General Philosophy

(or, Just What the Hell Do We Think We're Doing?)

In planning the creation of this game, we have theorized that several elements play key roles in the life of any story, especially those that happen to also be a cooperative gaming environment. The storyteller's style, the believability and sense of realism of his story, and the depth of the characters who play the parts; all contribute to the story's power and effectiveness.

In that light, we've come up with a list of goals that serve as guiding principles when making design decisions about the game.

Storytelling

The first of these principles is that we wish the world of FaerieMUD to be a world of story. We are no longer entertained or challenged by online games which cast the character in some sort of mercenary role, in which, no matter one's profession, the only way to succeed in the game is to run about murdering everything. There is no heroism in pointless bloodshed, especially for something as trivial as "experience points". We strive to create a game with enough depth, enough realism, and enough mysticism to capture the player's imagination in a shared epic that never stops being told.

Words are the blood of story, and so we are focusing the majority of our effort on making the game playable through a text interface similar to many current MUDs and MUSHes. We are building the object classes with the plan to eventually develop an optional graphical client, but the true test of our game will be its playability without any pretty visuals.

There are many distinct advantages to playing a game in text-only mode. Until bandwidth gets much better for everyone, it would be virtually impossible to represent even half the detail planned for the world graphically in realtime. It also requires much more machine to pull off a realtime graphical rendered environment at any decent size than it does for a simple curses-based text interface.

There are also some disadvantages to a text-only interface, obviously. A scene that only takes a glance for the player to interpret graphically may take several seconds to take in if it is described in text. There is also the matter of the programming required to render a scene in proper (understandable, even) english. This will, we hope, be offset by the use of stories as objects.

Stories As Objects

One way to describe a person's life experiences would be to tell a series of stories that encapsulated all the things she had lived through, seen, and felt. In this way, if we assume that a person's experiences are valuable, then stories become a kind of currency that can be sought after, gained, and handed down to one's progeny. It is this currency that we hope to emphasize over the crude approximation of experience gained in some online adventures that is typically the result of hacking one's way mindlessly through the indigenous flora and fauna. The means to accomplish, we believe, is to give the system some way of encapsulating stories that are experienced by the in-game characters, much the same way that a storyteller do so with stories she has experienced or heard herself.

For more about stories, and what we plan to do with them, see the Stories topic.

Realism, Sort Of

Part of a story's appeal is its power to transport the members of its audience to another reality, and FaerieMUD should be no different. Any story which seeks to do this must, at all times, maintain the audience's suspension of disbelief. In order to do this, every world, no matter how fantastic, must maintain a realistic (or at least self-coherent) environment. Realistic, in this case, does not imply that the world must pedantically follow every detail of this world to the letter. It does mean, however, that the world must have established basic laws of operation, and that it must rigidly follow those laws which govern it in every detail of its existance. It also means that every object in the world must be a real object, not just a footnote in the description of another object. If you are in a meadow, and you see a rock, you should be able to pick it up, examine it in detail, write a message on it, and then bring it with you to some other place.

See the Playability, Properties, Description Generation, and Location topics for more on object realism.

Invisible Game Mechanics

As a part of this realism, there will be no view into the internal mechanics and calculations of the game from within it at any time. This means that there will be no score, no "hit points", no character attribute lists, no "who" lists, and generally no visible statistics of any kind. This doesn't mean that it will be impossible to track your progress or monitor your health. It means that you will have to rely on your own skills or the skills of others to do so. To accurately assess your health (beyond how your character feels, that is) will require the advice of a physician or healer, unless you yourself have such skills. To measure your improvement in swordsmanship (beyond simply observing your increased success), you must seek out the advice of a mentor or trainer, who has learned with the mastery of her art how to comparatively gauge the skills of those who use it.

See Character Traits, Statistics, and Characters for more about character attributes and how they affect the character. See Skills and Abilities for more about the skill system.

Limited Communication

Another aspect of the aforementioned realism is the lack of unlimited omniscient communication. In many online roleplaying games, the player has access to a set of 'channels' which can be used to communicate among characters from any location in the world. Communication is vitally important to almost every aspect of a game, and to allow it to be taken for granted not only makes it more difficult to suspend one's disbelief in the world, but also eliminates a game dynamic which leads to much more social contact and roleplaying.

This is not to say that communication over distance is disallowed. Magical (telepathy, projection), physical (flags, smoke signals, drums, messengers, carrier wyverns), or other realistic means of long-distance communication should definitely be possible, but with all the cost, risk, and potential for miscommunication that go along with them.

Limited Character Control

A character in FaerieMUD will not be a mindless automaton, and will be only mostly controlled by the player who is at his controls. Characters will be affected by emotion, fatigue, injury, and even their own moral dilemmas, all of which have the potential for causing the character to do something other than what the player has commanded. For instance, a character may flee in terror instead of holding his ground, refuse to harm someone he is charmed by, or spontaneously kiss someone he is attracted to.

See the Emotions and Good and Evil topics for a more in-depth explanation of how character emotion and morality work. This is also related to the IDoanWanna hard problem.

Immortals

Online roleplaying games have, for the most part, relegated the game's creators to purely administrative roles. This, in our experience, leads to admins who are out of touch with the game, and generally unsympathetic to the plight of mere mortal players. In order to avoid this, the creators of FaerieMUD will also all be immortal players and deities, free to interact with the game in whatever way they choose, and hopefully thereby be a better contributor to game play.

Immortals will not be omnipotent, however, because absolute power tends to breed tyrants. All immortal actions will be governed by a variant of the Skills system in conjunction with the immortal statistics. Players who have reached immortal status in one or more of their aspects will have new commands at their disposal, but like the mortal abilities, immortal abilities can only be used by spending the appropriate amount of statistical energy.

See Immortal Statistics, Immortals, Apotheosis for more information.

Magic

Other kinds of power will also need to be balanced, magic being chief among them. Magic will pervade every corner of the FaerieMUD world, at least initially. The land, and every object in it will be capable of containing magical energy, and magical effects are generated by harnessing and altering this power. There will be room for many different kinds of magic, each with its own philosophy of how magic should be used and accessed, but they will all be governed by the same metamagical rules. These rules allow the construction of spells which are deterministic, built out of components of action which serve as a kind of magical vocabulary. This will allow the modification of existing spells and discovery of new ones by experimentation, and will also serve to assure that magical systems remain balanced.

The magic inherent to an area or object is depleted through the use of magic, but it can also be more permanently affected by other actions such as Oath-breaking, epic battles, or overuse. Thus there will be areas of the world in which magic is abundant, and those places where it will be weak or even entirely depleted.

See Metamagic, Mana, Magical Genres, and Magic Users.

Expiration and Procreation

• Death
• Old age
• Sex and procreation

[More: the Oath of Making, Resource links]

Motivations

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

— Grace Hopper, Inventor of the Compiler