[MUD-Dev] Life

[Adam Wiggins]

[Caliban:]
> >If I kill you within the context of the game and you take it personally,
> >than YOU are not playing the game correctly.
> 
> 'Within the context of the game' is the key there. Let me give you an

I couldn't agree more - and I think that's one of my main sticking points.
People get too confused over what's in-game and what's not.

> example. A player I know decided it might be cool to play a six year
> old. Just a regular everyday six year old. She was having great fun with
> it for about six months; it opened a lot of RP possibilities for herself
> and others.

Eh...your character didn't age on that mud, I take it. :)

> The problem is, she ran into a character whose character background and
> concept indicated that he was a child molester. Entirely in keeping with
> his character, he kidnapped, molested, and killed her character. Just
> because she was a child. He managed to get into the same area with her
> on a deserted street, and called a staff member saying he was kidnapping
> the child by knocking her over the head. He then simply dragged her off
> and said 'Okay, I'm basically going to kill you, and there's nothing you
> can do about it'. This was true. Logically, she had no options. He was
> rather expert at it, after all. But the player -- in fact, a LOT of
> players -- were up in arms about this. His argument was that this is
> what his character would do. The staff supported this by saying that
> unfortunately, he was completely in character and completely justified
> within his character concept and the abilities available to him. 

Well, I have would have to agree with everything stated here.  However,
I don't find child molestation fun and/or interesting, therefore I wouldn't
have allowed this sort of a character on the mud in the first place.
But it's their mud, and they can do whatever they want, so I can't
find any fault with the above.

> Now, the question that I have is, was that really fair? Did she have a

This is a question that people like to ask all the time.  To use a
trite but true phrase - Life isn't fair.  We try to make the game balanced,
but tearing your hair out over whether a given situation is fair or not
is IMO, a waste of time.

> right to be upset? I certainly think she did. My argument is that he
> should NOT have killed the character; his argument was that she could
> have identified him. This is true. However, why in a world theoretically
> full of children that are NOT being played by participants in the game
> did he have to do this to a player character? Should the player just go

True.  This is another problem I have with muds, as they stand - NPCs
are considered a different class of entity in the world.  Although there's
a very good reason for this (technology isn't nearly up to par with the
human brain just yet), we've done everything we can to lessen the difference
between PCs and NPCs.  Certainly you can't tell a mob and a player
apart by how they look or any of their descriptions; you can only tell
from their actions.  So the idea would be that a child molestor would just
go around molesting every child they saw; if you chose to play a character
that was young enough to be considered a target to him, and you happened
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then yes, you'd get molested.
But if you're the only 'child' in the game, your chances are about....
oh, 100%.

> 'oh well' about the loss of a character she had played for six months,
> just because she happened to run into someone who could come up with an
> excuse to off her? 

This is another thing I have a problem with.  People expect their characters
to live forever.  Why?  I don't expect to live forever, nor would I want to.
Part of the fun of role-playing games is that you get to take on *different*
roles every so often.  Generally in pen and paper games our character either
die at some point, or we get tired of playing them and retire them after
a few campaigns.  I don't see why a mud should be different.  Even if I *did*
allow children PCs and child molestation on my mud, they wouldn't stay
a child for six months - they'd age in that time to become a teenager.

> >Now, I'm a human being.  Human beings are fond of conflict.  In most
> >cases, we consider situations where everything is hunky-dory to be downright
> >boring.  We like challanges, which is why we do pretty much everything we
> >do, including playing games.  
> 
> Where's the challenge in conking a six-year-old over the head and
> killing her?

Ah-HA!  Now we're getting somewhere.
It's not, so I'd never do it.  Nor would any self-respecting powergamer
that I've ever met.  The challange is to try to do things that are harder
than you are 'supposed' to be able to handle.  King-of-the-hill doesn't
work if you try to climb downhill.
I know people on dikus that hang around in town, chat with people, cast
cure light and remove blindness on those who need it, and stay the same
level (3, or so) for months or even years.  Do these people ever die?
Of course not.  Who in their right mind would want to kill them?  It's
no challenge, and they'd just get blacklisted and find that they couldn't
go anywhere without other high-level players saying, 'Hey, you're that
one prick!' and jumping them.
Now, I'm not saying that I like this either - mainly, that towns are
so darn safe (read: boring and predictable).

Lastly, yes I do expect people to just say, 'oh well'.  It's a game.
It's a character, a figment of your imagination.  Hopefully, she enjoyed
playing the character for those six months, at least up until the end.
Even though I don't necessarily approve of that specific end for a character,
it's just like any other end.  You don't cry when you get to the end of
a good book, or a good movie, because it doesn't go on any longer - you
think, 'Wow, that was a great book.  Think I'll go buy another one now.'
I don't see why muds should be different - I've always thought of them
as being interactive fiction, anyhow.

>It certainly didn't make his life any easier. Those of us
> with powers beyond the human norm hunted him down and killed him. We

Rightly so.  As I said, the penalty for killing someone (or otherwise
commiting a crime) should be that you
become an outlaw, not welcome in any town, possibly hunted down by the
cops or some bounty hunters and tossed into jail.  But once again, this
is all in-character, and in-game.  I think it would be fun to play an
outlaw.  I also think it would be fun to play a cop or a bounty hunter.
If you don't like these things, don't allow them in your game.  I do,
so I do allow them.  Don't take anything too personally and it's all
in good fun.

> >I find it pretty refreshing to enter a raw, basic world which is both
> >dangerous and vital.  The conflicts here are closer to the basic elements
> >of survival.
> 
> In a world with permanent death, killing another player's character is a
> lot different.

Yes, this is what I've been saying all along.

> You seem to think that every game is just like a MUD,
> where death means you lose your equipment and a few experience points
> but you can go back and get your corpse.

Yes, I hate this.  It makes people so ready to kill each other, since it's
no big deal.  This is probably my favorite part about role-playing versus
powergaming.  You can imagine my shock when I found out that my character
wasn't permementaly deleted the first time I died on a non-permadeath mud..

>There are a LOT of games out
> there where death is completely different; dead is dead, after all, and
> it ruins the logical consistency of some game worlds to have dead people
> show up again. In that context, death is a lot more serious than a few
> XP.

Yeah!  And that's how playerkilling fits in perfectly.  Glad to see you're
starting to understand. :)

One thing I should point out is that I use the term 'PK' or 'PK-enabled
mud' to indicate a mud where players can do whatever they please to each
other.  Usually killing is a small percentage of this.  PK includes
stealing, casting spells like sleep or blind or paralyze or web or
hallucinate or weakness or dispelling their fly or their waterbreath,
looting corpses, reporting other players to the local authorities, or
whatever.  Even when people actually fight on PK-enabled muds, the occurance
of death is usually pretty small.  There are too many ways to flee, teleport
away, or otherwise get out of harms way to make killing someone terribly
easy.  In addition, when someone does something to me (like ripping me off
in a business deal, or trying to pick my pocket) I don't really want to
*kill* them, just rough em up a bit to make them think twice next time.