The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [72]
Most MUDs generally limit party size from five to six players. Unlike a tabletop game, a virtual universe can conceivably have as many players as the game can handle connections. Some distinction must be made to break down the party into manageable groups—not for the game’s sake, which can usually handle the load, but because the traditional Dungeons & Dragons squad-based rules break down when too many players are involved.
The size of a fellowship in a MUD can vary tremendously. RetroMUD started with an unlimited number of players in a party, which resulted at one point in the entire MUD as part of one giant party. The coding staff discovered that any foe could be defeated when an army of player characters was thrown at it, so the code was changed to restrict the number to eight. This “army tactic” foreshadowed the power of players in large coordinated groups that would later manifest as raids in MMORPGs.
The other challenge for game designers is that although multiple adventurers inhabit the persistent world, there is no one player or group focus. It is feasible for the monsters in a dungeon to be wiped out by a high-level party before lower-level players get there, or a lower-level character to be helped by a higher-level character. In a tabletop game, a Dungeon Master monitors the progress of all the characters and ensures they have roughly equal balance, but MUDs are one large persistent environment that caters to multiple players. Player characters can be at cross-purposes even though they are technically on the same side. One way around this problem is “instancing,” creating a unique dungeon for each set of players. The tradeoff is that instancing robs the game of any sense of narrative, as we shall see in the next section.
Narrative
Bartle (1999) divides role-playing immersion into two categories, hidden depth and open depth. Games with open depth make extremely detailed amounts of information about the game immediately available to the player, while those with hidden depth reveal information only as the player’s character discovers it. Open-depth games provide rules up front in the manner of tabletop role-playing games, while hidden-depth games reveal information to the player as if they were a character. Because a MUD largely automates the actual rules resolution process, the rules can take a back seat to role-playing.
MUDs provide immersion through three levels of narration, including description, narration, and ergodics, or the reader’s choices (Aarseth 1997:94). Descriptions are the text conveyed about the room itself, narration is the broader story behind the game, and ergodics are the stories spun from the player’s decisions. The problem is that few of these are actually mutable.
Descriptions, for example, don’t really change in MUDs. A player might pick up an object or destroy a part of the room, but the game eventually resets the room to its original state. This is necessary to keep the game’s memory from being overloaded by too many objects. The room is removed from memory and reloaded when a new player enters it, resetting its original state. Despite these constraints, players can permanently change some objects. Characters and personal items, pets and home dwellings—all can have their appearance modified by players and remain that way indefinitely.
Narration in MUDs is practically nonexistent. Although it’s possible for MUDs to provide an overarching narrative, in practice it amounts to fighting certain monsters, gaining in power in a particular