I debated writing about the gameplay today, my basic idea of how the different sides would interact. I will detail it more later, but this MMO isn’t different than many others — the gameplay revolves around exploring new territory, defeating the monsters there via some form of combat, occupying and controlling territory, and gathering resources. The latter two are the most different, although any system with crafting has a “gather resources” task, and many games with PvP involve controlling territory. The idea is not exactly new.

Given that (and since the badges idea of advancement in Sean Howard’s original post excited me so) I thought I’d talk about why a player would bother doing those things, without experience points, new levels, or, in fact, money to urge them on. RPGs (and not just the Computer ones) are still largely entrenched in what Scott McCloud calls the “teenage power fantasy” (He uses the term to refer to SuperHero Comics). As people, we are neither powerful nor rich, and we want to be both. Fantasy heroes can become both, by performing sequentially harder and harder tasks until they have achieved fame, fortune, and extreme competence.

The unfortunate thing about most level-based games is that while you advance, so does the world you play in — or you move on from the places you were before because the challenge no longer exists. You’re better at fighting skeletons, but you’re fighting vampires now — and they are just as hard as the skeletons were. You get new abilities, but you still need to use all of them to win. You become powerful, but just move on to places where that power means nothing, and you start over. Or, as in Oblivion, the world levels up along with you; the same thing effectively happens in my D&D game. If I don’t keep the challenges coming, then the game is boring.

So, I’m attracted to an idea where advancement opens up more than you can do, but doesn’t necessarily keep making you more and more powerful. I’ll have to be careful later, that the nature of “strarting over” doesn’t make you have to do the same lowbie things over and over again. I think this can be done by differentiating the classes well.

Players are rewarded for doing the basic things that advance their side: killing/purifying the infected, exploring new territory, gathering resources, and donating resources. The latter two might be the same. There might also be class-specific goals tailored to the archetype the player is currently employing. These would sort of be “role-playing” rewards. A Doctor archetype might gain rewards for hanging out in the bandage-making area of a resource center. That’s boring, so it’d be possible to leave you character (at risk) hanging out in the world when you’re not logged in.

The rewards themselves grant access to more of the game to the player. They’d give the player new archetypes to imprint on a new character, the ability to make new equipment types, and the ability to use that equipment. There can be rewards that allow the player to buff attributes or skills, or to use a class skill when they aren’t that class (perhaps as a reward for completing a certain percentage of a class).

The original concept felt these rewards would be semi-random, given for semi-random quests. That is, the quest reward for Kill XX infected, would be a combat buff reward. For one player, they’d have to kill 20 infected, and they’d get a melee-10 buff that gave them +5 to their axe skill, +2 to swords, and +3 to clubs. Another player would have to kill 27 infected, and get a ranged-10 buff that game them +9 to laser guns and +1 to bows.

Since it’s random it might not always be fair, but with enough of these goals, it might even out. His original idea also states that the player won’t know what the goals are — he’s attempting to make it hard to share the info via the web. I’ve played games that do it both ways, and if you’re popular enough (or attract the right kind of players) they’ll figure out any parameters or forumlas.

I’m not sure where I stand on this information-hiding, or the pseudo-randomness of it. I like the kinds of rewards, though.

Much like the game they’d be split between player-level rewards and class-level rewards. The player can use the ones at his level to apply in the character creation process, picking from a list of selected archetypes and player-level buffs to modify the imprinting process. Class-level skills can be selected (and I think swapped in an out) so long as you are playing as that class/archetype.

Once a reward has been won as a class, you always have it when you imprint that class, so you can, eventually, “complete” the class. (There’s probably a reward for this, too). Class rewards will work like equipment, allowing you to pick which rewards are active at any time; more advanced classes would let you use more badges (and player-level rewards might allow this also).

Player level rewards act more on a advantages/disadvantegs level (or Gifts or special racial abilities). There are a certain number of them the player can use, and they are always on as long as that character is alive. Because character death is fairly inevitable, this gives the player the chance to try different options.

