First, after reading the forums on my host’s website, I disabled, then re-enabled PHP and the CGI error magically disappeared. We’ll see if it pops up again.
I finished the Dark Tower book 6 (Song of Susannah) yesterday. It was the worst in the series (so far). The first 3.8 books were very good, dealing with the adventure to get to the Dark Tower. The end of the 4th book and most of the 5th book were very random, introducing characters from King’s other novels. He should have just stuck with the original “ka-tet”. I’m going to take a short break, listen to music while walking the dog, then I’ll wrap it up with the last novel. Hopefully it puts that train back on track.
I’ve been stuck on these ideas of a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk MMORPG. Mad Max meets The Matrix. Something in the same vein as The Postman (I really like that movie). A setting where there are pockets of highly technological people (cybernetics, hovercars, etc), but the majority of the world is either a wasteland (desert, ruins, etc) or has been reclaimed by nature (forests, jungles, etc). The keyword for the game would be “gritty”.
Character advancement would not be done through experience points. Each character starts the game with every skill. Based on the archetype the player selects, the character will start the game slightly better in certain skills. The archetype is only used for character creation, though. Once the character is in the game, his actions determine which skills he gets better at. If the player does nothing but run around the wastelands punching mutants, he will eventually develop more upper body strength and become better at hand-to-hand combat. If the player spends all of his time growing and harvesting crops, he will eventually be able to grow a better crop and harvest it faster. If the player spends all of his time haggling for prices at the market, he will eventually be able to drive hard bargains.
The real kicker to my idea is that there are no hit points and a weapon’s damage is not variable. If your character gets shot by a 9mm pistol, the effect will be determined by hit location, the armor type at that location, and how physically hardy the character is (which is determined by how the character has lived). In most MMORPGs, if you get hit in the head, you take damage to your hit points just as if you were hit in the foot. If you are level 60, the hit in the head you took at level 1 doesn’t hurt nearly as bad anymore. In my game, if you get hit in the head, odds are that you won’t be living long, regardless of how long you’ve played or how many enemies you’ve killed. I’m contemplating calling it a MMORPS (role-playing shooter) because I think that the combat system will be real-time, or “twitch-based”. The true accuracy of your shots, however, will be based on your skill with the type of weapon you are using (with a slight bonus if you’ve been using that specific weapon for a while).
I would also take the scavenging aspect from the Fallout RPG series. I always thought that it was a fun element to have to scrounge for ammunition. 9mm shells could be worth more than the weapon that fired them. What use is a laser gun if you don’t have any batteries? I also thought it would be cool to find an old saucepan in some ruined building and be able to put it on your head as a helmet or to find some old scraps of steel and bind them together like platemail.
Balancing the high technology areas with the low technology areas would be a challenge, but I’m sure there’s a solution. Anyway, that’s enough spouting for today.
