Thanksgiving system event

Today, I ran what I call a 'system event', which is basically a special event put together by a god to entertain players. I've been trying to do one of these a month, but I almost forgot this one completely - I was only reminded of it a few days ago, and had to throw something together quickly. Fortunately, I have an excellent girlfriend who doesn't mud. As a non-mudder, she is unpolluted by ideas of what can and cannot be done.

This clearly needed to be a thanksgiving themed event; but what to do for it? A turkey hunt is a staple part of thanksgiving events in general, but I wanted to add other things too. She started proposing oddball stuff from real life. And I started thinking about how to implement it.

So, for this event, we had a pie throwing contest (using the throw skill), as well as a turkey carving contest (using the butcher skill.) I had to make some minor code changes to get butcher to work properly on non-corpses and to allow me to construct butcherable food, but beyond that pretty much everything worked right out of the gate.

Running the event itself was as usual, hectic. It always takes at least fifteen minutes to get into the groove and get the aliases set up that you'll need to manage things properly. In this case, with three different things going on, it ended up being more work than I expected, but it still went off with only minor hitches.

Anyway, the real reason for this post is to talk about code support for such things. Special events by their very nature are hard to anticipate code for; it's also important not to sacrifice the normal operation of the game by changing the code just for the event. But I do have to say that compared to previous events, this one was pretty easy to run. Simply by running them periodically, I'll both get better at it and I'll feel the need to add commands that make it easier to run them in the future.

Creating a web page for the final event prizes and information is definitely becoming easier, though honestly the content in those pages doesn't exactly require a lot of mental effort to put together. For the list of events I've built web pages for, check out the events page at http://dentinmud.org/events.

Hopefully I can come up with something interesting for Christmas/New Years Eve in the next month.