[MUD-Dev] Guilds & Politics [was Affecting the World]

[coder at ibm.net]

On 08/12/97 at 12:14 PM, Vadim Tkachenko <vadimt at 4cs.com> said: >Marian
Griffith wrote:

>First of all, I want to state clearly that I'm not a fan of pkilling, and
>I know what is a MU* harrasment (a close friend of mine, a girl, was a
>victim - and that wasn't even the MUD, that was just a talker).

As most here know, I am a fan of PK, largely due to my initial MUD history
on PK MUDS (SHADES, MUD1, MUD2, MIST, MirrorWorld, etc), and the fact that
close enough to all of the early MUDs were PK.

This aside, I have no interest in rampant PK wars, of Tron-like, Genocide
etc games.  For me PK is a flavouring to add to the game, and to increase
(in one direction) the level and extent of the effect a player can create
on the world.

>I believe that if you wouldn't know WHAT exactly has killed you, it would
>be much easier to go with. In other words, you just can't differentiate
>the monster/NPC from the different player, nothing personal will be left.

For my server I take a slightly different tack again.  Unless your
attacker tells you who they are, you have no way of knowing who or even
what they are.  Similarly, even if they do tell you, you have no way of
verifying the truth of their claim.  For me, from a player's perspective,
there is no way to differentiate an untalking player character from a
silent NPC.  Even more amusing, a given body within the world may be
controlled by a player character one instant, an NPC the next, and a
possibly different player character the next.  Body swapping )can_ be that
rapid and free, with the result that relying on identities tied to bodies
is a risk fraught proposition.

>By the way, have anybody ever tried to RP a rat? Or anything else which
>is small/weak enough to be vulnerable? And, it all depends on the
>circumstances, too - even a single rat can kill you, if you're asleep.

I have long been an advocate of making players a prey species.  The
typical MUD model has well equipped player characters the most dangerous
creatuers in the MUD world.  My preference is to make player characters
far lower on the totem pole, even when high level and well equipped.  A RL
comparison might have newbie characters roughly equivalent to field mice
in the MUD predator/prey ecology, and super-characters perhaps roughly
equivalent to an over muscled rabbit.

The world will be a dangerous place, full of predators far bigger than,
and far more dangerous than any single player character.  Even very large
teams (say 50+) will be mostly if not guaranteed doomed in any attempt to
confront a larger predator.

cf earlier comments on casltes, basilisks, seasonal migrations etc.

>Also, I'll try to make NPCs as intelligent as possible - in fact, from
>the implementation point of view, I want them to be the independent
>services (daemons, in UNIX terminology), which can possibly reside on
>other computer[s] and don't add any performance penalties - and, in the
>ideal world, [almost] indistinguishable from the real PCs.

I'd suspect that it would be generally easier and far more rewarding to
solve the synchonisation and locking problems for the general case and
make your base server distributed, than it would be to solve those same
problems for the individual case for your independant services.

Certainly at the gross level a server is not terribly difficult to
distribute.  At the minor level it can (and does) get *really* nasty.

>Also, I think that the idea about muting the offender is excellent, the
>only thing I'd add to it that I'd strip the offender from his/her body
>and give them, say, a rat's one. In other words, be prepared for others
>do treat you as you've treated them before.

Go steal a body, go on a killing spree, drop that body, grab another body,
and another body, and perhaps a third, go kill some more using all three
bodies, drop them as they die, grab new bodies, go kill some more, etc. 
It will definitely be possible in my game, and not all that terribly
difficult.  The problem is that the killer is going to have no way of
telling if the body he is attacking is another player or not, of locating
the bodies controlled by a particular other player character, of even
keeping another player character in control of a particular body that he
is about to attack, or even of preventing that player character from
stealing his own attacking body from him in turn.

The other side is that such body stealing and attacking sprees are
extremely expensive, offer few to no rewards, and will quickly reduce a
very nicely filled out character to mush.

>> Marian,  who is afraid this thread is going to degenerate into a pro-
>> or con-pk discussion again.

So far, so good.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...