A certain community college student was intently mashing a button on his computer. Filled with dreams of becoming a hero in a fantasy world he rolled up his sleeves and mashed buttons on his keyboard.
Roll roll roll. Nope! Stats are not good enough, reroll again.
One thing that has been a time honored ceremony is character creation. Are these stats good enough? Not if the list of randomly rolled dice can be higher.
Roll roll roll….
The stats are rolled in a group. 3d6 (3 six sided dice) rolled 6 times over. Then the player will assign them to their stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma.
Roll roll roll
12,10,4,17,11,14
Ugh… those numbers are crap. Where are the 18s? Random number generator please give at least two 18s. The player trying to create his MUD character grumbled internally and mashed reroll again and again.
This rerolling will go on for a while. It might be a good time to pontificate the meaning of MUD. MUD means “multi user dungeon.” Maybe a little more explanation is required. Perhaps some history on online gaming as well. In the days of Yore back before the internet was much of a thing the modem was a novel invention. This certain college student started off online gaming on something called a BBS: A bulletin board system. The movie ‘War Games’ is a good example of this. The whole premise of that movie is a kid dialing up what he thought was a BBS with games on it and tried to play global nuclear thermal war. Anyway, another game that this young man liked was ‘Legend of the red dragon’. It was a text game where you could dial in to the BBS play for a few minutes, use your action points and be done for the day. This is what makes MUDs so novel. Yes, like LORD (legend of the red dragon) it is text based run through a terminal program. However, instead of just having some action points it connects via telnet and many people can be playing on the same server at the same time. At the time it was something that was a technological marvel.
Back to the game: 18,8,14,15,18,4
Oh… two 18s…. Very good! But that 4...nope reroll.
All stats 18s that would be the ideal… no ,the perfect character. Is that even possible? Maybe there is some kind of code that puts a cap on how high the sum total can be. Only one way to find out: keep rerolling.
Hours passed and it became apparent that the perfect stats were likely unattainable. Sanity required something to be picked for progress to be made.
A decision was made to try for a caster. The system was familiar to the now weary man in front of the computer. Caster classes could be: Bard, Cleric, Mage. Also there were the multi class options Cleric/Mage, Fighter/Mage, Thief/Mage, Fighter/Cleric. Paladin or Anti paladin was also an option but they had some really high stat requirements. Also, ranger was an option as well but like paladin they were not true casters and had limits on how high of spell level they could go up to. Being able to cast divine and arcane spells seems like a good bet. Though the trick is… two 18s are absolutely needed because of how casting works. The game rules state that a cleric can cast only top level spells with 18 wisdom. If they settle for 17 then rather than 9th level cap it would be 8th level cap. It is the same with mage. If a mage doesn’t have 18 intelligence then they can’t cast 9th level spells. One could completely hamstring their character at creation by not rerolling enough and just not know it until much later after grinding levels.
Cleric/Mage check. 18 wisdom 18 intelligence check. Next is to pick a race. Races also have stat requirements but the character creation is tricky… you pick your race last so it’ll only show the races that you meet the stat requirements for.
Options are: Elf, Half-elf, human, Half-drow with how the stats are. Again other races exist but would require reroll. Half-elf selected; Lets go!
Pick a name: How about Isaiah? That is a good name.
Name: Isaiah
Race: Half-elf
Class: Cleric/Mage
Level: 1/1
After confirming and finalizing the new character Isaiah is transferred into the game world.
The very first room where new characters are plopped into the mud is a place called the ‘Main Adventurers Hall’ (MAH for short) with… well mostly nothing. Typing the command ‘inventory’ shows two items:
Holy Symbol
Spell book
One is for casting divine magic and the other for casting arcane magic. Divine magic one has to pray for that specific spell with the ‘pray’ command. Arcane magic one has to ‘memorize’. At level 1 there is one spell slot. Though getting access to spells is different for divine and arcane casters. Divine casters get spell domains based on their deity. Magi need to find scroll in game and transcribe them into their spellbook.
The main adventurers hall is a room set up like one would expect an adventurers guild. There is a desk setup with a clerk to receive quest items. Several tables are set around and the whole room is filled with wall and ceiling mounted trophies of monsters and odd artifacts.
On this MUD it is laid out with a series of connected rooms. There is one exit from this room: west. Most rooms are linked with directions “north, west, east, south” some stuff is up and down as well. But the exits can be any word. “Out” is a popular one for example.
Time to adventure! Isaiah leaves the room to the west and is on a road that goes north and south through a town called shadow. To the north there is a crossroads that goes east and west intersecting the north and south word he is currently on. By using the ‘peer’ command he sees an NPC in one of the rooms at the cross road named ‘town crier’. Typing north a few times to get to the NPC he excitedly says: “Hello Isaiah! You look new, do you need a map of shadow?”
Talking is done with the ‘say’ command. Isaiah says: “yes”
The town crier says “here you go!” and gives Isaiah a map. The map shows that the city has four gates: a north, a south, an east, and a west gate. At the crossroads there is a map that has levels of which are to go to. Isaiah looks at the map and discovers to the west there is a desert that level 1-6 characters can fight in.
Just then, something flashes across the screen.
Gabrielle enters.
Gabrielle exits south.
