Some Background (For Writers): Simon Silver's Random Ramblings

This thread, and the ones that come after it, expound on some bits missed by the story author in the main thread above: as this content is added to the main thread it may be removed from this and the other threads, but for now you can read it here. Keep in mind as you read that I have not read all the threads yet, and may be missing some areas, characters, gods, items and other content which lies in places I have yet to get to.

This 'top' thread doesn't have much in the way of content, it's more a branching point for sub threads in which the content is divided up by section, but because each thread should stand on it's own merits what follows is a few little essays on some common themes in the threads and my, strictly personal, opinions about them.

Leveling:
Most writers have assumed, for reasons that have never been adequately explained to me, two facts about the monsters and gaining levels that, when combine, bother me:
1: 'Monsters', and other NPCs, can gain XP and level up by defeating heroes.
2: When a monster re-spawns or the zone reloads they loose all the XP and level ups they have gained.

"Now think about it: that does not make sense!"

It would take added effort and time programming in the level up trees and what not for each monster: why would the game designers do all that extra work if they would just reset the monsters back to default when they reload the zone?

Now you see why in my 'personal' thread string, the 'Ghoul' story line, monsters and heroes level up the same way, it's just that the monsters are normally much lower level than the heroes they are fighting and also outnumbered as well, so it's harder for the monsters to gain levels.

The other way of doing things feels unrealistic to me, I would go so far as to say 'conceited' as in 'one of the conceits of the setting', and while I understand it's literary purpose: allowing for easier 'Bad Endings', it feels like a cop out, as if you cannot write a 'bad ending' without resetting the monster to zero. Even our gracious host 'Cantalope' who started this trope has proven that it is possible to write 'bad endings' without using this irrational dodge, such as the 'Do you have a choice?' option of his 'Weed Fiend' story, while in my own ghoul story-line I have several points where I show up this trope by having 'Bad Endings' where, though the character re-spawns at full strength, he loses his chance at glory by making a bad choice, or even dies permanently.

I encourage all authors of future tales to eschew this poorly thought out setting conceit, and go with more realistic depictions of the game world: but caution those adding to existing stories to not break with what is already established, irrational as it may be.

Boundaries, both Zone and Boss:
The tendency in the major MMOs such as WoW, Planetside, and a few others I am aware of, has been towards ever more 'open' worlds, divided up into ever larger 'Zones' which load and shut down one by one as the heroes move through them, and can contain other heroes and NPCs with which the player interacts.

The tendency has also been to ever increasing degrees of 'realism', 'interactivity', and 'detail' in the environments, opponents, characters, and game-play, which if taken to its fullest ****, would in the end result in a game much like the one about which we write.

It is in this spirit that I applaud some of the the threads, most notably 'Corrupted Dryad', 'Giant Rat' and the 'bard' version of '(Lesser) Poison Dragon' for showcasing the degree of description, realism, openness, and environmental interactivity which would be the hallmark of a good MMO game 40 to 50 years from now if our global civilization manages to endure that long.

But, there are other things which seem more rooted in today's MMOs, which are still mired by processing power far weaker than what would be required to run a game of the magnitude we are presently writing about, but will, if 'Moore's Law' holds, be available some time in the next two decades.

For example, the point, a common theme in many threads, that there are 'zone borders'. By the time they had the capacity to create a MMO with a physics engine realistic enough to manage what we commonly describe moving between 'zones' would be so seamless that you would never realize they existed at all unless you were looking at the game's source code.

However: that said, there are some aspects of Zones and Zone Borders which make, strictly from a game design standpoint, perfect sense to me. For starters, while there would almost certainly be some bosses and bands of monsters that 'roamed' over the entire world, most of them would be confined to their starting zone, just so the players could be relatively confident that when they went to X location looking for X monster for a quest, that would be where they would in point of fact find it.

The same applies to the common conceit of 'Boss Boundaries': even more so than common monsters from the perspective of game design you want to put bosses in one place and have them stay there most of the time, the few exceptions being bosses specifically designed to roam around attacking cities and making the PCs lives difficult until high level heroes vanquish them, at which point they either disappear from the game completely or have a re-spawn time measured in months.

While I find the idea of both zone and boss boundaries personally distasteful, I understand completely why they exist, and though I would hope that they would be more permeable and easily overcome, cannot, in good conscience, either encourage or discourage their use in any story.

That's all out of me for now, take a look at the sub threads for additional content!