now, prestige, Karma, and alignment Re: [MUD-Dev] Guilds & Politics

[Mike Sellers]

At 09:45 PM 12/9/97 PST8PDT, Adam Wiggins wrote:
>[Koster, Raph:]
>> Both UO and M59 do this, via code mechanisms to attempt to evaluate 
>> the behavior of players. Various increasingly severe consequences 
>> start to pile up on the player as they cross invisible lines. In UO's 
>> case it goes something like, NPCs treat you worse, players do too 
>> since they can see your "reputation" stat (relative to theirs, to be 
>> picky). Then shopkeepers refuse you service, guards start to harass 
>> you, players start to kill you on sight to pump up their reputation, 
>> and lastly you are refused entrance to towns, guards kill you on 
>> sight, and players run from you screaming.
>
>Heh, reminds me vaguely of prestige on Legend.

Considering Raph's relationship to Legend and UO, that's not too
surprising. :)  FWIW, "Karma" on M59 is (alas) a partial implementation of
my actions-based Alignment design for my paper FRPG.  Basically, every
major action you take can have an Alignment value attached to it, which
modifies your current value (this makes the numeric effect of many actions
automatable, which is a plus).  Lower numbers are more evil, higher ones
more good -- this is an absolute, not a culturally relativistic scale.  

I know that Alignment is out of favor in many parts, but in my game this
really helped actual role-playing.  Among other things, if you wanted to
play an evil character, you had to do evil things -- starting to do good
things would make your Alignment creep upward.  This becomes very cool
when, for example, you have a Paladin-like character whose ability to use
magic depends on his Alignment; one major misstep and his Alignment can
drop too low for him to do Great Things (he's no longer "righteous"
enough).  I use a weighted system too, so that doing things far from your
current value affect you more than things near your current value.  This
has the interesting side-effect of making it increasingly difficult to
approach either end of the scale -- to be *really* good or *really* evil,
you have to spend a huge amount of time and energy doing
wondrous/diabolical things.  

Anyway, for heroic/fantasy games, I think some form of reputation, honor,
or noteriety is worth implementing.  For other genres it's probably not
appropriate.

Mike Sellers                                    Chief Alchemist
mike at online-alchemy.com                         Online Alchemy              

        Combining art & science to create new worlds.