Creatures and equipment

One way to make creatures look better is to equip them with clothing. All humanoids of at least an average intelligence should have a minimum of a shirt and a pair of pants or a skirt. One of the arguments against dressing most creatures is that the cumulative stats of all of the equipment combined could make a creature too powerful. The stats on the clothing could be practically non-existent. They would serve as a window dressing. Another argument against this style of building is that most players do not care if non-key creatures lack equipment. I have never heard a player complain that there was too much clothing on a creature. However, I have definitely heard players complain that there was not enough clothing on creatures, and that they did not look realistic.

There are four things that the builder should check before they follow this philosophy.

First, make sure that clothing the creatures does not bring about an excess of gold in the mud. This could be done by setting the value of clothing for display purposes only to 0 or 1. This should decrease the incentive for selling these items to shopkeepers.

Second, ensure that the mud can handle extra, disposable equipment. How well does the mud handle equipment lying on the ground? Does it have a method of cleaning itself that works well? Some muds do not. If you walk through a mud and see large piles of equipment outside of town frequently, chances are that the mud does not handle spare equipment well.

Third, see what your head builder thinks of this issue. This is something where the opinions of head builders vary widely from one extreme to the other.

Fourth, be aware of system constraints. A lot of muds are hosted on systems run by people other than the mud administrators. This means that they are not fully in control of the resources they can use. Some mud accounts can be purchased that have only 8MB of memory. Consider the following data submitted by Arawn of Lensmoor:

"If 3/4th of the mobs on Lensmoor were considered sentient, and had to have 2 additional pieces of eq each, to represent shirt and pants, that would be an additional 2.5 Megs of runtime memory. Granted, Lensmoor's a big mud, but the concept is the same."