

Good thing I wasn't drinking!!



I'll take a look!!

iquestor wrote:I am a software programmer, so I understand what is involved. Will you use one of the pre-canned MUD engines or will you grow your own?
I am interested in this. let me know your plans.

I was hoping to develop a custom codebase for this game. That does, however, take quite a bit more work then grabbing rom2.4b and hacking it, but the end resultsz are much better.

I am personally incapable of starting a codebase from scratch, my code-fu is not that strong. I can certainly help, and hack though.

As for the actual setup, I was planning on levelless, classless with a backend system very close to shadowrun4 or whitewolf. A character will have 10 attributes, Strength, Stamina, Body, Agility, Speed, Intelligence, Willpower, Perception, Wits and Potency. The min and max are based on race.

They'll also have a couple dozen abilites, like stealth, melee, hand to hand, subterfuge, leadership, athletics, alertness, investigation, archery etc etc.
They all start at 0, but can go up to 15, and you can either have 2 at 16, 17 or 18, or 1 at 19 or 20.

They'll also get skills such as sneak, sword proficiancy, hide, kick, forced march, etc. There will probably be hundreds of these for every concievable use. To use one, it will roll as many 10 sided dice as you have in the correct attribute + ability. I.e. if you're trying to sneak from one room to another, it will roll Dexterity + stealth. Then, depending on other factors, terrain, injury, etc it will add or remove dice, and raise or lower the difficulty. Difficulty is a base of 6, which means any die that shows 6 or higher is considered a success.

Depending on the successes you have, you'll have a range of effects to each skill. And skills like hide and sneak will roll directly against other players and NPC stats for them to spot you, or find you while searching the room.

There will also be lore, which will work in more or less the same way. Same with craft skills, to make items, equipment, armor, weapons etc.

I want a focus more on character development and item crafting/customization more than finding good equipment, since from the books, theres a shortage of power artifcats just sitting around.

Anyway, still interested?

sure, why not?

BTW: Malik, I bet I am older than you

Its gonna take more than just a couple people to get this off the ground. If theres anyone else interested in helping in any way, I'd like to hear about it. We need people to help design game mechanics, write code, come up with skill, lore and crafts ideas. People to actually build the world etc.

iquestor, what platforms are you most comfortable working on? Also, do you have aim or some other means that we can communicate, so I can give you some more details on exactly what work is gonna be involved?

I am on vacation now; I think that building this from scratch might be too big a task; a MUD engine is no small feat, not sure I have thhat kind of time.

My suggestion is to just do some investigation on what is out there, I am sure that an existing engine could be found to match your vision.

I am comfortable in C/C++ JAVA VB etc. I think many are written in C.

I'm pretty well aware of whats already out there. The big problem is that you have to deal with all the terrible coding that everyone else on the source tree has used before. Like I said, I already run a few muds, so I have a pretty good grasp on whats out there.

Although, we could grab the latest RoM release, and start from there. It wont be too bad. Theres also the awakemud codebase, which might work fairly well.

I actually have quite a bit of experience coding and building on MUDs. CircleMUD was always my area of choice, just because it always has seemed to be the cleanest foundation of anything around. (I'm responsible for a few commonly-used code packages that people add to stock CircleMUD...several years ago, anyway.)

I know that, realistically, I have almost no time for such a project...but I'm willing to advise, support, or do a little support on the side. I'd be interested to hear how it goes.

One warning: the problem with building the Land in a text environment is that (1) you aren't SRD and

(2) if Revelstone ends up being a 25 room zone, you haven't done Revelstone justice, plus (2a) if Revelstone ends up being a 250 room zone, and it takes 20 steps to walk to Mithil Stonedown, you have warped the Land.

Be true.

I participated in an online roleplay story once, but I have zero experience with games. Is this one of those things that will require, you know, actual coding skill and games ability?

Because if it does, I'd be hopeless. However if it's just text-based role play, I'd be interested. I really like the time frame you proposed. There were still Forestals in the Land then. *is a big dumb fan*

As a player, builder or designer, you wouldnt need any coding experience at all. As for area size, the revelstone i originally built was about 300 rooms. Kevins watch and the area surrounding it was about 400 rooms. I'm thinking on a big scale. Perhaps a 10 minute walk or so to get from revelstone to mithil, which is a lot in game terms.