So I was talking to a buddy of mine whose been playing CF for eons...Myself, I've been playing about half an eon (four years) :P

Anyhow, we were having the discussion on how things have seemed a little less...well...roleplay for the most seems to have gone to the wayside. No other way of saying it. Now, I'm not here to start a flame war, but I won't to propose something that I think needs to be changed back:

Please bring back the days of rolling for stats!

Here's why I say this. You remember those days, oh about a year ago?
When most of us who knew more or less what we were doing had our little roller program and we would set it up to roll a character? We knew what was coming next....about an hour of staring at our computer screen while numbers flashed by until we got the exact ones we wanted. Yeah, tedious, time consuming, hell, sometimes boring...

But know what? When you finally got that character rolled, and the stats were right in line with what you wanted...you knew you were ready to get rocking. It was finesse. During the tedious time you were rolling this guy you typed up his role, your fleshed out the details of your description, you ironed out his quirks and details. So when the stats finally lined up, the character was complete. It was time to go into that magical world and make things happen.

And somewhere along the way you hit a bump...an unexpected mob death, an early than expected loss of con, something along those lines. And you got frustrated...you thought for a second...I should delete, but most the time in the end you thought about the effort you had placed into making this character and in the end you realized that the effort to reroll and rehash him out didn't outweight this bump. You stuck it out and moved on.

Fastforward to today. You get an idea for a charcter, it sounds cool, you think you would kicks some ass with it....Write a role? Nah, I can do that later...a good description? I'll do it a level 10 when I have to. I just want to get started on this idea. Lets log in...and not two minutes later there is the newbie academy. Now its time to run and gun, power rank to where I want to be. Then...that rabid beast kills you. Ah, screw it, I'll just delete real quick and reroll. Total time invested? Maybe ten minutes... Here is what bothers me. The general mass (not everyone) is likely to take the attitude that every character is a throw away character and there is no real time invested into it. Instead theres a role entry now and then to get them by with cabal inducts or the work their particular behaviour into a way they want it. Its just not the quality that went into a char before.

That one little hour, well, sometimes two or three that went into rolling a charcter was not only about having to wait...it was sort of a time to meditate on the character....to get a feel for it. Hell, even if you set the roller up and walked away, you were still thinking about the character and mentally fleshing out the details.

So in the end I ask, please bring back the rolling. I really think its a great time for development and will be an extra incentive to try and keep people from making such disposable chars. Even I'm guilty of this, and its part of the reason I'm writing this.

Anyhow, I'm off to a vacation of nine days and so won't be able to respond for a week...I hope though I'll come back and see some good discussion on this and not a total flame war. Thanks for taking the time to read it.

Rob

Not sure whether you're even being serious, but I really utterly fail to see the connection between stat rolling and theoretical "lack of RP".

I wonder why no one's mentioned the fact that roleplaying itself, in general, is less popular amongst people today than it was years ago with the Dungeon's and Dragon's crowd.

Honestly...RP seems to be doing alright if you make it past rank 30, and its always been this way. I just think you're nostalgic.

>But know what? When you finally got that character rolled,
>and the stats were right in line with what you wanted...you
>knew you were ready to get rocking. It was finesse. During
>the tedious time you were rolling this guy you typed up his
>role, your fleshed out the details of your description, you
>ironed out his quirks and details. So when the stats finally
>lined up, the character was complete. It was time to go into
>that magical world and make things happen.


Most of my characters were created before I even opened my stat roller. So by the time I got the stats I wanted, the idea/mood/feeling of the character was dead and I ended up with an "empty" feeling where my character should be.

To me, the current creation process is about 90% more problem free than the last.

I remember everyone bitching for years about stat rolling, begging and begging to have it removed. Don't make me have to rip some elf's thigh off to beat you with.

I didn't usually use the rolling time to write role or desc, so that argument is rather a moot point. In current system, it is possible to write that role and desc before rolling if you want to. Long rolling time won't make you write that role, it's something you choose to put your time into. My roller had a beeping sound when acceptable stats came, so it was possible to read while waiting during the hours it took to roll a char.

It is true that the tedium of rolling would discourage rolling throwaway chars, but so does self dicipline and realisation that you'll only waste your own time with one hour throwaways, not to mention that it increases the tedium of lowbie hours. Take your break and don't roll a char unless you have a good idea for one. Until next month, Rob.

Dur

Making character generation especially tedious so you don't want to delete the character isn't a direction we especially want to go in. There's better ways to increase character 'loyalty' other than punishing an honest player with wasted time.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

You make it sound as if most the playerbase is this honest player type. If you wish to live in such a fantasy world, be my guest. And while you do the mud will just continue its downward spiral.

I find it humorous that changes designed to increase player loyalty (usually by making it more difficult and/or time-consuming to "advance" a character in some way) are almost always roundly criticized by the majority of the playerbase. "If you make it difficult and/or time-consuming like that, you're just killing the funstick for everybody. This isn't real life! We want to be able to roll a character and have some fun, not treat CF like a full-time job!"

Why is it humorous? I think it's a valid complaint. Making it more difficult to advance a character may be intended to increase player loyalty, but I believe it has the opposite effect.

Partly, that's because I have a hard time believing adding more tedium to a game makes it more attractive. Partly, that's because of personal experience: I doubt I'd be here if my last MUD didn't take this "loyalty" route.

Granted, there are games where it is too easy to advance a character. It's not good for RP or PK if people keep dropping old characters to make a quick new hero on the winning side. But neither is it good for CF if players leave for games with less painful advancement. Maybe it's my newbishness, but I have a hard time believing the first is more a problem than the second.

There's a line between tedium and challenge, however. Both can decrease the overall rate of advancement. However, tedium has no upside, whereas sufficient challenge is required to keep the game interesting, and places a higher value on thinking and skill. A very simple competitive game necessarily devolves into either predetermined outcomes (like Tic-Tac-Toe) or luck (like Craps).

There's obviously a lot of judgement calls there, but I don't think anyone would count making rolling take 3 hours as anything but tedium. Isildur's point, as I read it, was to *boggle* at a request to add tedium simply to drive up attachment to a character due to punishment inflicted during generation, given the general tenor of the forums. The two of you are in agreement on that front- neither of you would enjoy a change like the one proposed.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

It's humorous because, in this case, the staff actually reduced tedium in a way that made sense, and now he's suggesting character creation be made more tedious again. They can't win. Make it hard and people bitch that it's too tedious and ruins the fun stick. Make it easier, and people bitch that it's not tedious enough.

Uhh, silencedstatik != "the playerbase". Stop kissing ass.

He's not an imm, and he plays Carrion Fields. Hence he's a member of the playerbase.

Man, who pissed in your fruit loops this morning?

n/t

nt

I have no idea what you're getting at.

An especially tedious character generation process has one positive aspect, which is that it makes getting caught cheating that much more painful. This is why some games have inordinately time-consuming character generation, the most common form of which is manual approval by staff for every character, meaning you may not be able to play for 24 hours or more. Such systems can be effective at deterring character turnover, but they have a hosts of obvious drawbacks, notably discouraging people from trying the game in the first place.

Given that denials (forced deletion for cheating) are incredibly rare compared to normal character generation, I see no reason to punish the 99+% for the outliers.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Yeah, sorry there. In the haste of getting out the door and up to the lake, your reply was read a bit too quickly and I interpreted it in a more personal manner than it was intended. I saw the 'you' in your reply and took it literally. My bad there.