[MUD-Dev] Integrating PK

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <Pine.GSO.3.95.970626010345.15155B-100000 at merlin.sedona.net>, on
06/26/97 
   at 08:58 AM, Brandon Cline <brandon at merlin.sedona.net> said:

>For pk:
>   Anonyimity;
>    Standardized personal descripts, (hair color, length, eye color etc)

I take a very backwards approach to this, doing my standard thing of
attempting to handle such problems via side-effects of a basic
redesign of the game's approach.  I'm not sure if you were around for
the way I handle this sort of stuff, but essentially the ties between
a player character and his body are extremely tenuous in my world. 
The player character can actually be thought of synomymous with a
"spirit" where said "spirit" is able to control multiple bodies, and
even wrest control of a body from oehter spirits or the game itself. 
As such I actively encourage players to steal other player's or
mobile's bodies, at which time they gain full control of them as if
they were their own.  In this manner a single player character can be
running (controlling) multiple other bodies, each of which previously
belonged to various other players or mobiles.

>    Layered eq visibility (Pc and NPC alike)

Cute.  I've yet to think of a decent implementation model for this.

>    Non-automatic pc name visibility

I don't have *any* visibilty of player character names.  I don't even
have default name assignments.  The only names that exist are the
names that an indivual player character has assigned to others that
he's met, and those names are unique to that player character and have
no requirement to be shared or the same as any other name assignments
for that identity (cf the Silke effect).  There certainly is no WHO
command.

A side benefit here is that the player characters are anonymised thru
their bodies.  You assign a name to the body, not the character.  Thus
if you later meet the same body, but now controlled by a different
player, your same name will still work.  This is hoped to lead to
amusing accidents.

>   Combat system:
>    Wound based instead of hp, allows for more non-deadly battles.

Ehhh, I'm not so sure about this one.  Given a tight coupling between
player characters and their bodies, yes, Is ee the value.  For me I
don't see much more than a lot of fiddling and cursing.  I'll play
with it.

>   Coord based world:
>    Adds to anonynimity, not everyone occupies same space in 
>    same room.

Agreed.

>    Sight, soun, smell, taste and touch have different ranges.

Of course.

>    Ranged combat.

Automatic with a coord world.

>   Less support for invasive player social commands:
>     Tell, who, shout, etc...bleh, replace with something realistic
>     yet still useful. Telepaths, (require name, see anonynimity)
>     etc.

Disagreed.  Just tweak ther definitions to be something actually
usable and manipulatable as play objects in their own rights.  For me
TELL will only work if you've assigned a name to the body you want to
talk to.  Of course the character controlling that body might not be
the same...  WHO just doesn't exist in the stnadardised form.  All it
reports for me are what accounts are currently logged in which reveals
little to nothing of what characters are playing (remember: I don't
remove players from the game when they log out).  SHOUT just makes a
loud noise as a variation on SAY.  

<<Actually I also allow name assignment to characters, but there's no
reverse mapping of characters to bodies or visa versa, which is used
to deliberately make the coordination trickier>>

>Now, I could go into a long discusion why I think some or all of this
>would help to counter abusive players without restricting all the
>players of the game to non-realistic "game" rules. I.e. you can't
>kill that person because he is cotroled by a player, etc.  And I know
>it's not all worked out here, but I think some of these ideas would
>help to eliminate the problems that were generated by an over
>simplified mu* environment. --hope some of this makes sense, cause
>it's sorta late and I need sleep, hehe.

I don't have any real play testing to back me up.  I suspect that I'll
get a log of rabid PK'ers for a short while, who will then quickly
discover that they are much easier to kill (cf earlier discussion on
partial ownership of bodies) than their victims.  

To a certain extent I'm attempting to make a model where causing any
effect within the game increases your own liability to have that same
effect created on you.  That single fact will hopefully quickly become
the driving mantra in the game.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...