Atheists vs Theists: The Game of Intellectual Integrity

Inspired by Nomic.

rules:

Obvious rules that together boil down to "don't be a douchebag"

• everyone has to play
• all players have to register on the atheist or theist side
• all players must make appropriate moves until they personally admit defeat
• if one side is collectively defeated, the other side wins
• an atheist admits defeat by acknowledging that a Real World Entity is a god
• a theist admits defeat by acknowledging that an atheist has possession or ownership of all of a god in their bedroom
• anyone who can't make a move in a timely manner automatically acknowledges defeat
• a move consists of adding an item to a list in accordance to the rules and having that item survive instant nullification
• adding duplicate or meaningless items does not count as a legal move
• to count as meaningful, an item on a nullifying list must nullify another item, unless there are less than 5 items to nullify on the appropriate list.
• anyone who breaks the rules is an intellectually incompetent dishonest lying hypocrite

Important rules

• there are three lists: Real World Entities, Criteria For Godhood, Acknowledged Fictional Gods
• any logical discrepancies between RWE items and CFG items, or CFG and AFG are resolved thus: CFG nullifies RWE, AFG nullifies CFG.
• theists control the RWE list
• atheists control the CFG list
• any fictional entity whom over 90% of the population calls a god is allowed by default on the AFG list
• atheists and theists can only modify the AFG list by mutual consent

So for instance, atheists and theists could agree that entities demonstrating Narcissistic Personality Disorder don't automatically go on the AFG list even if everyone calls them gods, in exchange for entities with Anarcho-Communist personalities getting on the AFG list over their own refusal to be called gods. But until such an agreement happens, any fictional Narcissist demonstrating alien superpowers who manages to wow a fictional population of primitives gets put on the AFG list.

RWE:

• atom bomb
• world bank

CFG:

• is very impressive

AFG:

• Apollo from Star Trek: the Original Series.
• Zeus
• Q Continuum
• Akatosh, the Dragon God of Time
• 'God' from the Christian Bible

Magical Thinking Game

This is how magical thinkers think. Note that I'm not recommending this game except as a learning tool, in case you want a practical demonstration of magical thinking. If just reading logic vs magic didn't do it for you. Oh and in that case, this is how analytics think.

How To Punish PKs In A Fun Way

The more I read of http://mu.ranter.net's articles about multiplayer game design, the more I conclude the guy is utterly incapable of producing a novel or original idea. He is miserably incompetent as a game or any other kind of designer because he lacks synthesis and judgement. The fact he pontificates about game design theory when he lacks the very cognitive faculties that are necessary to be a designer makes him a pathetic moron.

A case in point is his idiotic proposal for solving the problem of Player Killing players in MMORPGs.

So the logical response in an MMORPG to the presence of a known criminal is to dispatch groups of NPC cops to hunt him down.

NPC cops? How illogical! This just gives the bored user more opportunity to get into interesting and challenging fights without any trace of guilt. Far better would be to have a sheriff NPC who hands out quests for the heads of criminals for PCs to collect and hands out magic compasses that point to the criminal’s location, as well as warning them about the class and level of the target. Quest rewards would give out copious XPs and gold.

And after the criminal is caught you can have a prison (a day’s lockout) for the criminal with a suicide option (with the standard penalty for resurrection). That way you punish bored PCs who misbehave with even more and longer boredom OR with an unwelcome stat penalty. Better yet, make it so the prison doesn't count offline time. When the player logs off while doing prison time, they actually manage to escape. And when he logs back in, the guards dragged him back to prison and slapped an additional penalty for escaping. Or hey, for more fun you can have escaped convicts be hunted down AGAIN.

And if the criminal is so bored of watching messages like "another day passes, you scratch another line on the wall of your cell" repeat then he can suicide in his cell. The problem with that is it leaves a corpse so if they do that (or if they're killed during an attempted capture) then their shrunken head could be sold on the open market to make voodoo dolls. Voodoo dolls that work! Maybe have a voodoo doll to shrink the convict or paralyze them at a critical moment. Or maybe to summon them arbitrarily. Basically to fuck with them and make them miserable and regret ever having tried for a life of crime. The point of all this misery is to make letting yourself be captured the preferred option if escape isn't viable.

But even more important than discouraging and punishing criminals is that for every bored PC who turns to crime, you can interest 5-10 PCs to catch and/or kill him. That way anti-criminals have MORE FUN than criminals. Contrast this with ranter's stupid idea where NPC cops reward bored players who turn to crime by providing attention to them!

