Rule Changes to ArmageddonMUD

Almost thought this was an announcement thread. I got excited.

this.

rules are pointless when people go against them or find crazy out of the blue ways to subvert them. if I was setting down rules, i wouldn't write "don't threaten unrelated people to punish a player" because never in my wildest dreams would I imagine a video game volunteer would do that.

It's hard to summarize it concisely, but they need to stop treating the game mechanics like sacred, fiercely protected information that should be kept from the playerbase at all cost. Armageddon still clings to some incredibly old-fashioned ideals of game design stemming back from times when AD&D nerds maintained that players shouldn't read the Dungeon Master's Guide until they graduated to the exclusive realm of DMing, like some strange and elitist rite of passage. Obscuring the game mechanics as some arbitrary and wholly OOC layer of difficulty is absurd.

The advantage gained from knowing the shit that veteran Armers know about the code is enormous. It's to the point where you pretty literally cannot obtain a truly powerful character if you don't have rather extensive knowledge; and this isn't just stuff you learn over the course of playing a long-lived character, this is information that you basically have to be given by other players in the know. Awareness of skill caps and branching, of skill-gaining methods, of obscure commands and unbalanced quirks of the combat code, these things make such a gigantic difference in gameplay that you can't justify denying players access to it.

This is a roleplaying intensive game. A character's prowess should not be determined almost entirely by the player's gaming nous.

I campaigned for the implementation of stat prioritization years ago, and people fought tooth and nail, insisting that it would cause all sorts of problems and that the most realistic representation of characters as individuals is for their physical and mental attributes to be completely randomized. Jealous cunts like Spawnloser (and others whose names I've blissfully forgotten) swore up and down that it was a horrible idea that conflicted with the spirit of the game and all sorts of bullshit.

Then there were the recurring suggestions of visible skill levels, and half the GDB hissed and booed at such a preposterous notion. It would cause people to obsess about skills and become horrible twinks and so on. It would make the game less of an RPI, it was anti-roleplay and somehow unrealistic for people to have any inkling about their prowess at something. It got implemented anyway and lo and behold, the sky hasn't fallen (at least not for that reason).

On these two notable occassions, instead of telling anyone who asked any code-related question to "find out IC," they lessened the obscurity of the code and the result was unanimously positive. Stat prioritization and visible skill levels have caused no problems whatsoever.

But those are very few concessions that have been made over the years, and the GDB community still maintains a general stance of 'never give an answer that would help the person who asked.' Most of the game's code is still shrouded in complete mystery, which is a large part of the reason this community has sprung up. It has also created a persistent elitism in the game and a jealousy between players as these secrets are worth just as much as any powerful race or exclusive role.

There are things that should be kept vague, of course; we don't need to see the actual numerical values of stats and skills, we don't need to know the exact damdice of a weapon and so on. But basic information such as which stats affect what skills, if one helmet is stronger than another, the fact that you get city stealth on your ranger if you pick the right subguild, which class becomes the best at climbing, what you have to do to learn how to make poison cures... what the hell is the point of keeping this kind of information from players?

Armageddon has always had problems with OOC communication, and now has problems with an entire rogue community largely opposing the way the game is run. There are other reasons for these things as well, but a significant factor is the general inability to learn how the game works on your own, and the immense advantages that can be gained by "cheating" like we do here on the big, bad cheater board. Well, staff, it's only cheating because your rules and practices are ridiculous and belong in the 80s when games were so primitive that their rules had to be kept obscure as a means of artificially preserving the difficulty for players.