Apparently that is another player? They just walked past me so might have not been interested in talking. Time to head to the desert and see if we can get some experience points! After heading to the desert Isaiah discovers something very annoying. Low strength means that the character can barely hit anything and doesn’t do much of any damage at all.
Most of the rooms have rats.
Rat attacks you!
Rat misses you.
You miss rat.
Rat tickles you innocently.
HP: 8/9
You miss rat.
Rat misses you.
You tickle rat innocently.
This continues on for a while. The rat is vanquished after casting both the single cause light wounds spell and magic missile spell. However, having used all the spells prayed and memorized means having to prepare them again. Maybe picking magic / cleric wasn’t such a great idea. Not great HP and being entirely reliant on magic doesn’t sound fun. The only answer seems to be recreation. Oddly enough the command to remove your character so it can be recreated is <suicide>.
Suicide is typed. A prompt appears: “are you sure? yes/no” Yes is typed and the connection disconnects. Well that was a bit of a setback. But on a brighter side it is a chance to roll for better stats!
Suicide was a good excuse to take a break from sitting at the computer typing out commands to play the game. The young man prepared some unhealthy snacks and a soft drink and took a bathroom break before refreshing the closed telnet connection that cut out after the character he had just spent hours rolling and much less time playing was deleted with only a couple keystrokes.
Reconnecting showed the main login screen. It was an ascii art with characters that were spread out in the shape of a dragon’s head. Under that there was a prompt:
Enter Your character’s name:
Isaiah was still a good enough name and was free’d up because the old Isaiah committed suicide. The old Isaiah didn’t really interact with anyone so it likely wouldn’t cause any confusion to keep the same name. After entering credentials the young man was face to face with his old nemesis. A list of 6 stats:
10, 9, 14, 5 , 6, 17
Nope. Reroll.
4, 11, 15, 9, 18, 11
Ugh! Reroll.
This went on for some time until a decent fighter/mage was rolled up. One with an 18 strength. This character could actually do some melee damage to those rats right outside of shadow. However this proved to open another can of worms. Apparently there is a thing called a strength percentile.
Strength: 18(11)
Warrior classes like fighter, ranger, paladin, and anti-paladin get to roll a 0-100 randomized number for their percentile. A strength of 18(00) could get a massive bonus to hit and to damage. However, the player doesn’t get to see this character until they are almost done with character creation. Isaiah was an elf fighter/mage but with a not great strength percentile. There was no way to reroll the percentile. This was frustrating.
“Character creation… I see you have shown me your final form…” thought the young man while he disconnected to see if that would let him restart his character from scratch again.
This double walled RNG with lots of steps into the character creation was just so grindy. Eventually the 18(00) strength stat was rolled. However, fate was not kind. The elf race has some stat requirements and elf was the race he wanted Isaiah to be now. Half-elf was still an option but it would be nice to try something different. Besides, lots of the players were half-elves. They were a popular choice because they didn’t have any stat requirements and also got low light vision. The main advantage to be an elf instead of a half-elf was because they had a +1 to dexterity and a -1 to constitution.
Roll roll roll, suffer suffer suffer.
Maybe this is what it feels like to have a gambling addiction?
There must have been some kind of otherworldly force preventing perfection in stats and eventually the elf isaiah came out something like this
Name: Isaiah
Race: Elf
Class: Fighter /Mage
Strength: 18(71)
Dexterity: 19
Constitution: 16
Intelligence: 18
Wisdom: 14
Charisma: 10
Yes, Charisma was the sink stat---so meta. But being able to have a stat higher than possible to roll with 3d6 was something to be excited about. Those rats were sure to not be able to hit him almost at all now!
Hit points are averaged together for the two classes. Fighter has 1D10 (one ten sided dice) and mage (1d4). This multi class was a combination of the best hit dice and the worst. Cleric hit dice is 1d8 so that combo is a bit more tanky. Fighter/mage seemed like it might be a bit more enjoyable play style. Focus on fighter for damage output and maybe get some defensive / fodder spells to help with survivability.
Another thing that is noticeable is that part of creation is to select a magic school for specialization. Some of the magic specialization options are: transmuter, invoker, abjurer, enchanger, diviner. Isaiah will be a diviner. Currently, the magic schools didn’t mean much except for titles. Depending on the level, it shows a title. This is what is shown to the who list. A command that is executed by just typing <who>.
After finishing up, posing as a mage showed Isaiah’s title.
Isaiah --- Expert-know-it-all
Well apparently a level 1 diviner is an expert-know-it-all. That title is somewhat silly. But newbies are supposed to be not too serious so it is okay.
Isaiah left MAH headed north to the crossroads and east to the many rooms in the desert to fight rats. He didn’t have weapons or armor and the only item on him was a spellbook with the starter spell magic missile in it. However having good dex increased his AC(armor class) and a high strength increased his damage and frequency to hit. The rat hardly touched him and he finished it in a couple hits. This process repeated until he had enough EXP to get to level 2 fighter and level 2 mage.
<Advance> was the command to level up. However, this didn’t work in the desert it gave the message: “This is not an appropriate place to advance, advance in rooms with boards, churches or trainers”
For some reason every novel I read about this kind of novel they always pick the race half-elf , author you could just pick elf
Funny you say that considering the next chapter.