But even more important than that is the fact ranter doesn't see it as any kind of a problem that the computer or GM comes swooping in to steal all of the fucking limelight from playing characters. What kind of a pathetic excuse for a game designer is he when his solution to a problem in the game world is for the programmer to have fun by stealing all of the fun which players could have had?!

Mages As Enchanters Who Never Fight

In Getting Beyond Spellcasting the idea is mooted of getting away from spell-slinging wizards with some ritual magic. This isn't going nearly far enough as far as I'm concerned.

It should be noted that item enchantment magics should also be performed as rituals, with significant investments of power in many cases.

A mage who ONLY does enchanting and takes NO part in combat AT ALL is acceptable in conjunction with the Offline Activity concept in the essay Marking Time. But only if two conditions are met.

First, making enchantments gives the player serious money as a mage. Not minimal money, but serious money. Because that's going to be the enchanter's only source of income. Granted, the money could primarily come from player characters. But it could also come from noble NPCs handing out fat contracts (quests) to supply their armies.

Second, there are quests to further the player's skills and supplies as an enchanter. If they learn from Master Yan how to enchant scrolls of town portal for example. Or they go to Sundabar to secure a contract for a routine supply of Eagle Feathers (either as needed or by the tonne) from the Merchant House of Vreel at a given price. A price which they may improve upon when their contract runs out and they opt to go to Sundabar again with more points in their Negotiation skill (thus improving their profit margin on even low-level enchantments).

Ideally, all of the no-risk grinding activities that involve supporting other players and negotiating with them (determined by your automatic Negotiation skill!) should happen offline. And all the activities that involve risky Personal Character Development and decision-making (like learning stuff, setting up trade routes, and negotiating with fighters to escort him to Sundabar) should happen online. This is really basic game design since sleeping and resting is skipped over (not endured) even in pen and paper games.

Most of that's done already. What's novel is the offline activities concept, and converting "one eagle feather in a wizard's inventory" into "a contract for one tonne of eagle feathers delivered by caravan to the wizard's shop". And both of those novelties are to systematically do away with grinding. Which is something very anti-WoW. But then again, so's actual roleplaying (stealing, gambling and negotiating) so fuck em.

Remember Wizards In Early MUDs and MOOs?

I just read this stupid rant about how wizards in modern RPGs aren't special enough because they aren't enough like literary mages. Because there's too many of them and they're too obviously powerful. This is a bunch of crap.

Early Days of Yore

There used to be a time when Wizards were even MORE powerful. Back in the early days of multiplayer text games, wizards were the content creators and programmers. They were the ones who created new rooms, new areas, new quests, new objects, new stories. They did all of this awesome stuff that NOBODY is allowed to do nowadays.

Wizard powers were awesome because they were meta-circular. Because from within the game you were changing the game itself. Unfortunately, since the world is filled with fascistic assholes, game designers want to control everything that's going on in a game. And also, since the world is filled with idiots, these same game designers don't understand the concept of meta-circularity.

The best part is that early Wizards made games more egalitarian because the structure of the game world was controlled by the players within the game world. And this is the exact opposite of what some people who want wizards to be "special" in their "heroic myth" want. In early games, the motto was "yes, you too can have absolute power". Nowadays, game designers don't want players to have even the illusion of it. Pathetic.

How It Would Work

There's very little administration that can't be folded back into the Wizard hierarchy.

For instance, an obvious way to judge how much XP creating a quest gives a Wizard is to count the number of players who seriously attempt it (enter the area, pass the middle waypoint, whatever) divided by how many players finish the objective of the quest. If zero players finish it then count that as zero XP. This provides an automatic means of judging the popularity and difficulty of quests created.

Since popularity matters for new quests, a Wizard will want to advertise them. So obviously they'll buy signs pointing the way from a Signmaker, bribe an NPC to tell players about the quest, buy ads in the world's newspaper, hire the Sculptor to make statues of the great general, and have a book written and put in the town library about the perilous dungeon. All of this draining money out of the economy (working against hyperinflation) which is good, and increasing the immersiveness of the game world, which is even better.

You could also add XP points if the quest area is far outside of town. This is important too in order to prevent all the new content from being clustered around the central city. Not that this would necessarily be a problem so long as Wizards can dig out tunnels underneath the city or float mountains above it, or simply build upwards. Or even just be very creative with the existing elements of the city by adding rooms here and there, building skyways. To say nothing of portals and extra-dimensional spaces.

