chapter 4 "Gaining Experience" Now you must prepare for the technical demands of your creators. Your creators will expect you to have answers to their questions. For the most part, they'll find these answers in the Creator's FAQ, at http://dead-souls.net/ds-creator-faq.html . But you're going to get questions not on that FAQ. You'll get stuff like: * How many quest points should the Issa Quest award? * What's the maximum player level on this mud? * Can I make a player class called "Swiper"? * What's a good weapon type for The Bouncy Ball? These are questions that depend strictly on you and what your vision for the mud is. Dead Souls is a starting point. The classes, levels, systems, *everything*, is open to modification. It is normal and natural not to have all of these answers at first. I suggest you concentrate on making an "area", perhaps a quest, consisting of perhaps 15 to 20 rooms and a few npc's, weapons, pieces of armor and general items. Test your weapons and armor in the arena. To get to the arena, first go to the Creators' Hall by typing: wiz Then go east, then north. You can have the dummy wear armor like this: give mithril shirt to dummy force dummy to wear shirt And you can test your weapons by beating on the dummy: force fighter to drop sword clone hammer give hammer to fighter force fighter to wield hammer force fighter to kill dummy The dummy will very helpfully blurt out the amount and type of damage it receives. You can get ideas for your npc's by visiting the menagerie. It is east and south of the Creators' Hall. By creating your first quest, and putting test characters through it, you will gain the experience you need to be able to tell your players things like: "The Issa Quest is supposed to be easy, so make it 2qp." "Level 50 explorers are way too strong. I'm capping player advancement at level 40." "No, there is already a thief class." "Make it a projectile weapon."