Hi jeremy.
On the social point, to be honest I don't ever really remember entombed
being heavily competitive. Occasionally people on the mailing list would
post a particularly well run game, or indeed a particularly bad one for
humour value, but this was never by way of beating others scores
particularly, but then again i suppose it depends upon how a person wants to
play.
I'd not actually describe Entombed as a pale imitation of muds or tabletop
games, indeed I confess I've never been a massive mud fan sinse if I am
going to play an exploration based game which lets me wander around a
massive world and fight monsters, I want time to appreciate it and read the
text and not have to constantly have my speech set to ridiculous volume and
have to type like a demon, half the time not knowing what I'm fighting.
Entombed also employed a multi party mechanic so you were strategically
having to manage several characters in turn based combat.
To be honest though, for me the best thing about the design of entombed, was
that it didn't devolve as so many rpgs do, to simply stat management and
inventory crunching then automatic, or semi automatic fighting. In entombed
you always had to watch what the enemies were doing, and act accordingly.
For example if you run up against a necromancer you always need to take them
out before they can raise enemy zombies, and if your up against an enemy
fighter, you always want to try and use attacks that keep them tied up like
sleep or charm, or just knocking them flat with a tackle.
This aspect of needing to always keep ontop of what was happening and then
play accordingly was also enhanced by the fact that you didn't get to choose
the race or class of your rescued characters. Yes, you got to pick a second
class, and if you were wise and knew the game you could pick a good match
for the first, but if you got stuck with a fairy mage or a halfling fighter
you just had to make the best of things.
This is one of the things I'd like to see more games doing, presenting you
with a set of circumstances which you continually need to manage and make
judgements about.
This is also why I find your idea for combat in your spaceship game an
interesting one.
All the best,
Dark.
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