You can also award XP points to a Wizard if they ERASE an area or quest leaving a prominent complaint sign for users to bitch. The more they bitch, the fewer points the wizard gains by it. If they don't bitch at all because the area was unpopular then you've obviously got a winner! If the Wizard actually starts losing net XP for deleting an area, they're then responsible for choosing to reverse their decision ... or not.

After all, maybe the area was ugly and they think it was worth losing 500 XP points to get rid of it. Or maybe the Wizard demolished an area in order to remodel it and the bitching of some users is more than made up for by those who like the new area. These are judgement calls and some people need to make them. Not everything can be universally popular after all.

Oversight

So yes, this way Wizards could level up automatically, with very little oversight from administrators. And if game designers were smart, they'd make the entire Wizard hierarchy into an MLM scheme so that a high level wizard can sponsor prospective lower level wizards. If the latter's content sucks then the sponsor gets a penalty. If the latter's content rocks then the sponsor gets a residual of XP points every time the lower level wizard gains XP. And if game designers were very smart, they'd have a sophisticated scheme where you can have multiple sponsors (sharing residuals) or switch sponsors with some penalty.

You see, with the exception of the guys managing the servers and maybe the game engine itself, there is no good reason to have ANY out of game administrators in an MMORPG. Even banishing a k001d00d player to another server where they have a higher tolerance for that kind of crap is easily done IN-WORLD. After all, it's just a Wizard spell - Banishment! Proving that yes you really shouldn't meddle in the affairs of wizards.

Note my emphasis on IN-WORLD game mechanics. I learned that important lesson more than a decade ago from Lessons from LucasArts' Habitat. I also learned that protocols needed to distinguish objects from presentation (as HTML doesn't). It doesn't seem to me that game designers have taken either lesson to heart. Probably because they're retarded idiot.

Creating In Game Lore ... In Game

Consider the town gossip mongers talking about heroic quests the PCs accomplished. I bet you never thought about how to do it in an automated way. Or how to palm off the responsibility to those who would be most likely to want to do it. The names of the quest and the objectives (kill bad guy, retrieve artifact) are all publicly available from the content creator, whether it's an out of game company programmer or an in-game Wizard. So THOSE parts can be fully automated and that's one generic mechanism down.

What can't be automated is what actually went down. But who better to tell you what happened than the guy who finished the quest in the first place? Have HIM tell the gossip mongers what he did. Fuck, have the gossip mongers ASK HIM what he did when he shows up in town next. And so what if the guy lies? The only thing that matters is that it be dramatic or exciting enough. And how better to achieve that than to have some kind of feedback so that each player asking the gossip monger “tell me more” gives the vanquisher of the quest a small number of XPs?

Gossip Monger: "Did you hear how X did Y at Z? [The first paragraph of text X wrote, with a minimum length]"
Gossip Monger then has two options ‘I already heard that story' and ‘Tell me more'.
Gossip Monger: "[Three more paragraphs of text X wrote]" then two buttons 'Tell me more' (or 'Thanks' if it's the end) and That Sucked.

Hell, if a player is a great writer then they could even have the action written out in multiple stages. And every stage nets them another 10 XPs each time a character listens.

And the best part of this is that THIS IS HOW THE REAL WORLD ACTUALLY WORKS. Because the real world doesn't have any “programmers” or “world designers” that create buildings and script people's actions. The real world has Gossip Monger NPCs and Historian NPCs.

For that matter, if a PC hires a Historian to write up his deeds and make them available in the Library, for a very hefty price. Or if he hires a Sculptor to make a statue of himself … then this could boost his Charisma stat which would feed his Negotiation skill. You could even have a Hero Worshiper NPC giving out a quest to heroes to write up their deeds and get sculptures made of themselves, with an XP reward for completing that quest. Again, work WITH economics!

Wizards' Disincentives

This would be trivial to script. The challenge is making the Wizards powerful enough so they can CREATE this “hero worshiper quest”. Is fulfilling the hero worshiper quest something every hero should do? Or is it only for a very select few heroes? If the latter then yes the Wizards would have an economic incentive to create such quests. If the former then they won't have any economic incentive to do that. But they might do it just for colour. Oh wait, no they couldn't.

After all, you have to provide a huge disincentive to wizards to create easy quests where level 1 characters can acquire a million XPs. And that disincentive has to kick in once quests are solvable by >50% of players who attempt them. And the penalty WILL kick in if the quest provides enough XPs to attract level 20 characters to something that should be a level 1 quest. So the rewards of a quest have to be commensurate with the difficulty of the quest.

