A lot of discussion has happened over the last week or so on how to deal with overlapping buffs.
At present, there aren’t very many objects that give stat buffs - and there aren’t any that give skill buffs. Aside from my strong desire to avoid unbalanced +con buffs floating all over the place, the biggest reason for this sort of thing is probably just how horribly difficult it is to implement reliably.
The current method for giving someone a temporary stat buff is by giving an object a query_str_bonus() method (or con, dex, spd, int, etc…) and dropping it in the player’s inventory. You then wait until recalc() is called on the living - it is called very frequently. The result of all query_str_bonus() calls on the player’s entire inventory is added together in a stat_bonus[] hash that’s stored on all living objects and the contents of stat_bonus[] are then added to all stat queries…
there is a better way
In stead of requiring individual objects to track every buff and in stead of requiring frequent iteration over a player’s inventory and calling 10 methods on every object they’re holding… I think a single buff manager is in order.
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allaryin idea buff, hunger, magic, stats
At present, hunger is really quite complicated. It does its damage in weird scaling ticks that vary in rate from race to race. Eating different items of food provides an assortment of unreliable and difficult to track buffs (that may be abused horribly). Eating habits will affect your character’s weight - with most players trending toward skin and bones as a result. Gurgling stomachs can interrupt spellcasting, and sufficient hunger results in a penalty to strength, constitution, and dexterity.
Not only is this too complex and involved, it’s too harsh and arbitrary. Yes, player characters should need to eat (it’s part of the mudlib’s original vision). No, they shouldn’t die because they idled out. Yes, wolves should eat deer. No, peasants shouldn’t starve to death because their employer’s player went on vacation for a week.
What we need is a simpler system that motivates people to eat - requires them to eat if they want to play the game at all, but does not penalize them for periods of inactivity and does not require the balancing of quite so many variables.
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allaryin idea buff, crafting, hunger, stats
(This is a repost of the original announcement of the ‘warcry’ ability. The command still exists in the mud and has been almost unchanged since I originally wrote this in November of ‘05.)
I’ve just churned out the first nonmagical combat type ability to hit the mud in a while (the last one was damage soaking, which has been around for one or two years).
The idea for the warcry command had been floating around in my little brain for a bit now, but when Snarky went and wrote a completely social version of the command before skipping town for the holiday, my hand was forced and I had to actually implement the thing 
The basic idea is that you can shout a warcry right before entering combat and generate a good bit of adrenaline for yourself. Sufficiently skilled fighting types will also be able to psych their enemies out.
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allaryin news, repost abilities, buff, combat, haste, interruption, stun, warcry
(Yet another repost from notes archived elsewhere. I originally put this on my personal blog in August of ‘05.)
The following is a continual survey that I am conducting of all magical effects that I have seen implemented in pen and paper rpg’s. The point here is to condense them into their barest forms and thus be able to categorize specific spells into individual categories - and to use the list as a sort of checklist when designing other magic systems.
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allaryin repost buff, magic, plans, skills