Going through a lot of my old logs I noticed that for me, while I had too many characters, many of them due to being created by one person would not get the experience from exploration due to confusing old characters with new. This might now affect others so badly but nonetheless, a command that keeps track of where a character has been would help to some extent.

How the system would be implemented and advantages:
On character creation typing in the command (ie explore) would only reveal the hometown that they selected and possibly the academy or other available hometowns. As the character traverses throughout Thera, any area that the character has not stepped into will not show on the explore command but areas that have not been explored fully will show and be gauged based on how much experience is available for the area. For example, say character A enters the Forest of Nowhere for the first time; typing in explore would register the title "Forest of NoWhere" and beside it will show something like "know very little." The more said character looks at everything, the higher the guage goes from "Know little" to "everything there is" or something like that

In an OOC perspective it keeps a pretty good filesystem for the player in keeping track of the exploration based on the character and IC it would fit well with a character measuring how familiar he or she is with an exploration area.

I don't know how difficult the coding would be for this but I'd like to discuss the viability of this as part of the game.

>For example, say character A enters the Forest of Nowhere for
>the first time; typing in explore would register the title
>"Forest of NoWhere" and beside it will show something like
>"know very little." The more said character looks at
>everything, the higher the guage goes from "Know little" to
>"everything there is" or something like that
>
>I don't know how difficult the coding would be for this but
>I'd like to discuss the viability of this as part of the
>game.

The simple solution is to base it off of observation/explore experience, the problem with that solution is those all have level caps so if you don't explore an area before you hit one of those caps you'll always be "knowing very little" even though you could actually have been through all those rooms and seen all those things.

The other option is far more complex and would basically be 3 giant lists that you tick off (rooms, mobs, objects), and that's just way to much data to try and track (It would make player files probably 100 times larger than they currently are).

Ultimately I don't see a good way to do this that doesn't really just feel like an attempt to game the system. How do I know that I've observed/explored everywhere?

This lets you determine information your character would have no business having. If you haven't been to parts of an area, or seen certain things, how does your character miraculously know that there's more out there?

Exploration and Observation are a fairly minor fraction of available experience, and their impact (skills, Edge considerations) are also fairly minor. They're a nice supplement, but not worth obsessing over.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Its pretty easy to get about 4 to 5 fairly strong edges on just explore XP alone in the 30's

You need what? 6000? Imm xp to equal that. How is that minor?

A VERY thorough adventurer who wants to take time to know everything there is about a certain location. Take for instance an investigator going through a home that's been already furnished. If one wants to truly know EVERYTHING there is to know about the house, they will look at everything behind every corner under every nook and cranny that their body is capable of going through and use whatever tools is at their disposal to make sure everything is seen.

From your perspective, I agree that it does seem incoherent for a character to naturally "not know" about what lies in unknown territory, but the functionality is designed to be more beneficial in an OOC perspective.

And while it would be natural for characters (as they are characters in a vibrant living world) to at some point assume that they know everything there is to know, this is a MUD where "we can pick up drift wood and swim across the ocean" and if we type in "area" we are able to see the rank range (highly inaccurate IMHO and also begs the question "how does the character know?") and name of places that we've never been to before but I digress.

The main point I'm saying is that having a sort of system to keep track of where the character has been would be very helpful to veterans and newbies. Rather than going through old logs and having to tabulate where every created character has been, we have a command that would encourage the player to actively explore what's out there in CF as it grows and changes.

Ask any char of mine after sixty hours where I've been and I could make a list off the top of my head.

This game is VAST and if you try to cover it completely with one single character, you will find that it IS possible. But you will miss a great deal simply because you didn't know about secret passage A that leads to lower tunnel section B (I know of at least one area like this). I'm okay with this.

I'm completely against any sort of guage that shows "x% of area explored" simply because it assumes you already know about the secret passages. And one area is basically just that, a secret passage... and it's huge. And I know people that claim to "know it very well" that will consistently walk by the same things and never pause to get them. I'm okay with that. As Valg said, it's not that big of a deal.

Also, back in the day there were "extraneous" rooms that you couldn't walk to, but once in a great while you could teleport into them. I know that those mysterious rooms are largely gone now, but I don't know how many of the rooms in an area are filled with junk rooms and I couldn't see how such a meter would handle those things.

If it's a list of places you've been, then print off the list of areas, save it in a .txt file. Make a spreadsheet and put x's by them as you go through them. I take notes. I take a LOT of notes. Lots of other players take notes. If it's important to you, write it down.

List each area they've been to and show how much exploration XP they've earned from it as an absolute measure. Then you're only reminding the player what their character should already know, not what they have yet to discover.

I really like this idea. Would help explorers know when they've truly seen everything there is. It even makes information sharing amongst the clicks matter less, because there will be less super secret stuff that no sane person would ever realize was in the game unless they heard about it outside the game.