I also forgot to mention that there are ways to mitigate the penalty, for example the physician class have a skill to completely restore a character which removes the penalty altogether. I’ll have to see how it plays out, it may be that I reduce the penalty or the duration once we go live and get some feedback.

On my first pass, I attempted to make my mud quest *only*. Well, that failed miserably, especially when I tried to get creative with quests and add puzzles or secrets. The problem was that it was too easy to make quests all-or-nothing advancement. You got it or you didn’t. When players didn’t get it, they got frustrated and quit. You don’t run into the same problems with incremental advancement, like what grinding offers.

Since then, I’ve made changes to my quest design and I am very happy. I still use the basic components (collect, kill, give, find), but I link quests together incrementally. For instance, part 1 you might have to go find cheese for a little boy. He’s hunting rats, and he’s learned that they won’t run away if they have cheese. Part 5, you have to go clean all the rats out of a tavern. But, every time you attack them, they run away. I still use the same basic components, but the “real” quest is learning to apply the knowledge of part 1 to complete part 5. The end result is a very different feel to the quests. As a bonus, I have more space for exploration of ideas. The set of relations between events is bigger than the set of events themselves. I’m not stuck to the same boring models of quests (well, I am, but I’m not). The space is bigger, but it’s still limited… and I am sure this fact will shine through in time. However, it does feel different and I do feel like It’s a step forward. I feel as if I’ve moved from the basement to a one bedroom apartment with a nice view.

On the topic of PvP… I’m a little worried about the 10 minute debuff! What you’re teaching is “when you lose, go cool off, and then come back later to try again”. But when people wander off… say, go make a sammich, or turn on the TV, it decreases the likelihood that they will come back after 10 mins. You’re pushing people away from the game when they lose (see: resurrection sickness on WoW).

This all probably has to be taken in the greater context of how often you expect PvP to occur, and the specifics of how your combat system works. The other thing I’m thinking is, that 20% is going to be game-breaking. Again, it depends on your particular combat mechanics, but just an example from my game… in an evenly matched fight between two people (2:1 odds for each), the winner will come out with less than 20% health, about 95% of the time. So giving a 20% damage penalty to the loser means next fight his odds are going to go from 2:1 to about 40:1, or about a 2.5% chance in winning. Basically, it’s a gaunrateed loss… and that’s a pretty big discourager for engaging in anything (for the next 10 minutes). Damage (reduction/penalty) doesn’t scale linearly with success. There’s usually a power law relating the two.