And if a Wizard makes such ridiculously easy and lucrative quests for his friends, thus violating the Sacred Ethos of the Order of Wizards, then he might have the magic drained out of him by a higher level Wizard. And his friends might be hunted down by a level-draining vampire assassin (from the Assassins Guild of course) on contract by the higher level Wizard.

Ideally, the disincentive would be that starting from 50% success rates on a quest, the XPs gained by the questors come straight out of the Wizard's own XP score, making it an automatic zero sum game. Unfortunately, this mechanism can be easily gamed so it only actually punishes mistakes by the Wizard and never malfeasance, which is why higher level supervision is still necessary lest Wizards just uplift their friends.

Still, it doesn't matter what you do. What matters is that it all be done using mechanics that don't break the illusion of the game world.

Offline Roleplaying In MMORPGs

I just read this great post introducing the concept of offline roleplaying in MMORPGs. Following is my response which extends and explores the concept.

A good rule of thumb is that skills should only ever increase through active participation of the player. I don't think Hunting and Cooking should increase from offline activity. You should increase these skills by going to a cooking school, finding a master chef, getting tips from a master hunter, and so on. And if you say that non-fighting skills may increase from offline activity then I'll point you to your own rant about Roleplaying = Fighting!

However, the value of these skills should definitely affect what's happening offline. If your cooking skill is exceptional then you never go to taverns because their food is shit compared to yours. If it's middling then you go to taverns for variety. If it's poor, you make a lot of food ingredients inedible and go to taverns as often as possible, whichever you can afford.

Unlike you, I'm not opposed to players gaining monetarily from offline hunting. At least a little. (As I said, I am opposed to them gaining skills.) The amount they gain should definitely be dependent on their hunting skill of course. There's going to be a big difference between trapping a couple rabbits and getting a tasty doe and field dressing her properly.

Same for blacksmithing. Of course, if you're a blacksmith then you should own a forge! And your Negotiation skill will determine how much coal and iron ore cost versus your products so how much profit you make. You may even gain products that you can sell to other players. And ideally, again the Negotiation skill should only be raised by training in-world. Maybe getting some tutoring from Tom the Savvy Haggler down in the market. Of course, you're gonna have to find Tom first....

Groan, and if you're a Merchant then you should own a shop!! Which just proves how smart and insightful your idea is. But I think having a personal-belongings tax is ridiculously and monumentally stupid. Everything I've read from you is smart and much of it insightful. But this is just stupid. Head tax? Yes. Property (shop, forge, house) tax? Yes. Wealth tax? Yes. Belongings tax? Fuck no. Get real.

And speaking of property, if there's online activity then having a house, which may or may not get burned down in an attack by Orcs ... this again proves how smart and insightful this idea of offline gaming is. Because a house is actually USEFUL. I mean, it protects you and makes sure you're at 100% HP when you log in.

Having a manor house gives you Charisma which increases your Negotiation skill. Having a shack lowers your Negotiation skill and is more likely to be destroyed or for you to have caught a disease offline (further reducing your HP). Imagine logging in and finding out your (untaxed) shack has been burned by brigands, who stole all your gold, and you've fallen ill so you're at 50% HP? :D Well, you get what you pay for!

Yes you COULD deal with banks, for a very, very hefty fee. Or you could risk your stuff getting stolen at your house. Hell, might even make it possible to rob houses by Thieves so all of your non-equipped inventory is at risk. And your housing might determine how much inventory you can keep before having to sell / throw the excess away.

The best part is that between diseases, fires, and wars demolishing cities and hurting the player characters living in them ("In the last week, you were caught in the Great Epidemic of 768"), you've provided them with a really great incentive to get that castle they weren't sure they wanted. I mean, what the fuck's a castle for? Oh yeah, to protect your character!

Having a castle might open up whole new areas of game play associated with waging border wars, subduing your neighbours, and rising in the ranks of the aristocracy. Also a castle allows you to call for merchants to come to you instead of going to the market, for a premium. But then again, every time you go out, you'll have to decide whether to disguise yourself (losing your Charisma and Negotiation bonuses) or going out with an armed guard to deter brigands.

The best part is that if you're offline for a year then your castle's been taken over by your neighbours (who've waged a 2-week war against you in your absence), you fled to a manor house with your possessions which all got robbed by a thief, you could then only afford a modest house in the city which got burned down to the ground, and you're now living in a shack with tuberculosis. Which is why you only have 50% of your HP and lost all of your non-equipped inventory.

