While I do not play TorilMUD any more, I do watch their for updates and remain interested in how the game continues to change and evolve nearly 20 years after I started playing its direct antecedent, Sojourn MUD. (Interesting that they distinguish the two now.)
An update went out last week around some new changes that included this item:
The “You receive your share of experience.” death message has been replaced with a new message that shows you the exact numerical XP gain as well as the percentage to two decimal points.
That was notable for me on two fronts. The first has to do with triggers.
I miss triggers.
In a MUD or like game (MUSH, MOO, whatever) a trigger is generally something set up in the client you use to connect to the MUD (in my case, zMUD) that parses the text scrolling by on your screen waiting for a specific set of characters to which to respond. There were endless useful and silly ways to use them, and they totally failed to translate into the graphic MMORPG world. Macros and log parsers and such are neat, but triggers were a world apart.
In the case of the bit above, one of the first triggers I made back in the day was to save when I got experience from a kill. As we have discussed before, MUDs crash to the point of dictating player behavior… and influence the whole MMORPG genre. However, most MUDs I played, including TorilMUD, did not save the state of your character to the database on every change event. Rather, there was a timer that would save your character every 5-10 minutes.
You could see it happening. Every once in a while a little “saving” message would appear which, aside from being mildly informative, made a great base for a keep alive trigger to keep you from being disconnected for sitting idle too long.
Anyway, if you gained experience, looted a mob, or generally benefited from you actions and failed to save… and the auto save hadn’t rolled around yet… and the MUD crashed, your character would be set back to the last save point. (In the perverse nature of such games, all the really bad things… death, corpse destruction on a resurrect attempt, and so on, included a save point. A crash couldn’t help you there!)
So, on obtaining a decent MUD client, one of the first things you would end up doing was creating a set of “good thing happened, save now!” triggers, giving you things that looked somewhat like this.
There is the “You receive your share of experience.” message that was part of the quote above. The “save” after it, in yellow-ish text, is the trigger response to parsing that string. I think I picked up zMUD over 15 years ago (having used a simple terminal emulator before that) and have had that trigger ever since. And now it no longer works. It is like the end of an era.
Not that it is the first trigger of mine to fall by the wayside. The first mildly complex trigger I had to create was to retrieve a fumbled weapon. You used to drop your weapon on a bad roll. You would get a message like:
You fumble and send an inlaid silver longsword flying!
The trigger would have to get the weapon off the ground and then equip it again. That was easy enough to create, just copy the line to trigger off of, and then put in a response like:
get longsword
equip longsword
Piece of cake!
Then you would find a better weapon and suddenly the message would be:
You fumble and send the flaming holy flamberge of the efreeti flying!
Your trigger would just sit there. No match. Back to the drawing board.
You could just make a trigger for each new weapon. Or your could be lazy in the long term and work hard in the short term and create a trigger that knew which part of the message was the name of the weapon… the red part in the above… would save that in a variable and then parse out of that the right word… or just take the last word… and use that for the get and equip commands.
You had your universal trigger!
Then you would get a weapon where the visible name had none of the keywords for the weapon and curse the immortals and the perversity of the universe. I had a couple of different “longswords” that had keywords “long” and “sword” but not “longsword.” At one point you could use the generic term “weapon,” but that would pick up the first weapon on the ground, which might not be yours, and swearing would ensue.
The fumble mechanic was one of the things that never made it into the live version EverQuest… I expected it might, but am very happy it did not… and eventually it got turned off in TorilMUD, so I need not worry about that one any more.
Enough on triggers. Now the second front on which that initial quote was notable for me, and that has to do with information.
The idea that, in TorilMUD, you would be told exact experience gain numbers as well as percentages down to two decimal places… well… at one time it would have been Bizarro world insane to suggest it.
The founders of TorilMUD had a specific philosophy on how you should play in their world. And included in that philosophy was the idea that all the underlying numbers… and as many of the character level numbers as practical… should be hidden from the user.
You were to adventure in the world and not focus on min/max or optimizing or beating the numbers. You were there to group up to go forth and find adventure. Your mind needed to be on the world described, not on some die roll.
And so when you rolled up a character, you were shown only vague descriptions of your stats. Your charisma might be average, your strength excellent, but your constitution above average. Do I take that character to be a ranger, or do I roll again. (Roll again, anything with less than excellent CON is not worth having, as I learned the hard way.)
Once you were in game, the stats got more precise descriptions at level 10, and you got to see actual numbers at level 20, and by level 25 all of the stats you were going to be allowed to see were finally visible to you. The thinking here, I gather, was that by 25 you would be committed to the character.
The reality was that a lot of characters hit 20 and never went forward.
Likewise, you couldn’t see gear stats directly. You could guess the armor class by seeing how that changed when you put on an item… unless you were below level 20, where there were only descriptions at every 10 point increment, so unless you crossed a boundary, things would remain the same. And +hit or +dam on any weapon could only been seen after level 20 as well.
The only was to get the stats on a weapon was to use a scroll of identify, which were prohibitively expensive for new players. But if you could afford them, it would give you a read out like this:
Name ‘the flaming holy flamberge of the efreeti’
Keyword ‘flamberge efreeti flaming sword holy’, Item type: WEAPON
Item can be worn on: WIELD 2H
Item will give you the following abilities: NOBITS
Item is: MAGIC NOBURN NO-CLERIC NO-THIEF NO-MAGE NOBITS
Weight: 25, Value: 100000
Damage Dice is ‘7D4’
Resists:
Fire : 5%
Can affect you as :
Affects : HITROLL By 6
Affects : DAMROLL By 3
Special Effects : Flaming Ball
You had better copy and save that off, because once that data scrolls off screen, it only exists in your memory.
You can see the keywords to which I alluded before. And that, but the way, is a weapon with about all the stats you can expect. It does 7D4 damage on each hit, is +hit, +dam, will proc fireball randomly, and applies resist fire. I always think of this when I get equipment drops with a laundry list of stats and bonuses.
Oh, and the value is the base vendor value in copper coins. But since vendors were eventually set to buy at a fraction of the base price (and sell at a multiple, to prevent fraud exploits ambitious money making schemes), that number had little practical value.
Anyway, if you were lucky and could afford it, you could get that much information… unless the item had the “NO IDENTIFY” flag, in which case your scroll of identify got used up and you got nothing.
Basically, information was hidden as much as practical and players were encouraged not to share information they learned in any general way. And the idea that you would publish data in a public fashion was, as I discussed in the past, practically an anathema. The idea that there would ever be an online stats database was just crazy talk.
And that applied to experience earned.
In the early days all you got was the message at the top, indicating that you earned some experience. To find out how far into a given level you were, you would have to go to town and visit your guild, where in response to your query you would get one of ten responses that indicated how far along you were. Somewhere I have all those guild leader messages saved.
Later, in the most recent age of TorilMUD, players were allowed to see their experience progress in the “score” result, first as a series of has marks, each representing 2% of a level, and then later an outright percentage.
Now you can see raw experience.
And I couldn’t tell you if that makes the game better or worse. If more information is always good, or if hiding things away made for a better game.
The latter certainly kept us busy trying to figure out the stats… which I guess meant we weren’t playing the game right.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 