The infected-side will be similar with badges as well — but these may be arbitrarily chosen by the game. The infected are controlled by the nano-AI (even if you, as a newly dead player have some autonomy). This is to help balance the two sides (since the game is helping the infected-side already)

I’ve been obsessing about the badges, how they will work, and a some of the other mechanics of the game, and I thought — maybe it’d be a good idea to start thinking about the setting a little, so that the mechanics will fit in properly. I can talk about badges and classes and zombies, etc, but if I get the setting right, we can use the “appropriate” terminology for everything, and, if my experience is right, that’ll push the thought process into other setting-appropriate, gamily-interesting ways. So today I’m going to try to flesh out the setting a bit. A wiki might be more appropriate, but this is a fun though experiment for me, and some of you may want to follow along.

Maybe I’ll even be able to answer Girl’s running and screaming from yesterday.

First, because of the existence of Urban Dead, and also because I don’t know what the implementation of this game will be like (if it’s a MUD I’m less of a direct competitor, but if it’s a webgame it’s too similar), I’m going to move away from the “Zombie” meme suggested in the original idea. Plus, some brainstorming last night led me to some ideas that would simplify and enrich the game play. I’m stuck with the “Z” for now, though, because of my tag. (Yeah, I could fix this.) And finally, while I may give things proper names, I suck at naming things, so proper names are just placeholders for now.

This game will be a science fiction game with magic-like effects like fast healing spells and zombie-like enemies. Using Orson Scott Card’s formula for science fiction: “Change only one thing”, all these effects will come about by the “miracle” of nanomachines. This has been done somewhat before, but it’s going to be central to my game, and I’m not sure that has been done yet. The actual setting with be the planet Zig, on which something horrible has happened.
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Sean Howard of squidi.net is working on publishing 300 Game Mechanics, one a day. I had thought, at first, that he was building an encyclopedia or pattern-book for game mechanics, and while that would be a cool project, he’s actually trying to document 300 unique ideas that he’s come up with. Some are small, some are quite broad in scope, and some stack together with other ideas to for more complex ones.

The particular idea that sparks my current interest (and I know how fleeting that can be) is #30 Communize Zombie MUD(which I’ll just call CZM for now). He’s attempting to change the way we think about games, and what they must be — most of what he proposes are nonstandard genres and genre-mashups. The CZM gets rid of experience points, guilds, parties, and (I can hear you gasping, Girl) money. In fact persistent equipment is discarded — you drop anything remaining on you when you log.

Treasure, such as it is, is donated to an outpost, and equipment is received from the outpost when you log in. The more people donate, the better the equipment. This would take some careful balancing, or you could donate yourself to better weapons, just by standing there. In fact there’s a lot about this idea that needs tuning, but it seems to have lots of knobs to adjust.

Advancement isn’t gone — just experience points and levels. He suggest badges, which would be semi-random rewards for doing things. In fact you might not always know what it takes to earn a badge and not all badges will do the same thing. His reason for this is to avoid grinding for specific rewards. Some badges would be skill or attribute increasers, one might increase combat skills by a total of 10 (but there are several skills, and it’s randomly spread around). Other badges would open up classes, or skills that you could play.

Death, in this game, is permanent. In fact, after you die, you play as the zombies. You’ll be an anonymous zombie, unable to communicate across lines, making the two sides varelse, much like the Alliance and Horde in WoW. Unlike, WoW, though, you’d come back as a new human player — in perhaps a different class (depending on your badges). The zombie player would be given rewards for things that hurt the humans, and vice-versa. That makes this a partially PVP game (although it’s more like the play as a random monster patch from EQ).

It’s different, it’s novel, and while it’s also somewhat PVP, I’m really interested.

I’ve started making notes about how I’d implement it, how the badges would work, etc. I see problems with his design — there has to be a way to establish community around it, some way to know when you’re a human that you’re with human friends. He’s trying to avoid in-game cliques, but I think that’s part of why we play. I would never log onto wow again if Girl, SexyWife and JB weren’t playing it. I played Kingdom of Loathing by myself for a long time, but it felt like a single player game, and it was a casual web-based experience, which might also make this game work.

If things continue as I’m going, I’ll be writing more about this as time goes on, so I’m tagging it as czm, if I did it web-based, I wouldn’t do zombies, since Urban Dead is doing that now. But some sort of robotic nanomachine monsters would be neat. And they could still eat brains.

The above image is a free-use image from morguefile.com