(In Asheron's Call, they had thieves robbing houses and people quit in droves. But the reason they left was because there was no way for players to protect themselves from the thievery. It turned them into helpless victims and such things can never be considered game features. If thievery was merely an obstacle to be overcome like every other game feature, it wouldn't have produced so much protest because it wouldn't have sucked so badly. The same is the case for player killing which players can't do anything about because they aren't allowed enough control over the game mechanics to institute effective punishments. And because there's no penalty or repercussions (like say losing resurrections) from criminal activity.)

See? No need to curve down anything artificially. Just add some random punishments that attentive players have to deal with every few weeks or months and an inattentive player will get burned by them after a year. This is why I have absolutely no problem with players getting monetary rewards for their skills. And for those players who don't have a castle to lose, nor any non-equipped inventory to get robbed, nor a wooden house to be burned down? I have one word for them: pregnancy.

It's So Easy To Fix 'Roleplaying = Fighting' Games

I read a game designer's rather interesting rant about how 'Roleplaying = Fighting'. But then I realized how easy it is to fix that. Following is my response to the rant.

Are you familiar with Chris Crawford’s work on Interactive Storytelling Engines? You may or may not find it interesting, I just know it exists.

It really shouldn’t be difficult to make Gambling and Negotiation parts of a computer game. Negotiation particularly. How often do players buy and sell items? All of the time, especially amongst themselves. Well, all you have to do is make any prices displayed for items be subjective to the player who views them. And of course dependent on the difference in their negotiations skills.

So for example, PC1 puts up a Staff of Firebolt for sale valued at 5000 but wants a 50 potions of Healing each valued at 100 in exchange. Then PC2 who has very poor negotiation skill sees the staff going for 75 potions of Healing, whereas PC3 who has excellent negotiation skill sees the staff going for 30 potions of Healing. Voila. And if the price of something is a non-integer number of goods (like 70% of a staff of firebolt) then it’s automatically converted into gold.

Yes some minmaxers could demand to know the price in advance through text (’five thousand gold pieces’) to “make sure they aren’t gyped” but there’s absolutely nothing stopping a prospective buyer from lying about what they see is the price. They are getting taken for suckers after all!

Cooking food is kind of a chore so you might not want to have a cooking skill. Though if you do, it’s very easy to have generic cooking ingredients turning inedible or less nutritious because of poor cooking skill. Lots of eating at taverns and eating lower-grade non-perishable food then! Or inviting a cook along. But the lack of a meaningful negotation skill in CRPGs is totally fucking ridiculous. It’s so fucking easy!

Having thieves and diplomats be able to deal with all monsters (potentially) in non-violent ways is also relatively easy. Especially the part where thieves steal the objects the monsters have so the fighters that kill them don’t gain any loot by it. And really exceptional thieves could steal the monsters’ weapons (gaining a lot of XP) leaving the monsters sitting targets and so not awarding the fighters as much XP.

Oh and the diplomats? Same thing, so long as they have high gambling skill and can dice the treasure from the monsters. And again you leave them alive for the poor fighter to kill them. OR, they regain their weapons / loot after a shift change. And yes I am seriously suggesting that you talk down then gamble with Orcs. Especially if you’ve got shapeshifting! Or glamours!

Hell, a character with exceptional glamour / negotiation (aided by high charisma attribute no doubt) / gambling would probably be able to walk through the entire game without striking ANYONE. See a boss? Put up a glamour to look like a minion! How’s that for role playing? The best part is you can tweak the effect of the negotiation skill on prices up or down to increase or decrease the ratio of fighters to diplomats in the game world.

So you see, dealing intelligently with the Thief and Merchant classes is EASY. It’s not even designers’ lack of imagination that nails it. It’s their total fucking stupidity. I mean, how does one get “thief => disarm traps” instead of “thief => steal from monsters”?! Or how do you get “negotiator => conversations with NPCs” instead of “negotiator => $$$money$$ from everyone”? Again, only stupidity explains it. Because dealing with it intelligently is actually EASIER than dealing with it stupidly. Creating a generic ’steal from monster’ mechanism is easier than putting traps all over the stupid game world. And it’s just as easy to program quest objectives for item acquisition (or touching a shrine or entering a vault) as it is for NPC deaths.

Oh, and you want an Appraisal skill added to the game? Dead fucking easy! Just make sure that low appraisal values means any item you put up for sale has its price shifted by a random value up or down. The lower the appraisal, the higher the random shift. And of course, this shift is invisible to the player character but visible to every OTHER character. Do you have a character with really poor appraisal? Then maybe that Orc Chieftain looks like a Young Orc as he hits you for massive damage. Hmmm, maybe you can’t even tell Orc males from females!

It’s not like thinking up these things is even difficult.