Making chargen newbie friendly

[Beronica]

One thing I would have liked to seen when I was making my character was an actual list of skills that had stat requirements. It would have made it easier to distribute my stats more in accordance with what I had in mind for my character than just doing an even 60 across the board.

[Dice]

I personally feel like our chargen couldn't really be any SHORTER for an RPI mud with an original theme. Ultimately, we have to keep our RP-intensive nature in mind. We want to attract players who are RP-driven - premade characters would be a massive turn-off to this population.

If we were going to streamline chargen to appeal more to our audience, I'd recommend a pretty massive overhaul, but one that might actually EXPAND its size.

What I'd honestly do is take everything out of nanny and put it entirely into the specific rooms. This means every choice is explained before you make it.

So you pop into a Welcome! room that explains the basic nature of TI (with some policy info) and says "Now, pick your race!" with a brief one-sentence summary of each race, pointing you toward helpfiles if you want to do extensive reading before you choose.

You pick a race and you go to that race's starting room, where you hear more about that race's culture and general attitudes toward the world. You then pick a class and age based on the information there.

You proceed to a room discussing your character's appearance, both in terms of clothing for your race and regional features. This covers how to write your desc and how to restring your eq.

Everyone then converges in rooms that explain stats and allow them to be chosen here, then skills.

At the very end a room explains magery and allows you to choose latency, with warnings both in the room and during the choice.

People could enter the game at this point if desired.

We could provide an optional 'school' set of side rooms for players who want more familiarity with the game, talking through some of its more esoteric functions and complex systems.

As for stat requirements... that's a different beast entirely. I am firmly of the opinion we should either completely drop stat requirements for skills or change them drastically, such that you simply function at below your rank if you're below a basic stat requirement (better set at 50, I think, than at 60)

They continually cause problems for new players picking stats the way they work right now.

[Puciek]

Extensive tutorial like that is another way about it. But this bottlenecks a new player in a hermetic environment and faceless tutorial far away from other players, while the best way to hook someone up is to just interact with them (creating the feel of social obligation is one of the oldest trick of traders).
People don't get hooked because of "oh how great, i just spent 2 hours in character creation", if they did they would just play it over and over, they get hooked because of quality role-play so this is what we should show them as soon as possible. And once they are hooked - then you throw them into lengthy and extensive process of customizing a character.
TI is already a bit headed into that direction, as you don't need to set your description for a while (nor character helpfile), so clearly whoever implemented those changes - gets my point :).

[Kinaed]

Greetings,

I've asked Az to raise non-Lith's starting Lithmorran to 36.

We don't cater to the casual RPer, TI's core purpose is definitely RP. It's our strength as a game for a niche market, and for that reason, we're unlikely to alter that. It's not about capturing players in that space, but about building a game we love and choose to play ourselves.

However, as that plays out with regards to making newbie creation more friendly, I don't mind taking up advice to do so. We're probably not going to create pre-made characters. There are games that allow that (Firan), and we've pondered it, but just don't have enough friendly system to support it. The building of that system would take considerable staff effort we'd probably be happier to place elsewhere.

Right now, with stat selection - if your stats aren't high enough for a skill, you should receive a warning before confirming your stats. My understanding is that this is in place.

Are you aware that, as long as your character remains cyan, you can pop back in to chargen to alter anything that went wrong in the first pass? We've even put people back who aren't cyan just because we knew they were new, even if the cyan had worn off. That is supposed to address things like "I wanted to do X with my character, but that skill I took doesn't work so well without increasing my intelligence" for example. I'm just thinking that might help with a few things.

I'll consider the other points for addition.

Warm regards,
Kinky

[Puciek]

I am aware of sending back to chargen, heck I used it ;). But using it, from a new player point of view, seems to be frowned upon (i recall a help file or room desc suggesting that you can use it only once). I wonder why not just make it as an ability a cyan can use on their own, when they need? It would also take the small shame factor that comes with asking for it for 5th time on visnet ;).

And it's about not lowering RP standards (so it will cater to casual RPer), but simply getting a player from login to roleplaying much quicker. And be it a hardcore player, or casual one, learning curve is steep in both cases. Making it less steep can only be a good thing (as long as it is done without dumbing down the game itself).

Yes, stats warning is in place, but we still don't know how they work nor understand which skills will we really use before we start roleplaying.

[Kinaed]

Not as far as I know, you can use it as much as you want. There's a few posts on the General Board about not abusing it because we had some abuse back in the day, but it's rare. As to why we don't allow people to trans themselves, probably we never thought of it...? It does allow us to keep an eye on who is doing it and how it is being used though.

[Puciek]

Not as far as I know, you can use it as much as you want. There's a few posts on the General Board about not abusing it because we had some abuse back in the day, but it's rare. As to why we don't allow people to trans themselves, probably we never thought of it...? It does allow us to keep an eye on who is doing it and how it is being used though.

You can still keep an eye on it if it's automated, it's only matter of putting a logging system to go with it (if it doesn't exist already). As to prevent abuse - maybe limit it to 3 times of manual use, and then he has to ask on visnet?

[Kinaed]

Generally speaking, we neither log nor snoop players as a matter of courtesy. We only do this when we have grave reasons to be concerned that they're doing something inappropriate to the system. With transing someone there, we usually ask why they want to go, and if it is kosher, we trans.

Yes, we could do it automated-like, but I'm not sure I see it as really a necessary benefit when we can spend time developing other things.